BLOXHAM History and Morality 2020

History and Morality
History and Morality

D O NA L D B L OX HA M
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Donald Bloxham 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957828
ISBN 978–0–19–885871–3
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To everyone who ever taught me history, and everyone
who has ever discussed history with me.
Preface
I have worked on this book on and off since before the birth of my elder daughter,
Yasmin, who will be 10 years old by the time of publication. She and her sister,
Zahra, and their mother, Cordelia, all deserve my apologies as well as my
profound thanks. The same applies to our wider families. I am grateful to the
following scholars for their encouragement and for reading parts of the ever-
changing manuscript: Adam Fox, Stephan Malinowski, Martin Shuster, Lucy
Grig, Steve Rigby, Douglas Cairns, Thomas Ahnert, Tony Kushner, Cordelia Beattie,
Tom Lawson, Jonathan Leader Maynard, Jürgen Matthäus, Michelle Moyd, Lissa
Skitolsky, Matthias Thaler, Claire Duncanson, Jonathan Hearn, Gordon Pentland,
Geoff Eley, A. Dirk Moses, Natasha Wheatley, Roberta Pergher, Mark Roseman,
Tom Webster, David Patterson, Enda Delaney, Paul Boghossian, Patrick Joyce,
Graham Stevens, Rick Sowerby, David Motadel, and Mark Levene. At Oxford
University Press I thank Christopher Wheeler, who set the ball rolling, Robert
Faber, Christina Wipf Perry, Stephanie Ireland, and Cathryn Steele. Not for the
first time I owe a major debt of gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust. Significant
sections of the book were written, and others revised, during a period of leave
from my regular university duties facilitated by receipt of a Leverhulme Major
Research Fellowship (MRF-2016-164). I hope the work constitutes a respectable
part-repayment of the Trust’s faith in me.
Contents
Introduction 1
Part 1. Contemplating Historical Actors in Context 16

Introduction 16
Misuses of Contextualization 18
Cause and Context in Historical Explanation 30
Different Sorts of Context 39
On Ideology 52
Political Morality and Special Roles 60
The Importance of Hindsight 76
Part 2. Writing History: Problems of Neutrality 87
Introduction 87
History versus Social Science 88
Evaluative and Evocative Language 91
Rhetoric and Truthfulness 94
Combining Perspectives 102
Legitimacy Contests in the Past 113
Part 3. Justifying Judgement on Things Past 127
Introduction 127
History I: By Faith Alone 134
History II: God Is With Us 175
History III: To the Present 208
Moving Beyond ‘Their Own Terms’ 225
Tolerance, Respect, Relativism 234
Past and Present in Conversation 249
Part 4. History, Identity, and the Present 251
Introduction 251
Influential Misunderstandings 252
Relating to the Past 261
Pride and Shame about the Past 271
Material Legacies 282
Closing Thoughts 288
Bibliography 291
Index 309
Introduction
The First World War: what caused it? The matter has fascinated every generation
since the war and sparked controversy well beyond academia, but why?
The enduring urgency of the question relates to the character of the war itself,
including the death toll and the nature of the killing: all of the imagery conjured
up by names like Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele. Then there is the mat-
ter of the vast material and moral resources poured into the fray, plus its inter-
national, social, and psychological legacies. Some of the legacies of the conflict
were also legacies of the post-war settlement; that is not a contradiction, since the
settlement negotiations were themselves influenced by the extremity and cost of
the war. Article 231 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the first clause of the treaty’s
section on reparations, stipulated that ‘The Allied and Associated Governments
affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for
causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments
and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed
upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.’ Whatever the narrow
legalistic meaning that the article’s drafters may have intended, unsurprisingly the
article became widely known as the ‘war-guilt clause’. The Kriegsschuldfrage, the
war-guilt question, then became a mobilizing issue in the interwar German polit-
ics of treaty revision and right-wing opposition to the Weimar Republic. In turn,
the fateful legacy of German resentment fuelled historical interest in the question
of whether Germans were right to feel aggrieved at having the blame for the war
laid at their door and prompted inquiries as to whether the belligerence of Nazi
Germany in the 1930s was continuous with the policies of Imperial Germany.
The political stakes are high indeed. As well as the issue of financial reparation,
matters of national honour, political emotion, sovereignty, and territorial revision
were thrown into the brew, guaranteeing that any explanation of the war’s causes
would upset some party. Some of the candidate ingredients for explaining the war
date back to the wartime propaganda battle itself, and some are the stock of com-
mon memory. An archduke’s assassination; the Habsburg Empire’s nationalities
problem; German hubris; German paranoia; the nature of the alliance system; the
collective mentality of Europe’s political and diplomatic elites: one may pick and
mix. As with most historiographical debates, this one goes round and round, with
revisionism sparking counter-revisionism and that, neo-revisionism. The quality
of the arguments is inconsistent, but the present discussion is more concerned
with what all explanations of the First World War share. They have in common
2 History and Morality
a sense that what they are trying to account for was undesirable, traumatic,
catastrophic. One can, of course, have natural catastrophes, but the matters in
question were distinctly human phenomena resulting from human decisions.
Some of the ‘causes’ or ‘origins’ of the war, to use the terms deployed in sundry
book titles, inevitably indicate ‘responsibility’, in the language of Article 231.
Given the negative associations of the war, conclusions as to responsibility will be
conclusions as to ‘blame’ and ‘guilt’, whether or not their authors choose to deploy
such terms. All that varies between accounts is who or what is to be blamed.
The evaluative association is reflected in the etymology of ‘cause’. The ancient
Greek , which became causa in Latin, meant ‘fault’, ‘blame’, or ‘accusation’ as
well as ‘cause’.1 In the explanation of wars and so much else, just as in detective
novels, whodunnit is at once a question about cause and guilt.2 Likewise, when
we talk of revolution we are apt to gesture at the weight and justness of revolu-
tionary grievances, the governing regime’s willingness to address grievances, or
the proportionality of grievances to the violence of revolutionary action.3 The
characterizations are infused with evaluative appraisal.
Since historians today, as ever before, like to think of themselves as critical
thinkers, it is of some interest that ‘criticism’ derives from the Greek verb ,
which means to distinguish and discriminate and also to decide and judge.4 Yet
professional consensus today is against the argument of this book that it is legit-
imate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for the historian to make
value judgements about things past.5 In the contemporary profession ‘critical
thought’ tends to be conceived as thought that would be polluted by any evalu-
ative element. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott mocked the idea of treating
the past as ‘a field in which we exercise our moral and political opinions, like
1 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 291.

2 Heta Pyrhönen, Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Issues in the Detective Story (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4.
3 I draw on Geoffrey Partington, ‘Relativism, Objectivity and Moral Judgment’, British Journal of
Educational Studies 27/2 (1979), 125–39, here 131. For the endurance of such matters of judgement
and rhetoric, see Christopher Pelling, ‘Commentary’, in John Marincola, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, and
Calum Alasdair Maciver (eds), Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History
without Historians (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 347–65, here 359–60.
4 James Gordon Finlayson, ‘Political, Moral, and Critical Theory’, in Brian Leiter and Michael
Rosen (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
626–70, here 632.
5 This is not to say there have not been countervailing voices. There have, but they do not seem to
have had much impact. For some important contributions, see Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1954); Pardon E. Tillinghast, The Specious Past (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1972), 151–69; Gordon Wright, ‘History as a Moral Science’, American Historical
Review 81/1 (1975), 1–11; Partington, ‘Relativism’; Adrian Oldfield, ‘Moral Judgments in History’,
History and Theory 20/3 (1981), 260–77; Richard T. Vann, ‘Historians and Moral Evaluations’, History
and Theory 43/4 (2004), 3–30; James Cracraft, ‘Implicit Morality’ History and Theory 43/4 (2004),
31–42; Robert J. Richards, ‘The Narrative Structure of Moral Judgments in History: Evolution and
Nazi Biology’, University of Chicago Record, 12 April 2005, 2–6; Jonathan Gorman, ‘Ethics and the
Writing of Historiography’, in Aviezer Tucker (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of History and
Historiography (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 253–61.
Introduction 3
whippets in a meadow on a Sunday afternoon’.6 In somewhat higher diction the

great historian Marc Bloch scorned the urge to play ‘the role of Minos or Osiris’
behind a desk.7 H. S. Commager enjoined ‘refrain from the folly and vanity of
moral righteousness about the past’,8 while in more measured tones Richard
Evans recently claimed that ‘in history, the element of moral judgment, insofar as
it is exercised at all, is in the end extraneous to the research rather than being
embedded in the theory or methodology of it’.9
Formidable arguments accompany the pronouncements. Evaluation is point-
less: even if it can be done in principle, why do it? Perhaps for the empty satisfac-
tion of telling the deafened dead of the age of absolutism that they could have
deconstructed the divine right of kings if only they had put their minds to it?
Alternatively, evaluation is a category error, equivalent for Bloch to a chemist’s
separating ‘the bad gases, like chlorine, from the good ones like oxygen’.10 It is
subjective at best; at worst, it is prejudice in disguise—the historian Herbert
Butterfield had this in mind when writing of the ‘whig’ historian that ‘the real
burden of his indignation may fall on things which are anathema only to the
whigs’.11 Besides, the past is a foreign country with different ways and values, thus
Butterfield again: ‘historical explaining does not condemn; neither does it excuse;
it does not even touch the realm in which words like these have meaning or rele-
vance; it is compounded of observations made upon the events of the concrete
world; it is neither more nor less than the process of seeing things in their context’.12
The final objection may be most resonant for historians because ‘context’ is one
of the trump cards of the discipline of History. (The upper-case initial is used
throughout to denote the discipline of History, while ‘history’ refers to the past.)
The card is played to distinguish History from the generalizing, model-building
or lesson-learning aspirations of philosophers, political scientists, and politicians.
Characteristically, a philosopher will engage with some seventeenth-century
document asking what it means to us, now. The historian will be concerned more
with what it meant to ‘them’, back then. Her contextual questions might concern
the circumstances of its writing, the motives of its author, or its influence on
seventeenth-century readers. Oddly, given the centrality of ‘context’ to the discipline,
few historians have tried to conceptualize it.13 A contribution to that end is
6 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), 165.
7 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 139.
8 H. S. Commager, The Search for a Usable Past (New York: Knopf, 1967), 316.
9 Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: Norton, 1999), 45.
10 Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 139, 142.
11 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965), 109.
12 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation, 117 (emphasis added).
13 For relatively rare historians’ forays, see E. P. Thompson, ‘Anthropology and the Discipline of
Historical Context’, Midland History 1 (1972), 41–55; Giovanni Levi, ‘I pericoli del Geertzismo’,
Quaderni storici, ns 20/58 (April 1985), 269–77; Peter Burke, ‘Context in Context’, Common
Knowledge 8/1 (2002), 152–77. Intellectual History has produced more explicit work on the context
than other fields, with a debt to Quentin Skinner’s work: for relevant recent references and also a
made below by the investigation of different, sometimes competing, sorts of

contextualization, but there is no ducking the point that some contexts are just
very different across time, as across place. The intellectual historian Constantin
Fasolt writes of the orthodoxy that acknowledging the contextual difference
between past and present, a difference that is more than purely temporal and can
denote great cultural and psychological diversity, ‘is so elementary, so necessary
for the very possibility of thinking about the past at all, that it may be considered
the founding principle of history’ in anything like its contemporary form. The
other side of the coin of this contextual difference is ‘anachronism’, the erroneous
projection of present values onto the past.14
History and Morality tries to meet all of the foregoing objections, arguing that
if value judgements are illegitimate by the standards of the historical profession’s
‘common sense’, the problem is with the common sense rather than the judge-
ments. As such, there is no point trying to justify this project by today’s historio-
graphical standards. Rather one needs to revise those standards, which includes
punching significant holes in common-sense thinking about evaluation, histor-
ical or not, in society at large. Sceptical readers are begged to bear with the book
as it unfolds. At the least, it may get them to reflect more about how historians
and other human beings think and judge, irrespective of what they say about how
they think and judge.
Reflection might be stimulated by an example of the tangle historians can get
into when forced to confront the question of value judgements head-on. Consider
an open letter from fifty-eight Oxford University scholars, written in December
2017 in response to an article in The Times newspaper, ‘Don’t Feel Guilty about
Our Colonial History’, by another Oxford scholar, the ethicist and theologian
Nigel Biggar.15 The letter also mentioned ‘the agenda pursued in [Biggar’s]
recently announced project entitled “Ethics and Empire” ’. While defending
Biggar’s right to expound opinions that he finds persuasive, the scholars felt that
his widely publicized views
risk being misconstrued as representative of Oxford scholarship [sic]. For many

of us, and more importantly for our students, they also reinforce a pervasive
discussion of the limitations of some analyses of context, see Daniel Wickberg, ‘Conclusion: The Idea
of Historical Context and the Intellectual Historian’, in Raymond Haberski Jr and Andrew Hartman
(eds), American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2018), 305–21, with references especially at n. 1 on p. 318. For an influential essay by a non-
historian, see Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–24.
14 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4 and 6 for
elaboration.
15 Nigel Biggar, ‘Don’t Feel Guilty about Our Colonial History’, The Times (29 November 2017); The
Oxford scholars’ letter, ‘Ethics and Empire: An Open Letter from Oxford Scholars’, 19 December 2017,
is available online at https://theconversation.com/ethics-and-empire-an-open-letter-from-oxford-
scholars-89333.
Introduction 5
sense that contemporary inequalities in access to and experience at our university

are underpinned by a complacent, even celebratory, attitude towards its imperial
past. We therefore feel obliged to express our firm rejection of them.
Such an opening invites the reading that these scholars are anti-imperialists, i.e.
moral critics of empire, and the overall performative effect of the letter substanti-
ates that reading. The letter was certainly interpreted thus by another historian of
empire, Bernard Porter, and by the Daily Mail newspaper, which in an alarmist
article accused the fifty-eight scholars of being ‘hell-bent on rewriting history’
and dwelt on the red herring of their supposed attack on freedom of speech.16
The letter’s impression of principled opposition to the empire was furthered by
the signatories’ endorsement of the seminal anti-imperial tract ‘Aimé Césaire’s
morally powerful Discours sur le colonialisme’. The remainder of the letter,
though, invited confusion as to the grounds for its opposition to Biggar’s views
and project. Sometimes it implied that a moral approach of any sort to the topic
was conceptually misguided: ‘The “Ethics and Empire” project asks the wrong
questions, using the wrong terms, and for the wrong purposes.’ Sometimes it
implied that it was legitimate to deploy moral arguments but that Biggar had not
done that very well: ‘far from offering greater nuance and complexity, Biggar’s
approach is too polemical and simplistic to be taken seriously’. Accordingly, the
letter dismissed
such arguments as that the British empire’s abolition of the slave trade stands
simply as a positive entry in a balance-book against (for example) the Amritsar
massacre or the Tasmanian genocide. Abolition does not somehow erase the
British empire’s own practice of slavery and the benefits it continued to reap
from the slave trade long after it ended—such as railway investments in the UK
or cotton imports from the US South.
What the letter did not do was hint at the nature of a moral inquiry that would
have been nuanced and non-simplistic. Its conclusion did little to resolve the
ambiguity:
We welcome continued, open, critical engagement in the ongoing reassessment

of the histories of empire and their legacies both in Britain and elsewhere in the
world. We have never believed it is sufficient to dismiss imperialism as simply
‘wicked’. Nor do we believe it can or should be rehabilitated because some of it
was ‘good’.
16 https://bernardjporter.com/2018/01/04/oxford-and-the-ethics-of-empire/ and Guy Adams,

‘Revealed: How Oxford University is “home to loud mouthed, Tory-loathing, anti-Israel academics
who believe only they should have freedom of expression”<thin>’, Daily Mail, 23 December 2017.
Whilst already having disavowed the use of terms like ‘good’ or ‘wicked’, at this
point the letter might nonetheless be read as implying that empire could be con-
sidered wicked as long as it was not only considered wicked, or that it was indeed
good if only in certain parts, but it is unclear, and the problematizing speech-
marks only further muddy the waters.
Little was clarified by a follow-up newspaper article by the letter’s principal
author.17 This article posited:
We need a fuller public understanding of what Britain’s empire was, and how its
aftereffects have influenced Britain’s multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society, its
inequalities and injustices as well as its commonalities and opportunities.
That debate should be equitable, rational and based on all the available evi-
dence. It should not be about apportioning blame, instilling guilt or recovering
pride. . . . It’s important in understanding our collective present that we know
what forces shaped it. But historical understanding is about recapturing the
sense of things done by, and done to, other people at other times. It’s not about
us, and how we feel about it is entirely irrelevant.
It is not evident how the pronouncement that contemporary feelings are irrele-
vant can be reconciled with the letter’s concern for the perceptions of Oxford
students, or the obvious ‘feelings’ of the authors of the letter. And since by the
article’s account the legacy of empire has affected the present it is unclear why
present ‘feelings’ (or at least reflective judgements) should be irrelevant whether
they are of Oxford students or not. The overall tenor of the article is notably less
anti-imperial than that of the letter, but its apparent aspiration to a state tran-
scending value judgement is thwarted by its reference to ‘injustices’.
Confusion was heaped upon confusion in Porter’s intervention.18 A self-
proclaimed anti-imperialist in the political sphere, Porter claimed that he was ‘a
scholar and a professional historian before’ being ‘a political activist’—though he
also wrote that his History informed his politics. In keeping with this unidirec-
tional relationship between his two personae, he talked of the importance of the
historian’s contemplating imperialism in ‘an objective and value-free’ fashion.
Then he went on to contradict his assertion about the importance of value-free
History by applauding the ‘Ethics and Empire’ project’s potential for introducing a
nuance, which in this connection must have meant a moral nuance, that ‘can only
benefit . . . our historical understanding’. Indeed he identified instances in which a
value-laden approach was positively useful: ‘It may be worthwhile in some cases to
17 James McDougall, ‘The History of the Empire Isn’t about Pride—or Guilt’, The Guardian, 3
January 2018.
18 All quotes in this paragraph from that intervention: https://bernardjporter.com/2018/01/04/
oxford-and-the-ethics-of-empire/.
Introduction 7
remind students about the crimes perpetrated under the aegis of the British
Empire, but only in order to counteract excessive reactionary pride in the latter;
and, in the same way, to remind the more rabid anti-imperialists of some of
Empire’s more positive or neutral sides.’ It is difficult to know how to interpret this.
Perhaps Porter felt that his evaluative corrections, negative and positive, would
have the overall effect of neutralizing the moral issue. Yet casting himself as arbiter
of what constituted ‘excessive’ pride and ‘rabid’ anti-imperialism implied that he
was the arbiter of reasonable pride and reasonable anti-imperialism, and a concept
of what was reasonable by way of praise and criticism could only have emerged
from his own evaluative assessments of imperialism. At issue seems to be a matter
of moral ‘balance’ rather than anything beyond the realms of moral thought.
If balancing acts were one of the things the fifty-eight Oxford scholars disap-
proved of, on other matters they were firmly in agreement with Porter. The
camps concurred in their enthusiasm for ‘nuance’ and their appreciation of
‘complexity’—and who would dissent from that? They further agreed that terms
like ‘good and evil’ were ‘useless to historians’. And they were roughly equal in
their lack of precision about the place of evaluation in their, respectively, ‘objective’
and ‘critical’ historical work. With little effort one could imagine Porter and the
fifty-eight swapping their existing positions on the desirability of an inquiry into
‘ethics and empire’, depending perhaps on the evaluative conclusions the inquiry
seemed likely to reach.
The subject matter of the debate—empire and its legacies—is of great import-
ance but the confusing way in which the subject matter was discussed is anything
but unusual. The only surprising thing about the argument was that neither side
explicitly mentioned anachronism, which tends to be one of the first responses on
Britain’s shores to any criticism of empire, as when one historian pre-emptively
dismissed criticism of ‘the conduct of the British empire in the 18th century’: ‘We
know that today we would do it all differently,’ he wrote, ‘but that is not the
point.’19 In an earlier essay on a related matter Porter did reassert that ‘The past is
a foreign country’, but that was less a way of suggesting that imperialists had dif-
ferent moral standards than to justify his claim that he and his government had
‘an alibi—the best one of all. We weren’t even born.’ The German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl had expressed the same sentiment in 1983 when he invoked the
‘Gnade der späten Geburt’, the good fortune of having been born recently enough
not to have been complicit with Nazism. For Porter this was argument enough
that contemporary Britons ought not feel guilt and ought not be blamed for
empire. He did not address whether, if guilt and blame were inappropriate terms,
the alternative concept of shame might still have salience. After all, today there is
19 Max Hastings, ‘High-Handed Moral Condemnation’, Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2006.

manifestly a great deal of pride in Britain about the empire, irrespective of the late
birth of so many of the proud, and if pride is possible, shame is too.20
The empire case exemplifies the consequences of the moral element’s having
been repressed in the historical discipline. The question of evaluation was never
systematically worked through by the profession after a ban was placed on the
sort of judgement common in classical and medieval historianship and the
Enlightenment Histories of Voltaire and Condorcet. The issue cannot be relied
upon to stay repressed. Its periodic resurgence is unpredictable and apt to mani-
fest itself in unargued assertion or inconsistency even among highly intelligent
and accomplished scholars such as those pitted against each other above.21 Time
and again, arguments against evaluation are embedded in tacit evaluations, and
concluding ‘both sides are to blame’ is equated with obviating concepts like
blame. Some of the same scholars who oppose evaluation—scholars including the
philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood—also suggest that a historical educa-
tion encourages tolerance of other ways of being and doing, as if tolerance, like
intolerance, could exist outside a sphere in which the evaluative faculties were
operative.22 In other words, there is little consensus on what is involved in jetti-
soning evaluation. Does scholarly ‘neutrality’ involve the complete absence of
moral judgement, as Butterfield implies, or the sort of moral contextualism
whereby it is acceptable to make judgements as long as they are in accordance
with the standards prevalent in the historical actor’s time? Such moral contextual-
ism might then form the basis for the separate doctrine of moral relativism.
The term ‘historicization’ can have the implication of either relativization or
‘mere’ contextualism. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) was one of the greatest
influences upon the German ‘critical historical school’ whose work become syn-
onymous with the historical philosophy called historicism, or Historismus. When
20 https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/04/imperial-blame/. For a discussion on pride and shame,

see Part 4 of this book.
21 This is not to ignore a great deal of intelligent and sensitive discussion about historian’s stand-
points, the need for critical self-reflection, and so forth. Recent historiography and associated cultural
and literary theory has been rich in addressing exclusions, silences, and the problems of representa-
tion. But discussion about moral judgement pertaining to the substance of the past has not played a
large role in these discussions—indeed, moral judgement may loom large in the minds of historio-
graphical theorists as precisely the sort of thing that a self-aware historian should avoid, its being
conceived as a-contextual or even imperialist.
22 Compare R. G. Collingwood’s stance on judgement in his The Idea of History (rev. edn, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 402–6 and elsewhere with his belief in its ability to promote tolerance:
Lionel Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 229; William M. Johnston, The Formative Years of
R. G. Collingwood (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 60; Alan Donagan, The Later Philosophy of
R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 246; and the review of Collingwood by Hayden
White in History and Theory 4/2 (1965), 244–52. Richard J. Evans both opposes value judgements and
espouses History’s tolerance-building capacities in his ‘What Is History?’, in Harriet Swain (ed.), Big
Questions in History (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 1–12, here 5 and 7. Alongside his pronounce-
ments against judgements, Butterfield also hinted at the argument to tolerance in his discussion of the
historian and the attitude about diversity: The Whig Interpretation, 95–6.
Introduction 9
he wrote to the effect that the historian ought to do justice to all forms of moral
life, since all peoples and epochs were ‘immediate unto god’,23 he was halfway
towards moral relativism.
The major claims of this book, most of which have yet to be substantiated, are
as follows. They appear roughly in the order that they are supported as the book
unfolds; the list is not a series of premises that follow logically from one another:
1. In many historical explanations, as in the First World War case, attributions

of responsibility cannot be divorced from evaluative concepts of praise or
blame.
2. Once historians establish the content of value systems in the past, they are
establishing criteria for assessing actions in relation to those values. This
contextualism is what historians pride themselves in providing when taking
historical actors ‘on their own terms’, and it is consistent with a species of
moral inquiry.
3. The language historians necessarily use to describe is often evocative,
reflecting or prompting evaluative reactions. This is not problematic in itself
since many of the things historians describe are not neutral. ‘Neutralizing’
non-neutral phenomena by one’s descriptions is not neutral either.
4. Value judgements and hints as to judgements abound in works of History.
Some of these judgements reflect the ‘terms’ of historical actors, others are
external to those terms. Attempting to remove all external judgements would
change History much more than would a consistent application of judgement.
5. In the past, as now, power was wielded positively and negatively, but never
neutrally. The contestation of standards and power in the past and the
capacity of the powerful to affect the lives of others for better or worse
means that the way historians depict past acts ought not always be deter-
mined by the way in which the authors of those acts regarded them.
6. The world we live in, with its distribution of advantages and disadvantages,
is a product of past acts, and so value judgements about the past may have
political ramifications in the present. Nonetheless, such value judgements
are intrinsically no more political than any other sorts of moral judgements.
7. In a world where History matters as an anchor of identity, historians with
relevant expertise need to embrace their roles as contributors to identity
debates, normative elements and all.
With a mind to the political ramifications of scholarship, while many histor-

ians are reticent about addressing the question of value judgement even when it
23 Leopold von Ranke, Aus Werke und Nachlass, ii, ed. Theodor Schieder and Helmut Berding
(Munich: Oldenbourg 1971), 59–63; Leopold von Ranke, Aus Werke und Nachlass, iv, ed.
V. Dotterweich and W. P. Fuchs (Munich: Oldenbourg 1975), 295.
looms large, then others are surreptitious, meaning they engage in evaluation
camouflaged as neutrality. It is unclear whether the German historian Friedrich
Meinecke (1862–1954) was endorsing surreptitious or merely implicit evaluation
when he wrote that
Although the historian may, in form, abstain from value judgments of his own,
they are there between the lines, and act as such upon the reader. The effect,
then . . . is often more profound and moving than if the evaluation were to appear
directly in the guise of moralizing, and therefore it is even to be recommended
as an artifice. The historian’s implicit value judgment arouses the reader’s own
evaluating activity more strongly than one which is explicit.24
Whatever Meinecke had in mind, if surreptitiousness needs to be challenged

(though not necessarily implicitness25) then so does reticence, because the sur-
reptitiousness thrives on the reticence.
A more conscious and consistent approach to the issue of value judgement will
moderate the judgement in some areas of historical inquiry while amplifying it in
some others; yet other areas will remain much as they are. Bloch illustrates a ten-
dency to assume that judgements must come in the form of judicial verdicts and
stem from a historian’s god-complex.26 This tendency can be attributed to a knee-
jerk association of all moral thought with a hard-and-fast moralism that has no
regard for differing circumstances or ways of life: Commager’s ‘moral righteous-
ness’, perhaps.27 Thus conceived, evaluation seems like something other people
do, and do, as Evans suggests, extraneously to their real business.
Evans is correct that historians are generally not trained in evaluative reasoning,
but what is the thrust of this observation? If it is part of an argument against
evaluation, as it is for him,28 then that is also an argument against historians
doing the very many sorts of History in which evocative (or neutralizing) descrip-
tions and critical allocations of responsibility are unavoidable. If, however, the
observation prompts historians to acquaint themselves better with the tenets of
evaluative reasoning to complement their expertise in detail and contextualiza-
tion, then that would seem to be a good thing.
24 Cited in Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 7–8.
25 Implicitness may be more conducive to the aesthetics that should rarely be consigned to the
margins of the historian’s artisanal practice. For important reflections on this, see Cracraft, ‘Implicit
Morality’. On the tendency to find moral and/or aesthetic fault in literary works that are too blunt in
their moral didactics, C. A. J. Coady, ‘The Moral Reality in Realism’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 22/2
(2005), 121–36, here 131–2.
26 A version of this is Arthur Marwick’s concept of the superstar ‘auteur’ historian.
27 For the morality–moralism distinction, see C. A. J. Coady, Messy Morality: The Challenge of
Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 287<thin>ff.
28 Richard J. Evans, ‘History, Memory and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness’, History and
Theory 41 (2002), 326–45, here 330.
Introduction 11
Part 1 tackles the historian’s signature practice of contextualization head-on,

interrogating the concept of ‘context’ and examining different sorts of contextual-
ization. It takes issue with Butterfield’s severance of contextualization from evalu-
ation. It shows how influential historians who have purported merely to be
contextualizing, not evaluating, have failed to maintain this distinction, and failed
in ways that confuse the issues at stake. This failure is not surprising since, as is
further argued, contextualization often just is oriented to concerns in which
empirical and moral elements go hand in hand. The commonplace and vital
injunction to understand past actors in the contexts of their time or particular
situation is, amongst other things, an injunction to understand the governing val-
ues of ‘times’ and situations and the choices made by past actors in relationship to
those values. Whatever one’s intentions, one often cannot avoid creating moral
impressions through the process of relating actors’ motivations and deeds to pre-
vailing values and interests, since that process involves showing when the actors
fell short of, or deliberately transgressed, those standards, as well as when they
met the standards. Such moral impressions are not at all alien to a discipline in
which causation is generally treated in humanistic fashion rather than by the
lights of scientific determinism. Insofar as neutrality remains a scholarly aspir-
ation in dealing with foreign countries past, it must pertain to the treatment of
the values that governed at particular points in the past, not to the treatment of
the way in which historical actors within those countries acted in relation to those
values. As subsequent sections of the book show, however, even that standard of
neutrality cannot be sustained.
If Part 1 concerns the way the historian conceptualizes the relationship of
past actors to the value systems governing them, Part 2 concerns the historian’s
product—a work of History—as it conveys that relationship and more besides.
As soon as one takes moral contextualization seriously, one has already fractured
any consensus about what is involved in scholarly neutrality, and Part 2 goes fur-
ther. It distinguishes a desirable aspiration to truthfulness from the problematic
aspiration to neutrality. It shows that it is often impossible to create a quarantine
area wherein the moral characterization of an historical act is ‘historicized’ to a
standard in the past.
Part 2 expands on the point that value judgements on the historian’s part can
be implied by nothing more than choice of noun, adjective, or adverb. The matters
to which words like ‘theft’, ‘ruthless’, and ‘charitably’ pertain are not value-neutral
in anyone’s mind, past or present, and in the way they ‘speak’ to contemporary
audiences such terms can exceed the boundaries of the contexts within which
past actors are otherwise discussed. Such terms of approbation and disapproba-
tion are particular to humanistic disciplines. They are likely to evoke some senti-
ment in the reader, much as ‘genocide’ does, which explains why certain states
fight tooth and nail to deny that they have ever committed it. Whether or not
historians are prepared to take responsibility for the implications of their
verbiage, readers are apt to make the inference. Contrary to the idea that conscious
evaluation must issue in some grand verdict, or what Evans calls ‘denunciation’
and ‘expressions of moral outrage’,29 it can just manifest itself through the validation
or contestation of turns of phrase or particular evocative descriptions. Arguments
about the justification of those judgements can only occur when historians recog-
nize that as part of their business they may already be implicitly evaluating, and
thus that evaluation is not a category error. One must acknowledge the presence
of evaluation in order to control it.
At the other end of the scale from word choices, a work of History gives an
overall impression and this can be a moral impression whether or not the histor-
ian sought to provide one. The moral impression given by a book or an article can
be straightforwardly a function of the explicit argument as, say, when a historian
of empire sets out to marshal evidence in support of the case that the project was
driven by good intentions rather than greed. Or it can be a function of accumu-
lated descriptions of historical occurrences and contexts, facts, rhetoric, and all.
Theorists of narrative remind us that overall impressions can be more significant
than particular word choices and the historian has as much responsibility for one
as the other. Again, it is no good the historian washing her hands of responsibility
by suggesting that readers can just make up their minds on the moral aspect, or
any other aspect, of the story, since, consciously or not, she will have provided so
many of the prompts that shape readers’ thoughts.30 The moral impression will
rarely just be a reflection of the views of the major actors under consideration—
those whose ‘terms’ the reader is enjoined to understand. As the historian explains
the outlooks of those actors, she has to go behind those outlooks, contextualizing
them in ways that might not have been familiar to the actors, and introducing a
‘voice’ that is external to the historical scenario under examination. As the histor-
ian explains the significance or consequences of what the actors did, she may have
to harness latter-day perspectives (including her own), or the perspectives of con-
temporary onlookers or those affected by the acts in question. There is no reason
that these sets of perspectives need cohere with the outlook of the principal
actors. The overall moral impression of the work is shaped by how the historian
elucidates and combines different contexts, perspectives, and experiences. There
is no professional rulebook for creating such compositions, far less for rendering
them morally neutral.
Part 3 moves from describing features of works of History to underwriting a
range of judgements that are currently outlawed not just by advocates of neutra-
lism and moral contextualism, but, finally, by certain moral relativists. This part
of the book legitimates some of the apparently presentist value judgements that
many historians already make and establishes criteria according to which other
judgements can be formed or criticized. It is the longest section of the work
29 Evans, Defence, 44–5. 30 Evans, ‘What Is History?’, 5.

Introduction 13
because it has to dig so deep through layers of occidental thought to trace the
growth and flaws of an influential, though never uncontested, cluster of moral
theories. The point of the opening three historical sections is to use historical
investigation to undermine some of the prevailing standards of the disciple of
History, showing that far from being self-evident for a properly scholarly under-
taking, those standards emerge from particular, contestable standpoints in the-
ology, strands of philosophy, and even theories of nationalism and raison d’état.
Three concluding sections summarize the major issues at stake and address them
from a more purely philosophical perspective.
The central problem animating Part 3 is that whatever the time and place, the
world has been shaped for good and ill more by what people have done than their
motives or justifications for doing it. One of its contentions is that just as an act
has moral significance that is not always determined by the ‘faith’, good or bad, of
its author, an actor’s good faith is itself relative to a value that may be evaluated. In
terms of evaluating acts, though not necessarily actors, ‘good faith’ can be irrele-
vant. There is a gulf between remonstrating with historical actors for failing to
subscribe to concepts that were unavailable to them or failing to transcend values
and structures that conditioned them—which is what some opponents of moral
evaluation legitimately fear—and drawing out normative problems with the rele-
vant structures and values in light of their worldly consequences for others who
did not share the same outlook. At the simplest level there is no contradiction
between being morally contextualist about the outlook of a seventeenth-century
commodities trader who made a fortune on the products of slavery while criticiz-
ing slavery on more ‘external’ moral grounds. Reflecting morally on the crusades
given their impact on peoples the crusaders encountered is not the same as con-
demning any and all crusaders that had a particular world-view.
Pushing the evaluative question ‘back’ or ‘up’ from the level of historical actors
to the level of their value structures in different cultures past is, however, to step
onto treacherous terrain, so some clarifications are in order. Cultures, in the sense
of ways of life, cannot meaningfully be evaluated. They are immensely complex,
multifaceted, and never entirely coherent. They are marked by internal diversity,
and their members are capable of arguing, even fighting, about values. So we do
not even need cultural relativism except as a useful shorthand marker of the inco-
herence as well as the colossal presumption of judging ways of life as such. Part 3
distinguishes between cultural relativism and moral relativism. It is moral relativ-
ism that this book interrogates, in order to show that it does not constitute an
operative guide to the matters in hand. Unlike general ways of life, specific prac-
tices can be evaluated, and indeed are and have been evaluated, all the time,
including by those sharing the same culture.
A further crucial point about relativism is often overlooked. Contextualisms
and relativisms of all sorts—epistemic, aesthetic, and, for present purposes, moral
relativism—presuppose some basic human commonality as the parameter against
which particular differences are considered. Halibuts are notably absent from
most discussions of ‘difference’ under the rubric of diversity or relativism, because
relativism is an anthropocentric conception, no matter that the tacit underlying
definition of shared humanity is unprovided. Part of the reason for the defin-
itional deficit may be fear of a bias in any definition, which surely explains the
absence of philosophical foundation for the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights with its ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’-type assertion of human
equality. But without a parameter of some shared quality, whether asserted,
implied, or just taken for granted, the whole structure of relativism would fall
down because we would have no means of establishing what it was that we needed
to be relativist about. While we might be interested, say, in different social reasons
for the infliction of pain, or different cultural forms and ways of experiencing
pain, the pain itself lies within the ambit of the ‘context’ of a shared humanity.
However various the concepts of justice across different societies past and pre-
sent, the concept of injustice, and indignation at it, has transcultural reach. As
elaborated at the end of Part 3, the sort of evaluation this book is concerned with
gets its specifically historical colouring from inference about actual instances of
happiness, suffering, justice, and injustice in foreign countries past. It does not
issue forth from some ideal social theory designed in the present and then
wielded in automatic criticism of all other societies, with no regard for how the
inhabitants of those societies viewed their situation.
If Part 3 is more angled towards the principles of evaluating the behaviour of
‘others’, then Part 4 moves the focus more onto ‘us’ in the here and now. Part 4
gives the book explicit political relevance. It addresses the way in which moral
evaluation feeds into the relationship between History and identity. It suggests
that a major anxiety about making value judgements in one’s History is not that
judgements will hinder understanding of the past but that they have the potential
to disturb the order of the present. In particular it addresses a common and espe-
cially important mode of engagement with History, a mode hereafter named
Identity History.
Identity History in the upper case is founded on the idea that the past lives on
in the present. It is not—or not necessarily—identical to the wide range of historical
scholarship that simply examines the History of particular groups with, say, a
desire to recognize their historical experience and write them back into the his-
torical record. Identity History is prejudicial; its historians tend to be self-servingly
selective about what moral aspects of the past they connect with, or how they
make that connection. In particular, Identity History is characterized by incon-
sistency in the way its practitioners relate to historical actors. When the ways of the
ancestors are embarrassing by the standards of the present, the Identity historian
pleads that the past is a foreign country and criticism would be anachronistic. But
the positive—or arguably positive—achievements and patrimony of the ancestors
Introduction 15
are embraced as if these forebears were close relatives rather than distant foreigners.
Historical Identity debates about the British Empire often comprise a case in
point of this process of alternating association and distancing.
Identity History should be taken seriously. The topics most likely to feature in
it—wars, revolutions, suffering, triumphs, dynasties, national stories—tell us
something about general interest in the past, and it is irrelevant if the nature of
that interest contravenes the strictures of academic historians, many fewer of
whom would have jobs without it. One aspiration of this book is that all relevant
History becomes self-reflective identity History rather than upper-case Identity
History.
To the extent that memories of the past bolster practices in the present, changes
in the former will affect the latter. By extension evaluative interrogation is vital
because, while parts of the same community and other communities beyond will
surely remember different things, they will also remember some of the same
things differently. When those memory clashes concern claims over rights and
wrongs it is already too late for exhortations to neutrality or relativism, and ‘toler-
ance’ may just be a way of favouring the historical victor or aggressor.
Thinking harder about historical evaluation would improve the quality of
many of the historians’ judgements that are all around us anyway. It would also
help reading audiences to distinguish an underlying moral stance of one sort
from a competing and perhaps irreconcilable sort, to spot where judgementalism
and moralism substitute for judgement and moral reasoning,31 and to detect the
influence of Identity narcissism as against critical reflection on identity.
31 I hold judgementalism to stand in relation to judgement much as moralism does to morality.

PART 1
C ON T E M PL AT ING H I STOR IC A L
ACTORS IN C ON T E XT
Introduction
The historian William H. Sewell Jr, who is also one of the most important
contemporary theorists of History as an undertaking, encapsulated the centrality
of ‘context’ to the practice of historians. ‘Both history as transformation and
history as context are recognized in the practice and training of professional his-
torians. We would regard as incompetent any historian not capable of arguing in
both modes.’ He suggests, however, that accounting for context is generally
regarded as more fundamental than the explanation of change:
A historical work that makes no effort (or only the most passing effort) to expli-
cate or explain a historical transformation but portrays effectively the context of
some past lifeworld can be hailed as a masterpiece. Think of [Lewis] Namier’s
The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie’s Carnival in Romans (1979) . . . or Robert Darnton’s essay on ‘The Great
Cat Massacre’ (1983) . . . By contrast, a history that recounted a series of changes
over time but failed to indicate the distance of the lifeworld being described
from the present would be dismissed out of hand as ‘anachronistic’—the histor-
ian’s equivalent of the anthropologist’s ‘ethnocentric’ and perhaps the most
damning term in the historian’s lexicon of judgment.1
As against ethnocentrism, the historian’s default mode today does include a

‘presumption of qualitative difference’ (in the phrase of another theorist) between
worlds past and present.2 One cultural historian writes of having ‘been trained to
1 William G. Sewell, Logics of History: Social History and Social Transformation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 183.
2 Eero Loone, ‘ “They Were Not Quite Like Us”: The Presumption of Qualitative Difference in
Historical Writing’, in Henry Kozicki (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 1998), 164–81, here 169.
Historical Actors in Context 17
mark the exceptionality of an era, region, or cultural group’.3 The historical discip-
line’s ‘cultural turn’ in the later twentieth century merely reinforced this long-
standing tendency, as did the promptings of sundry thinkers in the ‘structuralist’
and ‘post-structuralist’ traditions. The common point of contrast of these strands
of thought, as of nineteenth-century German historicism and the romantic his-
torianship with which it was affiliated, is a universalist tradition associated with
elements of the Enlightenment. Where some thinkers in the universalist vein
might seek the shared kernel of humankind or promote a particular way of life as
an ideal to which all should aspire, historians now and for a long time have con-
cerned themselves with illuminating different ways of life on their own terms and
considering historical actors within the contexts of those ways of life.
This part of the book takes seriously the idea of doing justice to different ways
and circumstances of life. One of the greatest obligations historians bear is not to
caricature or traduce the historical objects of their investigations, and this obliga-
tion is honoured by care in depicting what one infers about the beliefs, motives,
intentions, and situations of historical actors. The same obligation ought to be
honoured for any actor under scrutiny, whether from a millennium ago or last
year, whether Gulag guard or inmate. The following discussion paves the way for
greater clarity and consistency in contextual understanding by bringing into
focus what the practice of contextualization implies and examining the logics of
different sorts of contextualization. It is a guide to what it means to deliver on the
commitment to take historical actors on their own terms, and it highlights the
unavoidable evaluative implications of the process. It has implications for revising
how certain historians have evaluated and how others might yet evaluate, but it is
the general fact of evaluation rather than the direction of any particular evalu-
ation that is central.
Wary that discussion of conceptual matters can become too abstract, not to say
abstruse, the first section anchors the others in concrete by examining some
influential works of History that raise issues of general relevance. That section
contemplates failed attempts in two famous books to neutralize a discussion by
invoking a governing context by reference to which things are simply explained
rather than justified, legitimated, condemned, excused, praised, etcetera. Then it
examines a third work which uses a governing context not to neutralize but to
provide arguably excessive mitigation for its chosen objects of inquiry. The point
is to investigate ways in which ‘ordinary’ practices of contextualization can be
normatively problematic.
The second section tries to demystify ‘context’, showing that it means nothing
other than ‘cause’ and, generally in humanistic explanations, cause in the weaker
3 Sharon Block, cited in Dror Wahrman, ‘Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Gender History: Or, Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?’, Gender & History 20/3
(2008), 584–602, here 598–9.
sense of ‘influence’ as opposed to the stronger sense of ‘determination’. In the

absence of determinism, human choice comes into play, and where there is choice
there is responsibility, which in morally salient matters cannot be considered
without attributions of praise or blame.
The third section addresses the different evaluative implications of the two
most popular sorts of contextualization: contextualization in societies with differ-
ent values to the present, and contextualization in unusual situations. The discus-
sion of those matters is interwoven with an account of the interaction of values
and interests as motive forces for historical actors.
The fourth section addresses actors who consciously bring about or forestall
change and establishes the limits of academically popular contextualizations that
focus on culture. It brings the focus to bear on matters of more narrowly-defined
and consciously-imbibed ideology and the inherently political nature of so much
that is involved in social transformation or social reproduction. Again, as the type
of contextualization changes, so do the evaluative connotations.
The fifth section addresses the range of special considerations associated with
certain leadership and functionary roles and highlights common mistakes in
evaluative thinking about the occupants of these roles. The sixth section builds on
all the previous ones in addressing a matter that seems antithetical to any serious
agenda of historical contextualization: the application of hindsight. It argues that
certain forms of hindsight, evaluative implications and all, are legitimate even
when ‘taking people on their own terms’.
Misuses of Contextualization
The brilliant historian Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939) famously contrasted the judicial
process with the historian’s investigation. The contrast is especially stark in the
ways evidence is used—in court evidence is played against evidence to reach a
final one-way-or-another verdict, while the historian seeks more holistically to
understand the relationship between pieces of evidence and historical actors who
can only be ‘known’ via the evidence. Marc Bloch’s opinion on historical judge-
ment was formed in reaction to a French historiography of the French Revolution
that seemed but an extension of the major political divide in French politics in its
determination to indict or exculpate.4 The French Revolution provided the
example par excellence of a controversial, event-centred History with high-profile
individual players who might indeed be subjected to the verdict of posterity. Such
was the sort of History Bloch sought to put in a different perspective. Surely it
also shaped Bloch’s philosophy that his History concerned a distant past, whereas
4 Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian (London: Verso, 2002), 13–15; Joep Leerssen and
Ann Rigney, Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 72.
the present was turbulent in the most urgent manner—so turbulent that this
courageous and wise man was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944.
Let us examine some of Bloch’s thematic History, his classic Feudal Society
(1939–40), to see how consistently he lived up to his famous demand:
‘Robespierrists, anti-Robespierrists, just do us a favour: for Heaven’s sake, tell us
simply who Robespierre was.’5 Bloch’s admonition that ‘the historian’s sole duty is
to understand’, not ‘pass judgment’, suffixed a discussion of knightly adherence to
the chivalric code of conduct that had emerged by the eleventh century:
[A] It is hardly surprising that the realities of knightly life, with its frequent
trickery and deeds of violence, should have been far from conforming always to
these aspirations. [B] One might also be inclined to observe that, from the point
of view either of a ‘socially’ inspired ethic or of a more purely Christian code,
such a list of moral precepts seems a little short. [C] But this would be to pass
judgment6
In sentence C, Bloch retreats from sentences A and B, which he sees as forming

the grounds for a disapproval that would be illegitimate. Yet A and B are different:
B concerns applying a code other than that which he thinks existed; whereas A
concerns failure to meet the standards set by an extant code of his knights, and
potentially provides the grounds for the very judgement from which Bloch ultim-
ately resiles, despite his having already implied a judgement. Indeed Bloch’s his-
torical analysis sometimes fuses ‘understanding’ and ‘judgement’. Immediately
after the above-cited passage, he described the ‘disturbing attenuation’ of knightly
values as they were translated from ecclesiastical theorists to lay popularizers:
‘disturbing’ is evocative. Now were this but a small performative contradiction
over a few sentences it would be churlish to raise the matter, but in Bloch’s own
testament, ‘war, murder, the abuse of power—these have cast their shadow over
almost every page of our analysis’. So we have an invitation to dig deeper. Let us
consider his account, especially of the ‘first feudal age’ which lasted from approxi-
mately the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the early tenth century to the
middle of the eleventh century, assuming for the sake of this discussion that all of
his factual assertions are warranted.7
Feudal Society deals with the consolidation of a social system. For Bloch, the
Church’s endorsement of the social role of the warrior class provided knights with
‘a religious justification of a social supremacy which had long been a recognized
fact’. It strengthened the collective identity of the knights and, while notionally
binding them to a set of moral precepts which they frequently ignored,
5 Bloch cited in Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, 15.

6 March Bloch, Feudal Society (London: Routledge, 1989), 318.
7 Bloch, Feudal Society, 318, 410.
consolidated the sense that their earthly dominion over other men was part of the
ordained scheme of things. Hence the romance of Lancelot: ‘above the people
must sit the knight. And just as one controls a horse and he who sits above leads it
where he will, so the knight must lead the people at his will.’ This philosophy,
Bloch concludes, ‘epitomizes the attitude of a dominant class: an attitude emi-
nently favourable to the development of a nobility in the strictest sense of the
term’.8 Abuse and exploitation may have been characteristic of the new system
which could not establish peaceful order for a long time, but there were, accord-
ing to Bloch, good contextual reasons why ‘violence became the distinguishing
mark of an epoch and a social system’. New power structures emerged from the
dislocation caused by the collapse of empire and then a series of invasions that
had ‘brought murder and pillage to every part of the land’. Yet ‘violence was also
deep-rooted in the social structure and in the mentality of the age’. This was so
partly because of the temptations of plunder and brigandage when trade was
insecure, and partly because of the absence of central, enforceable systems of just-
ice, and the inherence of violence in such law as there was.
Finally, violence was an element in manners. Medieval men had little control
over their immediate impulses; they were emotionally insensitive to the spec-
tacle of pain, and they had small regard for human life, which they saw only as a
transitory state before Eternity; moreover they were very prone to make it a
point of honour to display their physical strength in an almost animal way.9
This final and most generalized contextualization claims the broadest rele-
vance, sitting as it does atop the discussion of more specific sociological condi-
tions. In that final summation there is no distinction between, say, approximately
symmetrical everyday violence and the violence of a heavily armed, retinued war-
rior class whose actions did not just affect their peer protagonists but the entire
society over which they presided. There is, in other words, no distinction between
degrees and deployments of social power. Yet such distinctions must be salient
since in the same pages we read of how peacemaker lords were lauded above all
else, with prospects for peace improving a little in the ‘second feudal age’ given
the aggregation of larger political units and larger, more urbanized populations.
So let us move to considering the actions of various lords.
Bloch’s discussion of noble life earlier in the book provides insight into why the
much-desired ‘peace’ might have been so hard to come by and it does so precisely
by reference to the social class that had most say in the matter. For the nobility,
fighting ‘was sometimes a legal obligation and frequently a pleasure’, and of course
might be required as a ‘matter of honour’. It was also a source of wealth. (Other
8 Bloch, Feudal Society, 318–19, 349–51. 9 Bloch, Feudal Society, 411.

scholarship has illustrated how later depictions of chivalric knighthood obscured

the greed and crudely violent realities of much knightly behaviour, as judged by
some of their contemporaries. Indeed, the aestheticization of violence was a cen-
tral part of the self-justification of this class, much as it had been in classical
epics.10) A ‘share of the plunder’ was ‘the principal profit which the knight who
fought on his own account in little local wars expected from his efforts’. And so
‘by a series of transitions almost unnoticed by the rather simple minds of the
time, forms of violent action which were sometimes legitimate—requisitions
indispensable to armies without commissariat, reprisals exacted against the
enemy or his subjects—degenerated into pure brigandage, brutal and mean’.
Prepared for danger, and lauded for his courage, ‘the knight found in war yet
another attraction: it offered a remedy for boredom’. It was an expression of an
‘appetite for diversions’. A ‘roving disposition was especially widespread among
the French. The fact was that their own country did not offer them, as did half-
Moslem Spain, or, to a less[er] degree, Germany with its Slav frontiers, an arena
for conquests or swift forays’. It ‘has often been observed that Normandy was of
all the provinces richest in bold adventurers’, which was ‘above all the effect of the
state of relative peace which, in that remarkably centralized principality, the dukes
established at an early date; so that those who craved the opportunity for fighting
had to seek it abroad’. The ‘bloodletting thus practised abroad by the most turbu-
lent groups in the West saved its civilization from being extinguished by guerrilla
warfare. The chroniclers were well aware that at the start of a crusade the people
at home in the old countries always breathed more freely, because now they could
once more enjoy a little peace.’11
It seems that ‘peace’ at home might come from the absence of some nobles as
well as the presence of noble peacemakers, while the sojourns of the former coin-
cided with a marked reduction of peace in their places of visitation. Indeed, it tran-
spires that many nobles had their own reasons for not wanting peace at all. These
distinctions of Bloch’s are lost in his own later summary of the reasons for disorder.
One popular piece of wisdom is that if all are responsible, then none is, which is
evasive and incorrect, but still a product of moral discourse. Broad generalizations
about mentalité, such as violence’s presence in ‘manners’, seek to get outside moral
discourse by recourse to the fundamental acculturation within which morality
functions. But in the context at issue, not only is the argument to mentalité quali-
fied by the author’s own assessments of specific interests elsewhere, it also boils
down to the circular claim that violence was the product of a violent age.
This sort of circularity is far from uncommon when ‘historicization’ is taken to
mean the subsumption of individual or interest group agendas within what the
10 For references, see Andrew Holt, ‘Between Warrior and Priest’, in Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (ed.),
Negotiating Clerical Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 185–203, here 187 and nn. 7 and 8
thereto.
11 Bloch, Feudal Society, 294–7.
sociologist Émile Durkheim—a significant influence on the Annales school of

historical thought within which Bloch worked—called représentations collectives.
In that particular concept of contextualization, individuals and institutions are
seen as ‘embodying and applying collective beliefs and sentiments of “society” as
a whole’. In this vein, Bernard Hamilton’s The Medieval Inquisition (1981) claimed
that the views of the persecuting clergy were ‘shaped by the society in which they
lived, which regarded the persecution of heretics as normal’, as if the clergy, and
indeed secular authorities, had not themselves been responsible for initiating and
intensifying so much of the persecution that became ‘normal’.12
If the reader is seeking any guide as to how an agenda of historical evaluation
would look in practice, then Bloch gives us much before taking away at the last
moment. Despite his well-known ban on judgement he provides so much of the
grist for it, and even in refusing to remain with the logic of his analysis, he cannot
retreat to a non-judgemental position. Instead he just blames an epoch rather
than elements of a class. So: simply remove the ban on judgement, because it just
tells us what Bloch thinks we should do, rather than exemplifying what he does,
then qualify the misleading summation. In the case of Feudal Society, that is all
that is needed.
The impulse to attempt a value-free explanation remains especially strong in
controversial areas, as writers undertake a self-assigned task to add a sober or
disinterested perspective to a divided field of inquiry. Ronald Robinson and John
Gallagher’s classic account of late Victorian Britain’s role in the ‘scramble for
Africa’ from the late 1870s, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of
Imperialism (1961), is such a work. The book’s foreword states:
The ethics of empire have always fascinated the moralist, just as the causes of
their rise and fall have perplexed the historian . . . ‘Imperialism’ has become one
of the most evocative myths of our time and it colours what Americans and
Europeans, Africans and Asiatics think of each others’ intentions. Today the
motives imputed to national expansion have a world-wide significance. They
console those peoples still clinging to memories of imperial glory. They inspire
those countries even now extending their influence. They embitter those who,
having inherited the achievements of others, may yet plunge into an imperialism
of their own . . .
This study is an enquiry into the motives behind Victorian expansion.
Obliquely, it is therefore a commentary upon the historical truth of modern
theories of imperialism, using the classic model of the African partition.
12 For the quotes, and the contextualization and criticism of Hamilton, see R. I. Moore, The
Formation of a Persecuting Society (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 3–4, 100–1. The relevant work
of Émile Durkheim is ‘Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives’, Revue de metaphy-
sique et de morale 6 (1898), 273–302.
The book is avowedly concerned with explanation alone: ‘the morality of the
conquest is not here our concern’.13 To that end, it seeks to get behind the myths
and the moralizing (and the Marxist explanations) and explore the real motives of
some of the key agents of colonialism. The experience of empire, its impact upon
and meaning for indigenous peoples, colonizers, or merchant, is largely absent.
Britain’s politicians and bureaucrats are to be taken on their own terms, the terms
of what they intended and why they intended it. This is a legitimate thing for the
historian to attempt as long as one thing is borne in mind.
As part of any competent technical inquiry, those ‘own terms’ of the inevitably
select historical actors need to be interrogated just as rigorously as any other
aspect of causation. Historians are not in the habit of taking historical actors at
their word in other areas of causation but are constantly reading evidence ‘against
the grain’, or in light of ‘hidden agendas’, underlying trends, self-justification, per-
ceived interests, and so on. This is called source criticism. We know that histor-
ians have long speculated on the causes of the First World War, but whatever the
ongoing disagreements in the scholarship, no debate hinges around believing
everything that all of the relevant actors said at the time about why they got to the
point of fighting. If the historians did stop at the self-justification of their histor-
ical subjects, their books would be nothing but litanies of mutually contradictory
assertion. Historians would then indeed be guilty of taking the politicians at their
own word rather than taking them on their own terms. Explaining events with
reference to human volition entails giving motive reasons a meaning-in-context.
Insofar as part of that meaning is morally salient, the historian’s ascription of
motive binds her to a judgement about how things were, morally speaking, at all
relevant points in the tale. Thereafter come assessments of moral consistency, the
relationship between values and interests, good and bad faith avowals, and so
forth. With all this in mind some source criticism is called for. The source text is
Africa and the Victorians, and the critical task is to assess how successfully the
authors live up to their claim simply to avoid evaluation.
Robinson and Gallagher realize that telling it how it was necessitates identifica-
tion of morally salient historical facts. We are duly notified at the outset of the
introduction that the Victorians ‘regarded themselves as the leaders of civiliza-
tion, as pioneers of industry and progress’. In the same vein over the next two
pages we learn that in ‘the Utilitarian science of political economy, the earlier
Victorians beheld the rules for improvement everywhere. They were not the first,
nor were they to be the last people, to project their own image as the universal
ideal.’ ‘Few doubted that gesta Dei per Anglos, however they might disagree about
His choice of method.’ The ‘authentic mid-Victorian outlook on the world . . . was
13 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official
Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. xi (from the preface)—note that the foreword has
no page number.
suffused with a vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness, if with every

good intention’.14 So far so good—the British way was held to be good for the rest
of the world. This is clearly not an argument about discarding moral categories; it
is an argument that the morally salient element is the motive sincerity of the rele-
vant actors. Robinson or Gallagher are appealing to ‘good intentions’ relative to
given standards, in much the same way as Lawrence James’s Empires in the Sun:
The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa (2016). ‘Good intentions’, like ‘sincerity’,
have an affirming resonance.
As it happens, none of these general ‘spirit of the times-like’ assertions are tied
to specific sources. As the book progresses, other generalizations are made but
they are also importantly qualified. For the late Victorians, as for their predeces-
sors, ‘expansion in all its modes seemed not only natural and necessary but inev-
itable; it was pre-ordained and irreproachably right. It was the spontaneous
expression of an inherently dynamic society.’ This expansion was ‘not essentially a
matter of empire but of private commerce and influence . . . empire tended to be
thought of as an auxiliary, in much the same way as the liberal state at Home. The
main engine of expansion was enterprise.’ And though by the end of the 1860s,
‘this optimistic idealism was cooling, as disappointments piled up and the millen-
nium of peace, brotherhood and free trade receded . . . [nevertheless] experience
had only overlaid the earlier dreams, it had not erased them’. Then we read that
‘however liberal in principle, Victorian statesmen in practice never minimized
the role of government in all this’.15 One important illustration of tension between
principle and practice is to be found in British rule in India, when in ‘the so-
called era of laissez faire the country was being turned into a satellite of the indus-
trial economy chiefly by state enterprise’. Crucially, we learn that ‘such
inconsistency rarely worried the pragmatic British’.16 Within the space of ten
pages of introduction, we have moved from Britain as the universalizer of its own
deeply held beliefs to Britain the pragmatist, prepared to compromise its prin-
ciples on the minimal role of the State on the basis of the ‘Radical’ Sir Charles
Dilke’s recognition that ‘were we to leave Australia or the Cape, we should con-
tinue to be the chief customers of those countries: were we to leave India or
Ceylon . . . falling into anarchy, they would cease at once to export their [primary]
goods to us and to consume our manufactures’.17
The concepts pragmatism and practicality need interrogation, especially in rela-
tion to ‘principle’. How do they relate to the purported belief of the officials that
they were doing the right thing in principle? If pragmatism exists in a separate
sphere to principle, which in turn derives from morality in some relationship to
14 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 1–3.

16 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 10.
culture, it scarcely makes sense for us to treat the Victorians as men of their times
since they could choose whether to inhabit the universe of principle or that of
pragmatism and were thus significantly free from the contextual influence of their
culturally bequeathed beliefs. If, conversely, pragmatism exists within the con-
straints of a specific set of cultural or ideological precepts, we can assume that the
movement from ‘principle’ to ‘pragmatism’ is not that at all, but instead a change in
emphasis or parameter of rationality to another, within the confines of an overall
framework of belief. The only inconsistency here is over which doctrine is best fit-
ted to the pursuit of the higher, imbibed justification: the principle that purports to
be universal, or the pragmatism that is really just a name for the retreat from quasi-
universalistic principle to the pursuit of some other more fundamental imperative.
Presumably the more fundamental framework concerns the material prowess
of the British state in an international system of competitive states. Suffice it to say
that Africa and the Victorians adduces ample evidence of the awareness of British
statesmen of some sort of ‘bottom line’ of imperial policy. This evidence is not the
authors’ unsourced distillation of the spirit of the times, but specific citations. In
1840 Lord Clarendon looked ‘to what may be most for the honour and advantage
of England, and to what offers the fairest prospects of extending her commercial
relations and the sphere of her influence and power’. In 1863, Benjamin Disraeli
said that ‘there may be grave questions as to the best mode of obtaining
wealth . . . but there can be no question . . . that the best mode of preserving wealth
is power’. In the interim, according to the authors, ‘the Palmerstonians insisted
that the expanding economy needed the protection of power and that it was also
one of the weapons of power’. Robinson and Gallagher then conclude that ‘power
remained an end in itself ’, and that ‘trade and hegemony were manipulated delib-
erately as reciprocating elements . . . power must break open the world to free
trade’, and where it met with obstacles power was ‘extended in its subtler forms—
prestige, cajolery, threat, the dangled loan reinforced occasionally with blockade,
bombardment or expedition’.18 The logic of all of these pronouncements is that
the view that what was good for Britain was good for the world in the eyes of the
British has been reduced to the pursuit of what was good for Britain simpliciter.
In much the same deflationary vein we read that ‘India by the mid-century no
longer seemed likely to offer loyal partners on whom authority might safely be
devolved’, so the Victorians ‘accepted the fact, and comforted their liberal con-
sciences with the duty of an indefinite but benevolent trusteeship which pushed
beyond the mental horizon teasing questions about nationalities struggling to be
free’. Such dilemmas had apparently been present earlier in the century, in epi-
sodes in which Britain was ‘generally ready to confront despotism and Holy

Alliances, and to give aid and comfort to rebels in South America, Greece,
Belgium or Hungary’.19
Closer inspection of the Greek case rather qualifies Robinson and Gallagher’s
account of that instance and casts light on matter relevant to expansion into
Africa. Official British support for the Greek rebels, culminating in support for
independence from Ottoman rule, took years to develop out of a policy of neu-
trality in which the British foreign policy establishment hoped for a return to the
status quo ante. It is unclear whether public philhellenism was a factor in the
change of policy, or whether it merely provided additional justification for a shift
that would have taken place anyway owing to other factors. Certainly British fears
about commercial shipping were involved and a concern that were Russia to
intervene alone it would adversely affect British strategic interests. Tellingly, after
the Greek ‘war of independence’, British policy reverted for decades to sustaining
the integrity of as much of the Ottoman Empire as possible as a counterweight to
Russian influence in Europe and over the land routes to India.
The centrality of India and the Ottoman decline helps explain Britain’s venture
in Africa, as Robinson and Gallagher explain. Securing the alternative Suez canal
route to India was key to understanding Britain’s assumption of authority in
Egypt and thereafter the acquisition of large parts of Africa can be explained by
‘mission creep’, under the pressures of general European competition for Africa as
well as the land-hunger of white settlers in the south of the continent. There was
no great economic justification, so the rationale was strategic and ‘defensive’, con-
ceived to protect the large amount that Britain had in the world. Expansion into
huge tracts of Africa was, nevertheless, the result. Under the pressure of other
modern or fast-modernizing European states with their own expansionist agendas,
and in a world that had rejected many of the liberal tenets of the mid-Victorian
era, the late Victorians were in the mindset of retrenchment. This new turn of
mind did not, however, stop them using older rationales. Of traders and philan-
thropists, Robinson and Gallagher conclude at the book’s close that ‘ministers
usually listened to their pleas only when it suited their purpose . . . although their
slogans were frequently used by government in its public justifications’. Such
things as ‘promises of African progress’ were one of the ‘ex post facto justifications
of advances’.20 By this point this is good, discerning scholarship about the rela-
tionship between motives and justifications, but that is not how it began.
Robinson and Gallagher’s claim that ‘the morality of the conquest is not here
our concern’ equates to a refusal to assess the accuracy of their own claims about
the purported impulses of their historical subjects in the light of the evidence that
they (the authors) have themselves have brought forward. By their inviting us
into the official mind of imperialism at the outset and telling us that it ‘was

20 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 463, 472.
suffused with a vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness, if with every

good intention’, we are being told how it was in the moral world of the adminis-
trators of empire. On closer examination, by the authors’ own account, it seems
that that was never simply how it was, and at particular times some distance from
how it was. Far from obviating or postponing the moral debate by their opening,
scene-setting pronouncements, Robinson and Gallagher pre-empt it. Having pro-
fessed to take the British actors on their own terms in order to get on to the real
task of neutral explanation, the authors inadvertently provide a moral defence by
their partial establishment of those ‘terms’ and the officials’ good intentions rela-
tive to the terms.
Bloch, Robinson, and Gallagher each use contextualization to do some norma-
tive work. Bloch’s concern to treat certain actors neutrally ended up producing a
tacit evaluation of something else, namely the mentalité of the earlier Middle
Ages. Robinson and Gallagher contextualize in a way that heads towards justifica-
tion for their chosen actors. These three scholars are chosen not to cast any asper-
sions, but because their techniques are common. Many historians do what they
do to some degree and in some fashion, with a greater or lesser self-consciousness
and subtlety. Even when they do not use the term ‘contextualization’, historians’
choices of master ‘contexts’ against which all else has to be discussed frame the
moral issue in a particular pre-emptive way.
An example in which a form of contextualization is used not to justify, but
certainly to mitigate, comes from the work of one of the world’s best-known
historians. In the historical case in question, one of mass murder and expulsion
during the Second World War, it is impossible to hide from the moral purport of
the actions under explanation, and there is no suggestion that the author, Timothy
Snyder, seeks to hide from it. Nonetheless in the attribution of responsibility,
meaning here blame, contextualization plays a sometimes ambiguous, sometimes
problematic role.
Snyder’s article ‘The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing in 1943’
(2003) is a finely researched exposition that is essential reading not just on that
conflict but for any general student of ethnic cleansing or the Second World War.
It is thoroughly persuasive in its argument that Ukrainian nationalism alone can-
not explain why the contest over disputed Volhynian territory was resolved in the
most violent manner by the killing and expulsion-flight of the ethnically Polish
population. Nor, says Snyder, may we blame the mainstream Ukrainian national-
ist leaders, who were either enfeebled, killed, or imprisoned before the ‘ethnic
cleansing’. Thus far, the normative overtones are starting to become clear, even if
they are in the negative vein of telling us what not to blame. At the point of telling
us what and who is to blame, Snyder places a relatively great emphasis on the
overarching responsibility of Nazi Germany and the USSR, as opposed to the
agendas of non-Nazi right-wing nationalists, specifically Ukrainian ones. The dis-
tinction between totalitarians and nationalists from various states in eastern
Europe was also marked in Snyder’s subsequent works, notably the blockbuster
Bloodlands: Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010).21
Again, this is no crude apologetic for the chief Ukrainian actors: labelling
them as ethnic cleansers, as Snyder does, cannot but combine evaluation with
description—a combination that receives more systematic attention in Part 2
below. Nonetheless it is clear from Snyder’s introduction and conclusion that
‘triple occupation’ provided ‘the overarching institutional framework’, indeed the
framework, institutional or no, within which ‘local particularities’ like Ukrainian
nationalist agendas must be examined.22 By the triple occupation Snyder means
the occupation of Volhynia by the USSR from 1939 to 1941, then by Germany
from 1941 to 1944, and then again by the USSR from 1944, during which time
institutional stability and established political elites were obliterated, and vast
violence was committed by both totalitarian powers. Undoubtedly significant
though such occupations were in polarizing Volhynian society, this framing does
not include the Polish control of most of the relevant Volhynian territory in the
interwar period—control that Ukrainian nationalists viewed as occupation too,
and which was important in firming up some of the nationalist agendas that
achieved the most extreme expression in 1943. Indeed, midway through the essay
Snyder observes that one ‘constant from the pre-war period was an ideology of
ethnic homogeneity’, and that the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)
‘was founded, in 1929 [10 years before Soviet occupation], as an organization
committed to removing all occupiers from Ukrainian soil’. Further, Snyder writes
that both fractions of the OUN, i.e. the more radical OUN-B and the OUN-M,
‘understood that Poland would not voluntarily relinquish Volhynia’. ‘As proponents
of an independent Ukraine including these territories, Ukrainians knew they had
little to gain from wartime discussions with Poles. Both the OUN-B and the
OUN-M believed that the situation would resolve itself if populations were
moved in both directions.’23 Now we might view this recognition of exclusionary
endogenous nationalism’s importance from well before the beginning of the war-
time violence as Snyder explicitly qualifying his own insistence on the framing
priority given to the German and Soviet occupations. Instead, what we have is an
interpretative tension that is not reconciled in the conclusion. Oscillation
between different causal factors and their importance replaces integration. One
of the article’s subsections is entitled ‘ideology and circumstance’, and the overall
normative thrust of his essay is to foreground ‘circumstance’ in the explanation of
21 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: The Bodley
Head, 2010). On the issues in question, see Omer Bartov’s excessively hostile review of Bloodlands in
Slavic Review 70/2 (2011), 424–8 and Richard Steigmann-Gall’s review of Snyder’s Black Earth in
Humanity, 7 Feb. 2016, at http://humanityjournal.org/blog/the-holocaust-between-scholar-and-
public-intellectual/
22 Timothy Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, Past & Present 179/1
(2003), 197–234, here 200, 232.
23 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 212.
the actions of Ukrainian nationalists, by which he means circumstance from

1939 and especially 1941 as created by the ideological projects of Nazi Germany
and the USSR. For ‘circumstance’, read ‘mitigating context’ as regards the relevant
Ukrainian forces. It should be clear by now that the existence of a normative
thrust itself is not a problem; the issue is whether the author is clear about what
he is doing and whether the particular normative conclusion is appropriate in
light of what we know.
One indication of excessive lenience towards the Ukrainian actors and
Ukrainian political traditions involved in ethnic cleansing comes from the idioms
of explanation Snyder employs when addressing specific agents of ethnic cleans-
ing. Of the subgroup of extremist Ukrainian nationalists that did emerge (the
OUN-B faction) out of a bloody conflict with other Ukrainian nationalists, his
evaluation is that they were ‘immature and angry’.24 Carefully chosen words: in
legalese, we might associate ‘anger’ with the crime of passion, which pleads miti-
gation in light of hot, not cold, blood. We might associate ‘immaturity’ with the
age of minority, lack of full responsibility. Then we have a discussion of the
c.12,000 Ukrainians who served in the German-run auxiliary police from later
1941 and provided vital manpower in that capacity for the murder of 150,000
Volhynian Jews. Snyder explains their employment as ‘one of the few ways that
young Ukrainians could draw a local salary and avoid deportation to Germany
for forced labour’.25 That is all; the murder of Volhynia’s Jews is thereby detached
from Ukrainian ethno-nationalism.
Those 12,000 men subsequently broke away from German ranks and provided
the vanguard of the UPA, the paramilitary force of the OUN-B—a proactive
move. But in explaining their subsequent killing actions against Poles Snyder puts
them back into the reactive mode and finds an appropriate passive voice for the
description. ‘They had been taught how to kill. Former policemen brought not
only their SS training and their weapons, but the irreplaceable experience of
co-ordinated murder of designated populations. The OUN-B appealed directly to
this experience, and to the widely held idea that the Ukrainians were next.’
Accordingly, the ‘people who became UPA soldiers knew about Jewish death, as
they had brought it about as German policemen. The lessons were applied to
Poles.’ When they killed Jews, the reader infers, they did so purely as ‘German
policemen’, and thereafter, once made into killers by an external agency, they
could be instrumentalized for other tasks. German acts and agendas retain causal
primacy. In the conclusion we learn that the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’,
the Holocaust in Volhynia, ‘was not only an effect but a cause’, meaning a cause of
the ethnic cleansing of Poles.26 Again, when discussing OUN-B’s ‘voluntary’
24 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 208.

25 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 210–11.
26 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 210–12, 232–3.
resettlement scheme (for intermigration of Poles and Ukrainians across new

Polish–Ukrainian borders), as proposed to the Polish Home Army in December
1941, Snyder writes ‘that it could be [proposed] at all suggests the importance of
the German precedent’ of ethnic cleansing in Poland.27 One would be forgiven for
thinking that OUN had no choice but to endorse a precedent once it appeared, or
that their own actions would have been unimaginable without that particular
totalitarian precedent, as opposed, to, say, the precedent set by other ethnona-
tionalists in the First and Second World War eras. The rhetorical device is par-
ticularly jarring given that we know the OUN sought ethnic homogeneity from
well before the war, but that fact of Snyder’s own disclosure cannot be accommo-
dated within the primary ‘contextualizing’ structure of the piece.
Cause and Context in Historical Explanation
Snyder’s use of the occupations of 1939 onwards as a master context, rather than,
say, the OUN quest for ethnic homogeneity, was an authorial choice, but the very
idea of a master context is problematic. It is actually a special manifestation of a
wider problem, which is the tendency of historians to give an interpretative prior-
ity in their explanation to ‘context’ in the singular or plural. Context tends to be
seen as more fundamental than ‘cause’, but there is, in fact, no conceptual distinc-
tion between a cause and a context.
‘Context’ and ‘cause’ both have influence over an eventualization, and what has
influence over an eventualization is a cause. ‘Context’ and ‘cause’ are just different
names that we give pragmatically to elements of an argument as a result of the
particular scope of our inquiry. Were one interested in the proximate origins of
the First World War, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand might loom
large as a cause, with the modernization of Russia, French Germanophobia, and
German fears of encirclement part of the context, whereas an enquiry into both
longer- and shorter-term origins would count both sets of things as causes.
By extension of the argument that there is no distinction in principle between a
context and a cause, we need to resist any implication that a context is a particu-
larly important sort of cause. In contrast to the implications of serried History
essay and examination questions, in the explanation of any given outcome it does
not make sense to assign one cause, or sort thereof, greater importance than
another.28 It makes no sense to claim of the First World War that, say, the alliance
system, or German aggressive-defensiveness, or Austrian bellicosity towards
Serbia, or the Franco-Russian alliance, were ‘more important’ causes than the
27 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 212–13.

28 S. H. Rigby, ‘Historical Causation: Is One Thing More Important Than Another?’, History 80
(1995), 227–42.
assassination of Franz Ferdinand if one accepts that the assassination was causally
relevant. In Snyder’s Volhynian case it ought not be a question of portraying the
triple occupation as being more important than the nationalist ideology of the
OUN and the acts of Ukrainian agents. If all causes are needed for a certain
outcome, then they may not be given in hierarchy of significance. (This sentence
is not as startling as it may sound, especially to social scientists looking for shared
causes in roughly similar classes of outcome; it does, however, emphasize the
need for precision in defining exactly what outcome one is concerned with
explaining.) What we sometimes call catalysts are also causes: a catalyst changes a
situation by its introduction as a new element, and in plain speaking must be a
cause of the modified situation. Now one might say that the situation had already
to be unstable for the catalyst to have its effect (as in the Franz Ferdinand–First
World War scenario), but it is eminently possible for unstable situations to con-
tinue indefinitely, or to stabilize by the introduction of yet other factors.
To say that no cause/context is more important than another is not to say that
all are morally relevant. One does not blame a bullet for a lethal shooting even
though its hardness is causally integral to the death. But amongst the causes that
are morally relevant, the historian may not assume one to be solely relevant or
most relevant. In the Volhynian case it ought not be a matter of totalitarian states
or Ukrainian agents in the moral calculus any more than in the causal explan-
ation; it is a matter of totalitarians and Ukrainian agents. Nor ought moral
responsibility be treated as a finite quantity to be removed from one cause or
actor in the measure it is attributed to another, as with Snyder’s arguably excessive
mitigation of Ukrainian elements.
The present section explores more systematically the relationship between
causation and moral responsibility in a discipline—History—with a significant
humanistic element. ‘Humanistic’ is used here only in the loose sense of inquiry
that is concerned with human experience and agency, and by extension with mat-
ters of choice and conscious volition. In such an inquiry, one needs to be careful
in establishing exactly what one means by the rather protean term ‘causation’.
Let us first attend to what in the philosophy of social science is known as the
relevant ‘explanatory background’. Not blaming bullets for their hardness—a
hardness that is causally relevant to explaining deaths by shooting—is not the
same as subscribing to the argument underlying the popular expression ‘guns
don’t kill people; people kill people’. The questions of arms manufacturers, avail-
ability of guns, and the culture around gun-usage would easily fit within the ambit
of a humanistic inquiry in the aforementioned sense. The humanistic character of
much historical explanation becomes clear when we consider the elements of
explanation that historians have conventionally been most interested in. In per-
petuating the tale of William Tell, the storyteller more often than not takes for
granted, rather than providing, knowledge of how his synapses must have worked,
how his arm muscles must have contracted, and of projectile dynamics, even
though all of these elements would be required for a sufficient explanation of his
best-known deed, and all might be more interesting to the natural scientist. The
humanist is more interested in Tell’s aim, in the senses both of his marksmanship
and purpose in undertaking the shot. In either case the outcome—whether or not
the aim is achieved—can only be assessed in accordance with a concept of suc-
cess/failure that has no counterpart in the way that the chemist regards chemicals.
Even when projectile dynamics and automatic bodily reactions play a greater—
though still implicit—role in the humanistic account, as when the story is
recounted of Harold II’s (improbably) receiving an arrow in the eye at the Battle
of Hastings in 1066, the interest is generated by the existential significance for
Harold, and the broader sociopolitical significance for England.
Behind purposes like Tell’s stand reasons, which are of much interest in
humanistic explanations. By ‘reasons’ it is not necessarily intended to denote
products of rational calculation, merely motive source. A sexual drive or a fantasy
is a ‘reason’ of sorts, while the ‘memory’ that might also feed into purpose need
not be accurate or relevant by anyone else’s count than the actor’s own. Now it
should be stressed that humans are by no means the only entities capable of act-
ing on reasons. The capacity to weigh courses of action ultimately rests on weights
of attachment to different outcomes, and ‘justification’ in that sense is common to
neurologically complex organisms in general. Abstract evaluative reasoning, and
thus justification in the sense that we associate it with normative debate, is, how-
ever, plausibly unique on this planet to humans or at least the higher primates.
Thinking about justification in general, the eighteenth-century philosopher
Immanuel Kant noted that it is only through our own self-conception as agents
possessing some decision-making capacity and potential causal efficacy that we
can make sense of our existence.29 The evaluations on which human relationships
are founded, from sentiments of love to those of hatred, can only exist on the
assumption that praise, blame, admiration, and resentment mean something in a
way they would not if we understood ourselves and others to be determined in all
our actions by tradition, natural endowment, or divine purpose.
Even the theorists most associated with some species of determinism retain
space for conscious individual contributions to the causal chain, much as when
Otto von Bismarck claimed to the effect that one could not make events happen,
one could only secure their fruits—as if acts of ‘securing’ did not comprise a spe-
cies of event.30 While Karl Marx predicted that the proletariat would be driven to
29 Following Kant, and drawing directly on him, was Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob
[The Philosophy of ‘As If ’] (1911; Lepizig: Feliz Meiner, 1922). One acted as if one’s perceptions of
things actually corresponded to how those things were because it would be hard to know how one could
consistently act to the contrary. One acted as if one were a discerning, causally-effective moral agent
because it made no sense to act otherwise. Separately, note a general influence on this section: S. I. Benn
and R. S. Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), ch. 9.
30 Georgi Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (London: Camelot Press, 1950), 27.
action by its immiseration, it would nevertheless have to recognize for itself what
its predicament was, where its real interests lay, and how to rectify the situation.
That applied theorist Lenin emphasized this element of Marx’s thought in What Is
To Be Done? when he rejected the economic determinism that he called ‘econo-
mism’ and emphasized the role of the political sphere:
Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,
that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations
between workers and employers. The only sphere from which alone it is possible
to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships between all the various
classes and strata and the state and the government—the sphere of the interrela-
tions between all the various classes.31
Lenin also recommended the Marxist Georgi Plekhanov’s The Role of the
Individual in History (1898). Some of Plekhanov’s arguments resemble those of
the Christian father Augustine as he rebutted the somewhat Stoic Cicero, who in
turn had criticized other Stoics for their alleged fatalism.32 Analogous consider-
ations could be raised in objection to stereotypical portrayals of ‘fatalistic orien-
tals’. Both Augustine and Plekhanov sought to reconcile the existence of individual
volition and its attendant responsibility with forms of determinism—historical
materialism in Plekhanov’s case, God’s foreknowledge of all that comes to pass in
Augustine’s. Some of their arguments are fused with additional elements in the
following exemplification.
In Augustine’s and Plekhanov’s cases the determinism at issue is teleological
determinism, which needs to be distinguished from mechanical causal determin-
ism of the sort that will be addressed separately in a moment. Consider someone
who believes revolution inevitable as certain conditions come into existence, or
that Christ is destined to return after a set of arrangements fall into place. The
teleological determinist who believes that inevitability is incompatible with free
will could say this person should just sit and wait, because whatever her attitude
to the coming event, it is inevitable. The philosophy of reverse causation sheds
light on why this is not so. Imagine a promise to do something in future—a simi-
lar notion to a prophecy of what will happen. At the moment it is uttered, the
promise or prophecy is neither true nor false in virtue of its content. The illusion
that a promise can be true (or false) prior to its fulfilment (or non-fulfilment)
through future action ‘derives from the idea that the present truth must compel
the future action. The efficacy is in the reverse direction, however: a proposition
31 V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, 2 vols (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947), i. 201.
32 Augustine, City of God, ed. David Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 190–5; cf.
Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual, 10–22. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cato: or, An Essay on Old-Age
(London: J. Dodsley, 1773), 261: ‘there is no precept of morality which they [the Stoics] inculcate more
frequently nor in stronger terms, than an unlimited submission to the dispensations of providence’.
about what I am going to do is true in virtue of my later action.’33 The prophecy

will only be made true by its fulfilment, and insofar as the prophesied event is
foreseen to occur under specific circumstances, then the bringing about (or pre-
vention) of those propitious circumstances imposes a burden of responsibility on
the converted (or their opponents) for the making-true (or proving-false) of a
promise. Now the teleological determinist might counter that in virtue of the
events’ inevitability, inevitable too is the balance of the action for and against
their advent, such that when they do transpire, they transpire at precisely the con-
junction they are destined to all along. In other words, the historical actors’
actions are all accounted for in the teleology of revolution or the Second Coming
and those actions merely create the illusion of individual choice. But the return
argument would be that, prior to the predicted events’ coming to pass, partici-
pants in the historical process would, like everyone else, have imperfect know-
ledge of conditions, and ignorance of their precise ‘assigned’ role and how it was
to play out. Accordingly, they would have to act as if their actions made a
difference,34 even if, as it might turn out, this difference were only to their chances
of being remembered as a worthy member of the faithful. For the Christian or the
revolutionary, the will would be freest precisely in the moment of acting to bring
about that which was supposedly ordained, because the ordained would not only
be the most ardently desired; its bringing about would constitute the making-true
of the yet-unfulfilled promise.
History provides some empirical substantiation here. The self-perception of free-
dom that must accompany an act of will extends to self-conscious martyrs from all
faiths, as also to those fundamentalist Christians, the Calvinists, who were so deter-
mined to prove by their deeds their place among an elect whose membership had
been decided prior to any action they initiated.35 The German Marxist Klara
Zetkin’s obituary for her murdered friend Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) reads: the
‘great task and the overpowering ambition of this astonishing woman was to pre-
pare the way for the socialist revolution, to clear the path for socialism. To experi-
ence the revolution, to fight its battles—that was the highest happiness for her.’36
Whether or not our actor was participating in the creation of an illusion of efficacy
by her actions, she was not creating an illusion of intent, and her motive and actions
were hers in a very personal sense. Motive is desire. Intent is the effort to realize
desire and with the ownership of such purposive effort, even if the effort is thwarted,
comes an ownership of responsibility which is inseparable from human dignity as
well as being a condition of concepts like praise and blame.
33 Michael Dummett, ‘Truth and the Past—Lecture 3: The Metaphysics of Time’, Journal of
Philosophy 100/1 (2003), 38–53, here 48.
34 Here again the significance of Kant’s and Vaihinger’s als ob; see n. 29.
35 For relevant considerations in one important contemporary politico-religious context, see Saba
Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
36 Rosa Luxemburg, Prison Letters to Sophie Liebknecht (London: Independent Labour Party, 1972), 1.
To this point, the argument draws heavily on psychology—it concerns what Leo
Tolstoy called ‘consciousness’ rather than ‘reason’, and as such Tolstoy called it a
delusion. The individual’s consciousness endorses the assumption of free will in
herself, whereas reasoning about other people’s affairs, especially with the perspec-
tive of distance, will tend to endorse the denial of free will, Tolstoy felt, as he came
down on the side of the ‘rational’ conclusion. ‘If the will of every man were free,
that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of discon-
nected accidents.’ Conversely, ‘if a certain mode of government was established
or certain migrations of peoples took place in consequence of such and such
geographic, ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will of those
individuals who appear to have established that mode of government or occasioned
the migrations can no longer be regarded as the cause’. Here we move from teleo-
logical determinism associated with destinies to a claim more in keeping with the
mechanistic causal determinism associated with the natural sciences.
How might one respond to Tolstoy? There is an increasing scientization that
goes with expanding/exteriorizing the focus of historical inquiry to the level of
planetary environment, or for that matter interiorizing it to the level of genes and
biology. A sufficient level of aggregation, as with certain forms of quantitative
History, or a sufficient degree of generalization, as with the comparative History
of civilizations, makes the significance of wills and acts appear to fade into noth-
ingness. But the perspective effects can be reversed by asking slightly different
questions. Let us grant it true that the individual thinks she has control over some
at least of her destiny, even the theorist who at the same time as he alerts his
readers to the way their outlooks are shaped by pregiven contexts hopes to show
how innovative and thus relatively unconditioned a thinker he is. At the same
time, from her situated, local perspective, that individual is also likely to experi-
ence structures that confront her as permanent and immovable, which we might
conceive as an argument against the belief in freedom. Let us also grant it true
that a long-enough view will diminish the causal significance of individual action.
At the same time, that long view, which we might call a historical view, will suggest
that socio-economic structures at least, and even topographical and environmental
structures, are anything but permanent or immutable, and that human action,
individual and aggregate, is one of the causal factors of mutation. Ultimately, the
further one gets from the study of the choices of people, the greater the appear-
ance of mechanistic determinism, but this is because the historian who asks ‘what
is the significance of demographic change in history?’ is just asking a different
question to she who asks ‘how have particular humans oriented themselves to
demographic facts?’37
37 An analogous response might be made to Timothy Mitchell, whose Rule of Experts: Egypt,
Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 34, notes
that ‘Individuals may at times secure control of certain elements, and they may even claim to
Once his stark oppositions are rejected, Tolstoy’s own acute point about
‘disconnected accidents’ might be turned on him. He is correct that with nothing
but unconditioned will in the equation, it would be a matter of windowless
human monads bumping into each other like atoms in the air, and with as little
concern for consequences. The result would be just as arbitrary from the perspective
of observers and participants as a world in which determinism operated at every
level.38 In neither world would there be mere relatively stable trends, or structures
of middling durability. In neither, in other words, would there be the sorts of
things that humans have fought to change, perpetuate, redirect. Such structures
and trends of course shape the possibilities of action, but like a coral reef in per-
petual metamorphosis they also constitute the objects of present-transforming
action. The relationship may merely reflect the way that the existing architecture
of a house influences the construction of an extension that will change that house,
and the building techniques are influenced by the nature of the building mater-
ials. Bloch’s colleague Lucien Febvre mentioned ‘institutions, divorced from those
who made them, and who, while upholding them, alter them constantly’.39 This is
roughly the lesson of sociologist Anthony Giddens’s influential work on structur-
ation: that structure and agency interact in a rather indeterminate fashion.40
Theoretically speaking, it is not clear how much more precise one can be than
invoking interaction: one can produce greater precision by empirical study of a
given case, but what the case-study approach gains in specificity it loses in
generalizability.
Now apply this sort of thinking to the concept of context, beginning with the
etymology of ‘context’: the word stems from ‘weaving together’. In the historian’s
weaving process, new evidentiary material does not simply get plonked on top of
the tapestry, it should be woven in to alter the colour or texture of the fabric.
Context is thus contingent on interpretation of new evidence, just as interpret-
ation of new evidence is contingent on context, and new pieces of evidence add to
context as well as being subsumed within it.41 What is true of newly discovered
represent those elements in the social world. But no individual masters them, or submits the world to
their intentions’.
38 See also David M. Levin, ‘On Lévi-Strauss and Existentialism’, American Scholar 38/1 (1968–69),
69–82, here 74; and Bruce Wilshere, ‘Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Phenomenology: The Richard
Rorty Phenomenon’, Human Studies 20/1 (1997), 95–108, here 105, on the unmediated opposition
between ‘sheer contingency’ and ‘blind mechanical necessity’.
39 Febvre quote from Adrian Jones, ‘Word and Deed: Why a Post-Poststructural History Is Needed,
and How It Might Look’, Historical Journal 43/2 (2000), 517–41, here 521.
40 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1984).
41 At this point we also encounter a problem that is not inherent to historical inquiry in principle
but can be characteristic of its practice, namely the disproportionate influence accruing to the first
historians of a subject, who get to establish ‘the context’ first and, as is the way with academic egos,
frequently have a large investment in defending that interpretation. Subsequent historians then find
that the burden of proof rests disproportionately heavily on them to correct the presumptive picture.
evidence is true of historical actors themselves, whether, individuals, organiza-

tions, or movements. And if actors can shape circumstances by their deeds and
rationalizations, how can their actions then be entirely explained as a function of
environment? The problem is easily presented by the case of inventions. Not only
did they bring something new into the world, they can change that world more
broadly. Given the impact on ‘their times’ of the printing press or the Maxim gun,
it makes little sense to say that they can only be understood in the context of the
time in which they were invented.42
Purposes are another of the things that compromise arguments about deter-
minism by social or cultural context. Purposes are not the preserve of communi-
ties, societies, cultures, civilizations, structures, or circumstances. They are the
preserve of individuals, and self-conscious collectives like teams, armies, and pos-
sibly status groups. Purposes are one of the elements that have no analogy in
mechanistic accounts of causation. They derive from the interpretation of (prior)
experience and from (future-oriented) will/aspiration. In anticipation of criticism
about some notion of a fully autonomous actor unshaped by any context, the
seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza noted that desire, appetite, and fantasy
are themselves indicators of limitation; the being that had the feeling of total ful-
filment (for Spinoza this was God) would not have these, nor therefore the need
of will to fulfil them. When non-divine ‘purpose’ is invoked here, it means the
‘projection’ described by a famous existentialist philosopher: ‘No factual state
whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psycho-
logical “state”, etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act
is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way
determine by itself what is not.’ Much the same goes for ‘imagination’. Imagination
is one of the things distinguishing causation in human affairs from causation as
understood by natural scientists. Imagination projects from what is not to what
is, and that vision of the future provides the motive force for action, with action
complete when attempt has been made to realize vision.43 Purposes/imagination
are not sufficient to explain willed human actions (far less the outcomes of those
actions), but they are necessary in any explanation of such actions.
The word ‘determination’ has tellingly different valences in different contexts of
speech. Determined’ in the sense of determinism is held to be antithetical to free
will yet ‘determined’ in the sense of being hell-bent on achieving something is
New schools of historiography have to work hard to have their new sorts of evidence and new categories
of inference validated as genuine contributions.
42 For relevant reflections, see Derrida, Limited Inc, 1–24, and Giovanni Levi, especially on the idea
of ‘immobile’ contextualization in work produced under the influence of Geertzian anthropology:
Levi, ‘I pericoli del Geertzismo’, 273.
43 The ‘imagination’ point comes from John Dewey; the quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and
Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), 435.
held to reveal the very will incarnate. For an outcome to be determined in the
mechanistic way in which a natural scientist would use the word does not mean
that it is inevitable simpliciter, though that is how it is often construed in histor-
ical accounting, where the word ‘determinism’ can be used in a way that blends
teleological and more mechanistic meanings. In natural science, for outcome X to
be determined means that X is the inevitable result of the introduction of causal
agent/mechanism Y under initial conditions Z.44 In other words, given Y and Z,
outcome X is predictable. But none of this means that outcome X is ‘just deter-
mined’ as such, i.e. absent Y and/or Z. In the event that change in interhuman
affairs happened in ways substantively similar to this pattern, it is not given in
advance that equivalents of Y and Z are already in place. Removing or forestalling
one or both of them is the way to frustrate that particular ‘determination’. Acting
on an account of some past event in order that it ‘doesn’t happen again’ is one
commonplace recognition of this point.
Even the fact that one had a sword to one’s neck does not provide a causal
explanation, in the sense of a mechanistically deterministic explanation, of why
one killed someone else on the swordsman’s instruction, because one still had a
choice, however dire. Appealing to the fact of the threat is to appeal for mitiga-
tion, not justification, and certainly not determination. At issue is a loose sense of
cause, encapsulated by the concept of influence, or something that inclines, rather
than determination, or something that necessitates.45 In instances like these the
causal explanation cannot be divorced from normative considerations.
Ordinary language captures the connection between reasons and the humanis-
tic sense of cause, or it did until recently, if we consider the slightly archaic termin-
ology by which one said ‘she had cause’ to act as she did, in the sense of her having
had good or just reasons to act thus. Debates over the moral character of events, as
well as their causation, can also devolve on that joint meaning. The atomic bomb-
ing of Nagasaki is an example. It appears to be a different sort of case to the war-
guilt question about 1914 because there is no debate over who dropped the bomb.
But the difference is reduced if we said that an agent ‘had cause’ to act in the sense
of claiming that that agent had ‘good reasons’ to act. In the present case, ‘good’ may
mean prudentially sensible, morally pressing, or both. When one asks who or what
caused the Second World War, then, given that a complete causal explanation
would be literally endless, much of the explanatory emphasis falls on whether
salient parties ‘had cause’ in the sense of good reasons. Over the bombing of
Nagasaki, the basic moral question is whether it was blameworthy, but this is also a
44 One can see how the cause/context distinction might arise by analogy to the distinction between
the causal mechanism and the initial conditions, but in both cases the distinction is pure heuristic
convenience: in the scientific experiment both Y and Z are needed to produce X, so both are causes.
45 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (orig. Discours de métaphysique, 1686),
§30, repr. in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology, trans.
George R. Montgomery (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 1–46, here 34–6.
question of whether it was justified, which can encompass either or both of what it
was in response to and what it was supposed to achieve. The question could be
whether it was a (morally) reasonable response to existing circumstances, or a
reasonable measure with a view to achieving a morally desirable goal.
By whose standards the bombing might be evaluated is not relevant here. The
point is that as soon as standards exist, which they always already do in affairs
between humans, then actors can attain them or fall short of them because stand-
ards can only influence behaviour, not determine it.
Different Sorts of Context
Contexts are manifold, so ‘contextualization’ can mean very different things.

(Remember that ‘context’ and ‘cause’ are not distinct things, and thus that ‘con-
textualization’ cannot be separated from ‘explanation’.) This section addresses
different sorts of contextualization and their differing consequences. The principle
distinction is between what we might dub ‘cultural’ and ‘functional’ contextual-
izations. As the discussion progresses it encompasses debates about the motive
force of values as against interests in order to show that satisfactory explanations
of motivation must be open to the intrinsically evaluative concepts of good and
bad faith.
Cultural contextualizations concern people who we consider to be ‘just different
to us’ in their values and thinking; cultural arguments in this vein are ‘people of
their times’ arguments. Functional arguments in their purest form concern
people who we effectively treat as being ‘like us’ but in unusual situations; they
assume a rationality and value system that adapts to different situations in ways
that ‘we would too’. Bloch’s arguments were of the cultural sort, concerning as
they did the mentalities of a far-removed time, whereas Snyder’s explanation of
the deeds of his Ukrainian nationalists was a more functional argument, given its
emphasis on the extreme political conditions of the years 1939–43/4 and the
appeal to a familiar idiom of youth and anger when explaining the radicalism of
the OUN-B leaders.
Each sort of contextualization has different implications for evaluation, though
this is rarely observed in a discipline that has not worked out how to handle nor-
mative elements. Cultural explanations may well tend to be more relativistic
about context, or at least distancing in their character: ‘that’s just their way of
doing things’. Functional explanations have a more assimilative character,
whereby one passes tacit or explicit judgement: ‘I’m sure I would have behaved in
much the same way under those circumstances’; ‘the circumstances were bad but
they didn’t justify that’. An imagined scenario helps to illustrate. The setting is a
present-day class about the experience of the USSR during the ‘Great Terror’ or
‘Ezhovschina’, the Stalinist purges of the later 1930s. A student new to the topic
criticizes a local administrator of whom he has read denouncing a colleague to

the Soviet authorities. The History teacher then corrects the student along the
following lines: ‘you have to understand this wasn’t a state like ours. The secret
police were numerous and ruthless. There were no safeguards of liberty. In order
to survive, one had to bend with the wind. We may not condone what the bureau-
crat did, but it’s easy to make judgements when you’re not faced with those cir-
cumstances.’ Now the teacher’s assessment of the Soviet system’s arbitrariness
and terror is reasonable, but clearly explanation and warnings against knee-jerk
judgement do not get away from judgement tout court. This sort of thinking does
not encourage the student to jettison contemporary value systems, but rather to
apply them in a particular, contrastive way, to reflect the extreme situational
pressures of living under Stalinism. The implicit argument is that if that person
had lived under a democratic regime more like ‘ours’, he would have behaved
differently, just as ‘we’ would likely behave as he did under totalitarian circum-
stances. As regards the historical individual it is a moral argument in mitigation
of negative judgement, not an argument against judgement. As regards the
regime that constitutes the functional context the argument is straightforwardly,
negatively evaluative.
Cultural and functional contextualizations can combine but systematic thought
about cross-hatching has been hampered by the academic division of labour and
by changing fashions within the discipline of History that reflect wider intellec-
tual movements. Since intellectual fashions tend to compete with one another
there is frequently a quest for explanatory primacy as well as a difference in focus.
In much political science and economics, trends including rational actor theory
downplay cultural differences before the inquiry begins. Social psychological con-
cepts like cognitive dissonance also claim significant transcultural purchase. If one
took one’s cue from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflecting on the will, or
Sigmund Freud’s theory of drives, one would be more likely to contend that local
norms provide merely the idiom of camouflage in which individuals dress their
basically self-interested behaviour. Much the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for some
Marxist accounts of the relationship between class interest and dominant morality:
interests are a function of ‘objective’, basic economic factors while morality exists in
the universe of ‘subjective’, superstructural cultural factors, and unmasking the
interests that determine the ‘morality’ is one of the major purposes of ideology-
criticism. Marxist and Freudian approaches actually have some relationship to the
‘rational actor’ theory, with its emphasis on the instrumental pursuit of interests,
even if Marxist and Freudian ideas of what constitute interest differ greatly.
Conversely, some influential historiographical trends that developed in symbi-
otic relations with different generations of anthropology have foregrounded cul-
tural contextualizations. The nineteenth-century ‘historicist’ tradition associated
with Ranke was founded upon the idea of national-cultural particularity, as in its
own way was the British ‘whig’ tradition. The ‘cultural turn’ taken by the
discipline from the 1980s speaks for itself and provides the best illustration of
what one might term the ‘neo-historicist’ attitude. Neo-historicism shares with
nineteenth-century historicism and romanticism more generally the emphasis on
cultural difference but lacks the metaphysical basis in philosophical idealism and
puts more emphasis on differences over time within the ‘same’ culture. The con-
cept of culture that was deployed in History’s cultural turn was opposed to the
concept of ideology in its Marxist iteration, and is also to be contrasted with the
more sociologically-influenced quantitative social History that had dominated in
the USA especially from the 1960s to the 1980s and focused on questions related
to socio-economic ‘modernization’. In approaches foregrounding culture, acts of
‘interest’ could become mere epiphenomena when set against the more profound
study of systems of meaning and value. In this vein the anthropologist Marshal
Sahlins claimed that cultural ‘unity’ ‘defines all functionality’.46 Given its recent
prominence in History, such thinking is subject to particular scrutiny over the
next few pages. The coming critique shows what the recourse to certain concep-
tions of culture can obscure, especially when it comes to providing motive-based
explanations for any particular action. Then the ramifications of that critique for
moral evaluation are specified.
Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist most influential in History’s ‘cultural turn’,
provided useful pointers to combining different types of contextualization, while
sometimes muddying the same waters. His helpful intervention came from criti-
cizing the ‘stratigraphic’ approach to the study of relationships between ‘bio-
logical, psychological, social, and cultural factors in human life. In the stratigraphic
conception, the human is a composite of “levels”, each superimposed on those
beneath it and underpinning those above it.’ Stratigraphic analysis involves taking
one layer at a time and then peeling it off, in a way that happily reinforces the
integrity of each of the relevant academic disciplines. A non-stratigraphic
approach would consider the interplay of these different levels, showing how for
instance cultural norms could channel or repress biological urges, or the different
way cultural norms might be channelled in certain social situations.47 There are
similarities with the way Marxists can move beyond the idea of the base deter-
mining the superstructure, instead showing interaction and interpenetration.
Now to Geertz’s less helpful offering. ‘Culture is not a power,’ he wrote,
‘something to which social events, behaviours, institutions, or processes can be
causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be
46 Cited in Victor Li, ‘Marshall Sahlins and the Apotheosis of Culture’, New Centennial Review 1/3
(2001), 201–87, here 219. See also Talal Asad (referring to Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of
Highland Burma) on ‘the theory which gives logical priority to the system of authentic meaning sup-
posedly shared by an ideologically-defined community and independent of the political activity and
economic conditions of its members’, cited in the same article, 224.
47 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 37–8.
intelligibly . . . described.’48 This is another false dichotomy of cause and context.

Either culture has influence on outcomes like social events and so on, or it does
not. If it does, then it is part of the causal explanation. If it does not, then it merits
no mention in explanation. This particular Geertzian characterization of culture
implies that culture has an especially deep explanatory function, within which
more proximate, explanatorily discrete (and, to some, less interesting, even less
important) causes play off each other. The cultural historian Alon Confino makes
an analogous argument, but with contrasting terms. He downplays the signifi-
cance of what he calls context in order to promote his own theory of the causal
centrality of cultural developments. In ‘reconstructing the context one describes
the circumstances within which something happened, not necessarily why it hap-
pened’. In Confino’s work ‘context’ is equated with ‘circumstances’ and both are
opposed to cause which is equate with culture.49 One way or another, we are back
to a stratigraphic explanation, with, for instance, cultural and functional explan-
ations firmly separated, and whatever happens to be one’s favoured explanatory
factor (in Geertz’s and Confino’s case ‘culture’) put in the box seat, whether it is
called a cause or a context. It is no good, though, if (say) a historian criticizes
clinical or social psychologists for disrespecting context if what he really means is
that they are ignoring the contexts that he thinks are especially interesting or
important. Psychologists are deeply concerned with particular sorts of context.
The word culture itself is vague enough to connote many matters, from linguis-
tic and symbolic systems to law codes, manners, and folk-law, and a great deal
besides. The term is yet further contested when we consider ‘subcultures’, ‘coun-
tercultures’, ‘organizational cultures’, and so forth. Any number of identity cleav-
ages may run through any given society, and it is not uncommon these days to
describe those cleavages in the idiom of culture. Urban, rural, regional, ethnic,
gendered, and age-, occupation-, caste-, ‘order’-, or class-based cultures constitute
a non-exhaustive list. Since some subcultures can cut across other cultural divi-
sions, they may also cut across time and place, collapsing to some extent the
‘anthropological gap’ between past and present or between different pasts or pre-
sents. The idea of military culture for instance, may bind together even opposed
soldiers in a certain identity and value system, and may in some of its facets
endure across generations. Taking culture in the broadest sense of a way of life,
one certainly ought avoid what Geertz dubbed equally ‘absurd positions—radical,
culture-is-all historicism, or primitive, the-brain-is-a-blackboard empiricism—
which no one of any seriousness holds’. He also wrote that
The issue is not whether human beings are biological organisms with intrinsic
characteristics. Men can’t fly and pigeons can’t talk. Nor is it whether they show
48 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 14.

49 Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 83–96, here 87.
commonalities in mental functioning wherever we find them. Papuans envy,

Aborigines dream. The issue is, what are we to make of these undisputed facts as
we go about explicating rituals, analyzing ecosystems, interpreting fossil
sequences, or comparing languages.50
As it happens, some scholars who are considered to be serious have indeed sub-
scribed to ‘culture-is-all historicism’.51 But cultural difference and similarity have
to be argued for, not presumed by some theory of underlying similarity or differ-
ence. Simply being interested in difference ought not deny the possibility of simi-
larity, or vice versa, and establishing difference or similarity in one area or at one
point does not disprove similarity or difference in others, as an example from the
literature of subaltern studies shows.
The historian Partha Chatterjee and the postcolonial theorist Dipesh
Chakrabarty argued that Indian peasants reacted differently than English workers
had to the encroachment of new market norms. They explained this difference
with reference to fundamental, paradigmatic differences in the world-view of
peasants in colonial India. Whereas British workers reacted according to some
internalized utilitarian calculus about material interests, the choices of their
Indian counterparts evinced the influence of communitarianism, religion, and an
honour code. Now in some sense this supposed contrast is not one between
British worker interests and Indian worker values, because, so the explanation
goes, the British conception of ‘interests’ was itself related to something like the
insinuation of bourgeois values/culture. So the argument could also be read as
concerning different reactions in different cultures. Irrespective, Vivek Chibber
has shown that Chatterjee’s and Chakrabarty’s conclusions as to the difference of
British and Indian reactions are not supported by their own evidence, and more-
over that a quite different interpretation was supported by that evidence. Chibber
shows marked similarities across the cases in resistance to capitalism’s expansion
and its drive to control labour markets.52 Put in the terms of this section, the
assumption of ‘cultural’ difference determined Chatterjee’s conclusions because it
supposedly determined how Indian peasants would react to the situation in hand.
The assumption was that, given cultural dissimilarity between Indians and
English, there could be no functional similarity in human response. Chibber’s
conclusions, however, suggest one of two alternatives. Differently accultured
people might act in broadly the same way in response to broadly the same pres-
sures because there just are some obviously, widely identifiable ‘interests’ related
to well-being and pride out there that a great diversity of people can recognize. Or
50 Clifford Geertz, ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist, ns 86/2 (1984), 263–78, here 268.
51 For the basic issues at stake and a range of examples, see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of
What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For some specific examples of historians’
claims, see Wahrman, ‘Change and the Corporeal’.
52 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), chs 7–8.
there is some similarity in the situation and concern of certain sorts of workers,
wherever they might be, that shapes the character of their responses to certain
novelties—here the concept of ‘peasant culture’ might be deployed in a way that
crosscuts ‘Indian’ and ‘English’ culture. The difference between these two pos-
itions may be slight and in any case one need not choose just now. But Chibber
persuasively identifies problems in a certain hermetic tradition of thought about
culture that so sharply divides one ‘people’ from another—and, as he points out,
that tradition of thought ends up producing the same impression of radical cultural
‘difference’ that underpinned the ‘orientalism’ against which the likes of the
theorist Edward Said set his face.
What superficially appears to be a cultural argument can sometimes be a func-
tional argument. With moral evaluation in mind, consider the historical case of
the Western social scientist’s encounter with Inuits who walled-up aged relatives
and left them to die, which seems the epitome of a culturally different practice.
With further inquiry, though, what first looked like murder ended up looking like
respectfully assisted suicide for incapable parents who felt themselves a burden
on families living hard, subsistence lives.53 This realization might persuade the
observer that she would behave as the Inuits do were she in that economic-
environmental situation. The role of cultural difference is now moot.
What goes for people in the face of roughly similar pressures can go for states
and other polities. The relationship between war and social change is well estab-
lished across different cultures. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, polities
as different as the Romanov Empire, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan initi-
ated revolutions from above in the form of modernizing reform projects that had
many similar features because they had similar aims and similar prompts. China’s
reform endeavours were driven by successive military defeats at the hands of vari-
ous powers. Defeats at Russian hands in 1828 and 1877–8 were vital in the
Ottoman case. The loss of the Crimean War and the 1905 defeat to Japan explain
Russia’s drive. The fear of the Chinese or Ottoman fate of neo-colonial subordin-
ation inspired Japanese reforms, and the last major Ottoman reform movement,
that of the ‘Young Turks’, was in turn inspired by Japanese success against Russia.
Each of these cases underlines the truth in the words of one scholar of politics
that ‘the concept of tradition gives a poor picture indeed of the amount of invent-
iveness, innovation, and conscious dexterity which is needed for any state to sur-
vive at all’.54 Nothing is to stop one focusing on the differences in the programmes
of reform or their success, but that cannot occlude the similarities in ‘situation’
and innovation.
53 An example from Steven Lukes, Moral Relativism (New York: Picador, 2008), 37–8.
54 Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Penguin, 1964), 120, 121. For similar sentiments
in Oakeshott, see his ‘On Being Conservative’, in Oakeshott,<b/> Rationalism in Politics, 168–96. See
also Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Politics and Uncertainty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Let us now move away from the relationship of cultural and functional thought
and towards the relationship of values and interests within the confines of any
given culture, in the loose sense of a way of life. What follows is not an extensive
discussion of how the play of values and interests relates to the play of cultural
and functional explanations, or of the extent of what Geertz calls ‘intrinsic char-
acteristics’ and cross-cultural ‘commonalities in mental functioning’. All that is
sought here is to establish the moral relevance of the fact that values and interests,
while not necessarily in opposition, are not entirely dissoluble into each other. As
such, apprehending the relationship of values to interests in any given instance is
vital for the matter of taking actors ‘on their own terms’.
It is an absolutist or moralist fallacy to suppose values and interests must
necessarily be at loggerheads,55 but they can be, and while values can shape inter-
ests it is eminently possible for values to be the servant of or the camouflage for
interests. For all the neo-historicist preoccupation with the difference between
humans across time and space, one may still hazard that there is a general human
capacity to lie to oneself as well as others or to sustain an undeserved sense of
piety, even if different social arrangements channel and constrain these tenden-
cies in different ways.56 Consider Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész’s
semi-autobiographical novel Fatelessness, as the subject encounters a baker in his
home town who was known to dislike Jews.
That was also why the bread he pushed at me was a good half pound short. I
have also heard it said this is how more leftovers from the ration stayed in his
hands. Somehow, from his angry look and his deft sleight of hand, I suddenly
55 Indeed, it is a reasonable historical assumption that morality had origins in social functionality,
the need for cooperation and the shared rules that would govern cooperation. The need for mutual
understanding and assurance that is essential to cooperation will issue in presumptions in favour of
truthfulness. The need for internal protection and group reproduction will issue in strictures against
arbitrary forms of violence and in favour of more-or-less ritualized forms of dispute resolution. This
goes for relations between groups as well as within them: without customs governing feud, or delinea-
tion between the state of war and non-war, intergroup commerce would be impossible. Discerning
where morality meets functionality and prudence is difficult in principle because of the issues of reci-
procity and cooperation. To be sure, a resolutely ‘deontological’ account of morality depends upon the
distinction: Kant keenly distinguished his categorical imperative from the biblical injunction to do
unto others as you would have done unto you because of the implicit contract of reciprocity in the
latter. It is not surprising, though, that ‘golden rules’ equivalent to ‘do unto others as you would have
them do unto you’ recur across a wide range of times, places, and cultures. One could say that pru-
dence and reciprocity have moral valence whatever the Kantian absolutist has to say of them.
Alternatively, one could say that it is what philosophers call a genetic fallacy to allow the origins of a
practice to colour it for evermore, and to suggest that if morality emerged out of interest then it is not
really morality. We could say that a practice effectively becomes moral in an absolutist rather than
functional sense precisely at the point when its initial instrumental justification is forgotten. We do
this because it’s just what we believe it to be right to do, not for any pay-off. In any case, even if at one
point the presumption against lying or arbitrary killing was functional, in the permanent now of con-
sidering whether to lie or kill, it will not be the idea of the ban that is under debate so much as its
terms. Only negotiation will bring forth alterations to what is a permissible sort of calculation and
after negotiation outer limits of some sort will still exist—they will just be different.
56 D. Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007), 107, 109.
understood why his train of thought would make it impossible to abide Jews, for
otherwise he might have had the unpleasant feeling that he was cheating them.
As it was, he was acting in accordance with his conviction, his actions guided by
the justice of an ideal
The account illuminates the way in which cognitive dissonance can be reduced
not by changing behaviour, but by justifying behaviour through realigning values.
Montesquieu was thinking along similar lines when he parodied the ‘right’ to
enslave Africans: ‘The peoples of Europe having exterminated those of America
had to reduce the peoples of Africa to slavery in order to use them to clear so
much land. Sugar would be too dear if the plant which produces it were not culti-
vated by slaves.’ As to the slaves who therefore must be used: ‘We cannot suppose
that such folk are men, because, if we suppose them to be men, people might
begin to think that we ourselves are not Christians.’57 Even when slavery was well
established, and racism a given part of the value system for many whites, many
slave-owners who benefited from the doctrine that their slaves were inferior
beings suitable for enslavement nonetheless felt them sufficiently human to rape
them. A fine balance indeed: how fortunate for all the beneficiaries and perpet-
rators that values and interests were in such pinpoint harmony. Montesquieu’s
approach is not illegitimate: the norm that ultimately came to underpin the prac-
tice was racism, but racism does not necessarily lead to slavery; material interests
at the very least reinforced the norm as the norm legitimated that method of fur-
thering the interests.58
As ever, it may be impossible to establish whether what is under consideration
in any given case conforms to the economist J. K. Galbraith’s definition of ‘one of
man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy’—‘the search for a superior moral jus-
tification for selfishness’.59 But it matters nonetheless whether, say, the idea of
purity that has long been central to Indian social stratification is a fundamental
religious principle from which all else springs or whether ‘the value relating to
purity’ exists ‘thanks to certain economic and power relations . . . which [the
value] is summoned to justify’.60
57 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk XV, ch. 5, cited in John Plamenatz, Man and Society, i
(London: Longmans, 1969), 295.
58 Two older articles that take different positions on the slavery-racism chicken-egg question are:
Carl N. Degler, ‘Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 2 (1959), 49–66; Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, ‘Origins of the Southern Labor
System’, William and Mary Quarterly 7 (1950), 199–222. More recently: Davis Eltis, ‘Europeans and
the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation’, American Historical Review 98
(1993), 1399–1423.Thanks to Paul Quigley for pointing me to these pieces.
59 J. K. Galbraith, ‘Stop the Madness’, interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail, 6
July 2002.
60 Ruth Prince and David Riches, ‘The Holistic Individual: Context as Political Process in the New
Age Movement’, in Roy Dilley (ed.), Context and Social Anthropology (New York: Berghahn, 1999),
167–86, here 168–9.
Kertész’s baker returns to mind legion beneficiaries and accomplices in sun-

dry genocides. These people do not fit the model of true believers, yet neverthe-
less end up with the jewellery of the dead, the businesses of the evicted, the
daughters of the murdered—forced marriage within the ‘enlarged family’ saving
a dowry in some cultures, let us not forget. Those ordinary Germans who used
denunciation to the Gestapo for personal ends, even as they indirectly bolstered
the control of the regime, were not ideologues but were akin to those who used
the wider context of the Greek civil war for local score settling, those conquista-
dores who Montaigne saw using their convictions as a cloak for their greed, or
those crusaders motivated to massacre in and en route to the Holy Land by pros-
pect of plunder.
In every society so far as we know, significant acts are justified and explicable
in reference to significantly shared meaning systems, ideas of the good, the beau-
tiful, and the true, and beyond that the ontological sense of what is real in this
world and perhaps worlds beyond. Societies work by prompts by which the indi-
vidual pursues certain aesthetic or moral or prudential courses. For the most
cynical actions the relationship of interests and values is encapsulated in the aphorism
that hypocrisy is the tribute vice plays to established virtue.61 If an individual
transgresses a regulatory norm of the moment, she may meet with disapproba-
tion, loss of social standing, impoverishment, or physical punishment. Such out-
comes work insofar as they reinforce the general value system by playing on the
interests of the transgressor—i.e. her concern about the likelihood, magnitude,
and nature of disapprobation or punishment. If she does something that is not
transgressive, we cannot know why she did it without evidence other than her
self-testimony, because whatever the actual motive, actors tend to justify their
actions according to prevailing value systems. If one focuses, pace the sociologist
Talcott Parsons, on the ‘normative structure’ that provides ‘value orientation’ for a
society, then one is apt to see the causal arrow pointing in one direction only, out
from societal meanings to individual interests and then action. Not least of the
problems of running too far with structural-functionalist sociology, or with
Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse (see p. 118), is that once one has entirely
reduced the social to the socialized, one loses the tools to distinguish whether
someone is acting because of coercion, consent, or ulterior motive.62
Put differently, the values that purportedly govern in a social system can influ-
ence intent towards certain goals but without dictating the motive for achieving
those ends. In a highly religious society, an ostentatious act that is associated with
religiosity might spring from fervent belief but it might also spring from the
desire to be seen to be adhering to a dominant norm with special commitment, in
61 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 98.

62 Dennis Wrong, ‘The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Society’, American
Sociological Review 26 (1961), 187–93.
order to maintain social capital. It is scarcely beyond human intelligence to discern

rationalizations that seem appropriate to the moment. Quite the opposite: such
divination is exactly what it means to be a knowing participant in a cultural
sphere. Sometimes people lie and contrive to get away with it just because it seems
to chime with ‘reasonable’ expectations of what would motivate in similar situ-
ations, as with those British paratroopers who for a long time got away with
claiming that they shot Irish republican protesters on ‘Bloody Sunday’ because
they felt under threat. Security services regularly invoke security considerations
to justify their actions—given their social function, what else are they likely to
invoke?—just as the military are apt to plead military necessity and politicians
raison d’état; it is up to everyone else to work out whether the justification works.
Turning from the question of value to that of meaning, in accordance with the
influential conception of culture as a shared system of intelligibility, we might say
that certain options are cut off because they are incomprehensible within that
meaning system. But we would be better saying that if culture provides the frame-
work within which human acts can be made intelligible, then if an act cannot be
intelligibly described from within that culture, inhabitants of the culture would
not be able to recognize it as a deliberate act. In any case the unintelligible ‘options’
are not those that are proscribed, since proscription entails acknowledgement of
the possibility. Were this not the case, there would be no need for the punish-
ments which exist in all societies to deter people from transgressing local norms;
without choice there could be no taboo, no possibility of transgression, and no
need for deterrent. One point of distinguishing between values and meanings in
the sense of intelligibility is that given something is intelligible within a culture,
its position on the spectrum of values is not fixed. One need only reflect on how
in the Anglo-Saxon countries the cultural meaning of what it is to be a Christian
has changed from when it implied disavowal of earthly goods and veneration of
the poor, to see that few ‘truths’ within a tradition remain constant or are given
equal stress across time.63 The Quran can be quoted against suicide bombers as
well as in support of them; Adam Smith would not have approved of the eco-
nomic philosophy of London’s Adam Smith Institute. Far from being an iron cage,
cultures would not be able to survive over time, unless, like languages, they com-
bined flexibility with their depth.64
The valence of meanings themselves can change too, and quickly, as long as
some point of reference remains. In another example associated with wartime
defeat, consider the development of the concept of ‘proper place’ within
63 Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Introduction’, in Farmer and Rosenwein (eds),
Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000), 1–15, here 4, show how the deployment of different doctrinal strands and emphases was
dependent upon the needs of society and its most influential institutions in medieval Europe.
64 Loretta Fowler, Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre culture and History, 1778–1984
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 236, 242, and passim.
Japanese culture. In the 1930s and early 1940s, this concept was bundled up
with presuppositions about status, morality, and race to legitimate Japan’s claim
to leadership amongst the peoples of East Asia. After defeat the rhetoric of
‘proper place’ paved the way for acceptance of Japan’s more modest status in the
family of nations.65
The speed of the Japanese transition reminds us of a matter as important as
changes over the long term, namely disagreement in the moment. If we take the
definition of culture as a shared system of intelligibility, all that that necessarily
means is that people within the culture understand better than anyone outside
the culture what they are disagreeing about and are best placed to manipulate the
available resources of that culture in their own cause. As to self-interested behav-
iour, that only needs to have been imaginable within a culture and to the advan-
tage of enough of the right people for it, over time, to gain candidate status as
‘part of the way we do things’, even if that time is much longer than the lifespan of
its original pathbreakers. Every ‘time’ in every culture has its amoralists who
stand subjectively neutral to values while transgressing them. Every time has its
equivalent of the cannabis smoker who smokes in private, accepting the law and
hoping not to get caught breaking it. But some cannabis smokers deliberately do
it in public: existing meanings can be changed—deliberate and repeated trans-
gression of the acceptable is a well-tested way of revising what is considered
unacceptable—and purpose-driven action, whether its salient consequences are
intended or not, is one of the engines of historical change. Consider events in the
era of the ‘English Reformation’. These included massive sequestration of land
and other wealth from the ecclesiastic institutions by a monarch—Henry VIII—
happy to divide the booty with his supporters in the Tudor administration. Under
the name ‘enclosure’, the landed classes had already increased their holdings, this
time at the expense of the commons. In response to claims that the poor rebels of
1549 were engaged in sedition, against a backdrop of sixteenth-century unrest
caused by the development of English agrarian capitalism, the English poet
Robert Crowley (b. 1517) attributed the real sedition, the overturning of mores
and transgression of boundaries, to serried nobles, knights, lawyers, and mer-
chants, ‘men that haue no name because they are doares in al things that ani
gaine hangeth vpon’. ‘Men that would haue all in their own hands: men that
would leaue nothyng for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that
been neuer satisfied. Cormerauntes, gredye gulles: yea, men that would eate vp
menne, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition.’ Greedy gulls: a term
quaint to contemporary ears but damning in the context of a society in which
voracious acquisitiveness was not yet a general characteristic. For while Crowley
has been characterized as having a ‘medieval’ (read: outdated) concept of the
65 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon,
1986), 211, 259.
commonwealth, perhaps because of his recently rather unfashionable view that

the poor were heard especially loudly in heaven, it seems that his view was shared
by ‘most of his mid-Tudor contemporaries’.66 Most of what the ‘gulls’ did was
quite legal, and lawmakers were among the beneficiaries. Yet it would take a long
time for their agenda to become normative in the sense of being widely accepted
as legitimate.
The interrogatory work that ‘bad faith’ does at the personal level by exposing
the relationship between espoused values and interests is performed at the sys-
temic level by ‘immanent critique’. That is the grand name for assessing whether
something lives up to its own account of itself, for instance assessing whether
unfettered capitalism comes good on justifications like trickle-down wealth
enhancement. The foregoing studies of Bloch and Robinson and Gallagher were
instances of immanent critique applied to works of History, though in the latter
case they provided some evidence for immanent critique of official Victorian
imperial justifications, too. If, in that case, all we are ultimately saying is that
Victoria’s colonial officials were only consistent at pursuing interpretations of
national interest as narrowly defined, then we are already saying they were rather
less than they might have liked to claim. We certainly should not today make the
mistake of repeating their more grandiloquent self-projection as if that repre-
sented the relevant reality. It will perhaps be enough for their defenders then and
now to say that the Victorian elites were good at looking after national interest,
especially in a world where now, as then, the national interest provides a powerful
justification. But being satisfied with a pared-down claim to virtue when acting
effectively as judge in one’s own national case will leave many others unconvinced.
For all the stock placed in high-minded British imperial intentions then and still
now in some empire scholarship, we would do well to recall that label applied by
various Europeans at points, and implied by American diplomats who sought to
escape the ‘whirlpool of old world diplomacy’. That label, with all its intimations
of bad faith, was ‘perfidious Albion’. Naturally those applying the label were not
disinterested observers, but as soon as the defender of the Victorian officials
utters a rejoinder to the effect ‘well Britain’s competitors would say that, wouldn’t
they?’, then that defender is making an argument, however unsophisticated, about
the way that value judgements serve interests and this argument can be turned
upon their own clients and indeed themselves.
In cases of especially egregious behaviour, scholars who wish to respect the
ground rules of historical contextualization while not resiling from moral com-
ment may criticize historical actors for their infringement of their own espoused
66 Tom Betteridge, Literature and Politics in the Tudor Reformation (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 109–10; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35, 102. I thank Colin Richmond for alerting
me to the ‘greedy gulls’.
values. In his The Origins of Indian Removal, 1815–1824 Reginald Horsman was
clear that one should only ever criticize according to the prevailing standards of
the actors’ times and went on to show how those standards were routinely trans-
gressed.67 Other works have done more or less the same thing, such that we now
have quite an inventory not just of atrocity but also of what one might call bad
faith: making treaties with Native Americans then breaking them, or deceiving
the indigenous population into inequitable compacts while talking the language
of honour; encouraging religious and/or cultural conversion on promise of con-
sideration as equals, then failing to provide said consideration, even, sometimes,
to the point of murdering converts as cuckoos in the white nest; laying claim to
land on the doctrine ‘terra nullius’, then taking land even if it was being used for
the productive purposes that taking it was supposed to justify; not to mention the
many points at which systemically exploitative relations tipped over into actual
violence against individuals and populations on grounds of greed just as much as
racist acculturation. In the contrast between action and stated belief, or the juxta-
position of incompatible self-justifications, the results of historical investigation
open up these historical actors to a host of criticisms that one suspects some of
their contemporaries would have acknowledged as fair. That is an achievement in
historical inquiry, but it is, again, an achievement in orthodox historical investi-
gation in the sense of (moral) contextualization. The only reason it might seem
otherwise is the presumption against evaluation in which any criticism is deemed
as anachronistic or the agenda by which evaluation is only considered as illegit-
imate when it is negative.
With a view to future arguments in this book, it is worth pondering what hap-
pens if one puts all one’s eggs in the immanent critique or bad-faith basket and yet
bad faith is not demonstrably present. What, for instance, when good faith issues
in bad outcomes, or when we encounter a Nazi who genuinely believed he was
doing the right thing—that sincere Nazi who posed a problem for Jean-Paul
Sartre’s existentialism?68 The philosopher Berel Lang claims that the Nazis knew
that what they were doing was wrong, by which reasoning the prevailing value
system becomes morally and contextually irrelevant.69 The Holocaust historian
Saul Friedlander also refuses to allow that the leading Nazis may have acted in
accordance with the values of their own moral world. He described the Holocaust
as the product of ‘an amorality beyond all categories of evil’. Such arguments
67 Reginald Horsman, The Origins of Indian Removal, 1815–1824 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan
State University Press, 1969). I thank Claudia Haake for pointing me to this work.
68 The fundaments of the Sartrean argument as to why an authentic Nazi was a contradiction in
terms—an argument that has not been universally seen as persuasive—appear towards the end of his
1945 lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, first published in France in 1946 by Nagel, and appearing
along with other pieces in Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. John Kulka (New
Haven: Yake University Press, 2007). See also Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1948).
69 Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003),
25–32.
appear to be related to his opposition to the general historicist potential for ‘rela-
tivization of the political sphere; cancellation of [ie. by chronological] distancing;
historical evaluation of the Nazi epoch as if it were as removed from us as
sixteenth-century France’.70 Whether Friedlander’s and Lang’s characterizations
of Nazi morality are accurate is not the point, and there is more to be said about
moral contextualization and the Nazi case (see pp. 54–5). The point for the
moment is that by some moral contextualist reasoning there can be no such thing
as bad outcomes, only outcomes simpliciter, because the only aspect of the histor-
ical drama on which the historian feels it legitimate to make evaluative comment
is motivation and the matter of good or bad faith. This situation is curious, since
the salient outcomes-of-action by colonialists or slavers or génocidaires are evi-
dently what the scholars who appeal to bad faith are often trying to criticize, how-
ever indirectly they feel they have to render the criticism.
On Ideology
The strand of philosophy called virtue epistemology aids critical purchase on the
idea of ‘good faith’. Philosopher James A. Montmarquet argues for the allocation
of what he calls ‘doxastic responsibility’, which includes the idea of an actor’s
responsibility for the acceptance of the belief to which she was subsequently faith-
ful. The clearest instance of doxastic responsibility is that in which one wilfully
adopts a certain belief from a menu of alternatives, and knowingly, therefore,
accepts possible consequences pursuant to acting on that belief. Montmarquet
argues that doxastic responsibility exists even in instances of less forthright
decision-making, though that must remain moot—or perhaps we can say it is
determinable only on a case-by-case basis.71 The utility of this line of thought is in
scrutinizing subjectivisms of the type ‘that’s just what I believe’ or ‘that’s just how I
live my life’, as if all beliefs and ways of life were merely imposed on people and
they could never reflect on their ways. Consider George Orwell on two objects of
William Thackeray’s satire:
Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed

ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling tradesmen; but
what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous code they are neither
70 Saul Friedländer, ‘ “The “Final Solution”: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation’, in Peter
Hayes (ed.), Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1991), 23–35, here 27; Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer,
‘A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism’, New German Critique 44 (1988),
85–126, here 93.
71 James A. Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1993); Montmarquet, ‘Culpable Ignorance and Excuses’, Philosophical Studies 80/1
(1995), 41–9; Montmarquet, ‘Zimmerman on Culpable Ignorance’, Ethics 109/4 (1999), 842–5.
of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for instance;
Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he would not desert a friend in a
tight corner. . . . yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make one, the utter
rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying life72
The thinking characteristic of virtue epistemology also works well in highlight-

ing those areas that are consciously pushed from mind at one point, hopefully
never to return. The Victorian prime minister Lord Melbourne dismissed
Dickens’s Oliver Twist: ‘It’s all among Workhouses, and Coffin makers, and
Pickpockets . . . I don’t like those things; I wish to avoid them; I don’t like them in
reality, and therefore I don’t wish them represented.’73 Perhaps an unfortunate
stance for a figure notionally charged with the well-being of the whole polity,
Melbourne’s attitude was nonetheless a useful way of pre-empting dissonance.
Today’s equivalents might be the politicians who too willingly accepted the assur-
ances of tobacco lobbyists, and now imbibe the bromides of climate-change
deniers; or anyone who does not avail themselves of the accessible knowledge
about factory farming or unregulated labour because such information would
make it harder to justify continuing to buy the salient products. We might also
consider the fate of title VII of the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, which addresses not
only intentional discrimination in employment but also ‘disparate impact’, mean-
ing the adverse consequences of employment decisions irrespective of their
ostensibly fair intent.74 That doctrine has recently come under attack from elem-
ents of the American Right and has been weakened by Supreme Court decisions.75
The reaction against it is consistent with the governing American myth that any-
one can make a fortune with enough effort and failure is a purely personal short-
coming rather than the outcome of structured disadvantages. Undermining title
VII means the system’s beneficiaries will find it easier to continue to believe what
they want to believe about their own virtues.
The motivation in weakening title VII overlaps with what Orwell called ‘pro-
tective stupidity’ but we might rephrase as ‘protective ignorance’. This expression
denotes the refusal, out of self-interest, conformity, opportunism, or the desire to
retain the emotional or cognitive solace offered by a coherent view of the world,
to think counter to that view’s precepts, to let experience of the infinite complex-
ities of the world in, let alone to consider alternative interpretations. The expres-
sion also encapsulates the sort of thinking Sartre evinced, in neglect or (worse?)
in consciousness of his own existentialist call—that yes or no that one ought
72 George Orwell, Critical Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946), 25.
73 Cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination: from Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 57.
74 The Act was in 1964. A key Supreme Court decision shaping disparate impact doctrine was
Griggs v Duke Power Co. (1971).
75 Girardeau A. Spann, ‘Disparate Impact’, Georgetown Law Journal 98 (2010), 1133–63.
constantly issue to the world when it might be convenient to abrogate responsi-

bility and describe oneself as being swept up by events—when he wrote that
‘To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors and crimes, recognize
the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.’ Nikolai Tolstoy noted the implica-
tion that ‘it is better for millions of Russians to suffer “horrors and crimes” than
that he, Sartre, and his friends should have to abandon their illusions’.76
If some level of belief-choice is central to the concept of doxastic responsibility,
even if the choice is to stay with what you know, then the concept presupposes
belief-options that were recognizable as such. Here, and we arrive at the central
argument of this section, there is utility in a distinction between explanations to
‘culture’ in some broad sense on one hand and on the other hand explanations to
‘ideology’ in a narrower sense of one of a range of competing theories of why the
world is as it is and what, if anything, needs to be done to change it for the better.
Using this distinction between culture and ideology, one can identify moments at
which they are distinct and moments at which they come together. It is perfectly
possible to have both an imperial culture and a political ideology of imperialism,
a culture or an ideology of racism, a ‘bottom line’ of communitarian order which
none within the order can gainsay and an internal faction that is self-consciously
yet more communitarian than the norm. Religion provides a useful way of
approaching the question, because it is bound to culture, and indeed may be
purely cultural as opposed to metaphysical (in the way that an atheist could be
described as culturally Christian), yet it can also be the subject of ‘revivalist’ or
‘extremist’ movements that are manifestly ideological. The Islamic State move-
ment and the American Evangelical Right both play on cultural and metaphysical
symbols as they seek to shape social norms anew. This need not be a matter of
interests exploiting values; as with the fundamentalist’s reading of sacred texts, or
the neo-liberal who runs with a selective interpretation of classical economics, it
may be a matter of special emphasis on particular extant values reshaping the
wider climate of values and interests. A new ideology successfully propagated for
long enough will become woven into the (modified) culture from which it
emerged. Ideology can survive its most zealous, initial proponents, and may sub-
sequently be embodied by people within structures who do not necessarily reflect
on what it is they are enacting, and why.
Ascertaining of any act at any moment whether it expresses a culture or an
ideology will not provide an answer that is necessarily generalizable to others
even in the same processes at other times, and yet it is important in terms of con-
templating the actors as subjects. Consider the different moral valences of the
propositions: ‘Julius Caesar was a man of his times’; ‘Fidel Castro was an ideo-
logue’. An extreme example illustrates further. The Nazi leaders fall into the
76 All cited and contextualized in Erika Gottlieb, The Orwell Conundrum: A Cry of Despair or Faith
in the Spirit of Man? (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992), 122–4.
category of revolutionary ideological actors. Hitler felt himself intervening in the

historical process in order to change its direction, as did some of the OUN-B
leaders examined by Snyder. The very present-changingness of Nazism means
that so much about it would be missed were one just to present it as a cultural
phenomenon. War, genocide, and the reshaping of state and society were system-
atic, conscious, and transformative rather than systemic, automatic, and repro-
ductive. The idea of revolutionary conviction based on prior self-persuasion helps
explain why the conventional historian who distinguishes in principle between
‘the man of his times’ and the ‘ideologue’ has much in common with the moral
relativist who argues ‘different but equal’, or ‘incommensurable’, yet rejects the
hostile, anti-relativist argumentum ad Nazium.77
To develop the argument about the moral valence of contextualizations, con-
sider three statements: (1) The ancient Babylonians tortured for (given) cultural
reasons; (2) The British in Kenya in the 1950s tortured because of (imposed)
proximate circumstance; (3) The Khmer Rouge tortured for (self-imposed) ideo-
logical reasons. Assuming that the relevant facts of torture are accepted by all par-
ties, what present-day defenders of Britain’s name fear is that (2) is not the case,
i.e. that they cannot appeal sufficiently to some widely accepted if vaguely defined
concept like immediate ‘military necessity’ to justify the extent and nature of the
action against the Kikuyu population. If the argument to (2) is inadequate, as it
clearly is when one links the nature of British actions to pejorative ideas about
Africans and a concern for imperial prestige in crushing rebels, then (1) (culture)
is a more attractive alternative than (3) (ideology) because it is the basis for his-
toricization, which, satisfactorily performed, may also put the matter to bed given
prevailing neo-historicist sensibilities. Some examples suggest that while histor-
ians rarely phrase the contextualizing contest in terms of ‘culture versus ideology’,
77 The argumentum ad Nazium runs that relativism cannot work because if it did we would have no
grounds to judge Nazism. This anti-relativistic argument is complicated when we refer, as suggested
here, to ‘political/ideological’ as opposed to ‘cultural’ contextualization. Such considerations could
fruitfully be factored in to the work of Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 42, and Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167–8, as both scholars discuss the thought of John Dewey. By
extension, such considerations could take some of the sting out of Elizabeth A. Clark’s criticism of
Putnam in her History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 219 n. 74. My distinction between ‘ideological’ and ‘cultural’ contextualization
should not be taken to imply that I think relativism does any practical work; indeed I shall elaborate
the argument that it does not in Part 3. It merits underlining, though, that the (reasonable) determination
to rebut real and imagined ‘relativist’ arguments against judging Nazis merely exhibits that the judge-
ment on the Nazis has already been made. It is the grounds of justification to pronounce judgement,
rather than the judgement itself, that is in question, and in that sense Nazism is by no means pecu-
liar—it is just that in its extremity it brings a general issue into particular relief. What I have to say
about distinguishing Nazism as an ideology from the culture within which it was born has little rele-
vance for the arguments of Parts 2 and 3 about external judgement—it is only relevant to the issue of
moral contextualization that preoccupies this Part of the book. After all, the historian who constrains
herself to moral contextualization implies that the only legitimate evaluative standard comes from
contemporaries of the Nazis who did not share their agenda, and thus is a standard internal to the
period under contemplation, rather than external to it.
that is often precisely the battle that is joined, and there are significant political
stakes for the historian-combatants.
The distinction between the ideological and the cultural has been at issue in
debates over the retrospective evaluation of slavery in antebellum USA. As
David M. Potter noted in 1962, anti-slavery historians could be reluctant to take
Confederate claims to nationhood seriously because granting the Confederacy
status as a nation was a ‘valuative’ act which might ultimately condone slavery.78
Put into the terms of the present argument, granting the Confederacy the status
of a nation would allow it separate internally legitimate national-cultural values
that could then be invoked by way of contextualizing slave-ownership as some-
thing that ‘They’ just did because that was Their way. Denying nationhood meant
that the debate over the rights and wrongs of slavery were kept in the ideological
arena. Parenthetically, in a distorted mirror image of this sort of thinking, imme-
diately after the Civil War and up to the 1950s white Americans and many of their
historians pushed the slavery issue to the margins of the collective memory of the
conflict in the name of the re-formation of the all-USA white national-cultural
community. ‘Even-handedness’ in the historical treatment of two valiant warring
foes was now the order of the day, detached from consideration of an obvious
reason for their fighting. In the interests of healing the wounds between northern
and southern white communities, and stressing their basic commonality, south-
ern racist ideology rather triumphed, with romanticized accounts of slavery, and
recriminations against the supposed redistributive and egalitarian ‘excesses’ of the
reconstruction era of 1863–7.79 Black memories were subjugated.80
In 2011 one of Spain’s leading new ‘revisionist’ historians of the Spanish Civil
War era, Manuel Alvarez Tardío, joined another contextualization battle. He
wrote of the rise of the Spanish Republican regime from 1931 that ‘arguments
emphasizing structural factors which stress [. . .] the extremes of wealth and pov-
erty [. . .] are effectively justifying the radical political project of left republicans
and socialists, their political intransigence and even the violence emanating from
political and union organizations representing the “disinherited” ’. Put aside the
question of just how ‘radical’ the 1931–3 projects of socialists and allied republicans
were. Clear is that those who seek to outlaw critical emphasis on structural fac-
tors for fear of leftwing ‘justification’ wish themselves to delegitimate the leftist
project, rather than aspiring to some discursive state beyond legitimation and
delegitimation. As well as (re)legitimating the social order that the leftists sought
to change, such arguments can also be deployed to (re)legitimate, or at least
78 David M. Potter, ‘The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa’, American Historical Review
67 (1962), 924–50.
79 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001). The book is mostly
about public memory but there are key connections to professional historiography. Thanks to Paul
Quigley for the reference.
80 Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds), Race and
Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2007), 11–38, here 30.
provide mitigating argument for, the Franco regime that overthrew the Republic
on the tacit basis that the Republic was a partisan ‘ideological’ interlude in the life
of the supra-political Spanish cultural order. Tardío may reasonably be read as
suggesting that long-standing arrangements, however unequal, comprise some
sort of hallowed given whose normative weight trumps that of any mere political
contestation. Putatively monolithic cultural ‘value’ trumps ‘ideology’, and it should
not, one supposes, enter into the equation that the Restoration order was so
obviously partisan in the interests it served.81
A similar bid to claim the mantle of ‘culture’ for one particular ideology against
others was made in 1859 at the founding of the Historische Zeitschrift, one of the
most influential historical journals of the nineteenth century. The editor, Heinrich
von Sybel, described it as
a historical periodical, not an antiquarian or political one. On the one hand, it is

not our aim to discuss unresolved questions of current politics, nor to commit
ourselves to one particular political party. It is not contradictory, however, if we
indicate certain general principles, which will guide the political judgment of
this periodical. Viewed historically, the life of every people, governed by the laws
of morality, appears as a natural and individual evolution, which—out of intrin-
sic necessity—produces the forms of state and culture, an evolution which must
not arbitrarily be obstructed or accelerated, nor made subject to extrinsic rules.
This point of view precludes feudalism, which imposes lifeless elements on the
progressive life; radicalism, which substitutes subjective arbitrariness for organic
development; ultramontanism, which subjects the natural and spiritual evolu-
tion to the authority of an extraneous Church.82
Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution of 1789 and the English
Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 likewise sought to assert the normative parameter in the
form of the givenness of some social order, as if normative parameters and the
character of the social order were not precisely what was under dispute.
When great multitudes act together, under [the] discipline of nature, I recognise
the PEOPLE. I acknowledge something that perhaps equals, and ought always to
guide the sovereignty of convention . . . But when you disturb this harmony; when
you break up this beautiful order, this array of truth and nature, as well as of habit
and prejudice . . . I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a
disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds . . . The mind owes to them no sort of
submission. They are, as they have always been reputed, rebels. They may be law-
fully fought with, and brought under, whenever an advantage offers.83
81 Tardío quote from Helen Graham (ed.), Interrogating Francoism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 23-4.
82 Trans. and repr. in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History (New York: Meridian, 1956), 171–2.
83 Reproduced in R. B. Dobson (ed.), The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 292–3.
Any rejoinder to these partisan cultural contextualizations ought not go to the

other extreme and claim that what is taken for an expression of normative culture
is really ideology, but the blurred border between the two is conceptually and
evaluatively important. On one hand even ideologies as revolutionary as Nazism
were not entirely novel phenomena—elements of Nazi thought were shared by
other non-Nazi right-wingers and can be traced to earlier romanticism, so they
fell into some fertile cultural soil. On the other hand, and more importantly for
the present discussion, it is impossible, without remainder, to dissolve social
action into culture as culture as conceived in this section, and that is true whether
the social forces in question are more associated with continuity or change. The
best way to illustrate this point, which is ultimately a point about what we might
call conservative ideological agency, is to return to the conceptualization of
‘context’ and work from there.
As soon as one deconstructs the distinction between context and cause (as on
p. 30), one also deconstructs the distinction between context and process.
Remember that a context is just a name for a cause, and processes are caused. We
generally associate the idea of process with the idea of change but continuity is
also processual: indeed it helps to think not of change versus continuity but of
social transformation versus social reproduction, since this emphasizes proces-
sual elements (‘reproduction’) in what can sound like stasis when under the label
‘continuity’. Both continuity/reproduction and change/transformation are caused,
so the question is not of the absence of causes in a situation of continuity, but of
the prevalence of continuity’s causes over the causes of change. There are pro-
active agents of continuity, be they individual, collective, or institutional.
As an ongoing, active process, social reproduction requires not just consumers
and recipients but also ‘cultural warriors’, gatekeepers, enforcers. The warriors
may be members of functional elites, like Orwell’s reactionary ‘hanging judge,
that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dyna-
mite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret
the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe’.84
Or like the Guardia Civil who in Restoration Spain protected the interests of the
latifundistas more than rural Spaniards in general. But equally, like those white
Americans who lynched African Americans until well into the twentieth century,
cultural warriors may be lower within the social system, keen to sustain such
social capital as they have by ostentatiously policing the social boundaries separ-
ating them from the very lowest, in just the way that has so often prevented soli-
darity between subaltern groups like successive waves of immigrant workers.
Analogous dynamics may also play out within the family, as, say, patriarchy is
coercively maintained. A husband physically asserts his domestic dominance—he
84 George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, ed. George Packer (Boston: Mariner,
2009), 118.
beats his wife—in a way that, while perhaps ‘regrettable’, possibly illegal (though
rarely prosecuted), is nevertheless important in perpetuating a particular social
organization. Obviously enough it is not just revolutionaries who bring violence.
Sometimes the violence of what passes for the status quo may be less dramatic,
visible, and intensive than revolutionary violence, being more akin to what the
sociologist Johan Galtung called ‘structural violence’.85 But the sociological study
of overt ethnic violence, up to and including grand massacre, has also shown that
one of the most common conditions of its occurrence is when superordinate
groups feel their social power to be eroding and they fight to sustain their privil-
eged dominance.86 Such massacres are manifestations of conservative ideological
agency, extreme instantiations of the general phenomenon that one theorist of
politics had in mind when writing that sometimes ‘it is not merely necessary “to
reform in order to preserve” as Burke’s great maxim had it, but actually to create
in order to preserve’.87
Projecting purposively to the future—even if with the determination that the
future be as much like the present or the past as possible—is not just a necessary
element of any willed human action (see p. 37). It is an essential element of any-
thing meaningfully called political. In other words, conservatism, whether of the
Left, the Right, the religious, or anything else, is not a passive disposition but as
active a stance as is anti-conservatism. After all, in a system of complete and
enduring ‘natural’ social consensus, there would be no need for a conservative
agenda, because there would be no anti-conservative agenda.
Politics presupposes disagreement about the desirability of the way things are
at any moment. More than an institution called congress, the witan, or what have
you, the political sphere is the arena of articulation of competing social projects,
competing views of the desired, against the backdrop of whatever is given in the
moment. The adviser to President George Bush Jnr was only exaggerating a cen-
tral political idea when he said that the American leadership was creating its own
reality rather than tailoring its policies to address analysed reality.88 As much as
being the art of the possible, politics is the art of making possible the conditions
85 Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6/3 (1969),
167–91.
86 Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford.
87 Crick, In Defence of Politics, 121.
88 Karl Rove: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you
can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.’ Reported in Ron Suskind,
‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’, New York Times Magazine, 17 Oct. 2004.
Hannah Arendt used her studies of totalitarianism to show that an assumption underlying ‘consistent
action can be as mad as it pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then “objectively”
true. What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in
the course of consistent action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved.’ I do not believe this
phenomenon to be in any way limited to totalitarianism. Arendt, Between Past and Future
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 87–8.
for the desirable, and preventing the conditions for other possibilities from coming
into existence. The radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire described strategy as
asking the question ‘what can we do today, so that tomorrow we can do what we
are unable to do today?’89 He was perhaps thinking of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach,
wherein ‘it is essential to educate the educator himself because ‘the materialist
doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing . . . forgets that
it is men who change circumstances. . . . The coincidence of the changing of cir-
cumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood
only as revolutionising practice.’90 Obviously enough, these dynamics cannot be
fully accounted for by contextualizing reference to ‘structure’ or ‘culture’, whether
the actors in question subscribe to present-transforming ideologies or present-
reproducing ideologies.
As a general reflection, it helps to conjure up a sort of sliding scale where, for
different acts, explanations to ‘culture’ and its attendant systemic characteristics
vary in relation to explanations to ‘ideology’ and its systematic characteristics,
with an admixture of explanations to more proximate functional ‘situation’. If, as
is the case in this part of the book, the priority is taking a historical actor on his or
her own terms, every case must be considered in its own particularity. This means
balancing what was taken as given with what was more consciously chosen; and
when it comes to what was chosen, at issue is the relationship between what was
simply assumed to be right and what was pursued because it was advantageous to
the agent.
Political Morality and Special Roles
An attempt to take people on their own terms must remain sensitive to roles,
because roles shape terms. Withholding information from the authorities might
be an act of heroic solidarity or criminal complicity for us ordinary people; for a
psychotherapist it is known as patient confidentiality and stands up there as a
vocational principle with the Hippocratic oath of the medic. When one stands in
loco parentis to a child, one assumes greater responsibilities to that child than to
others, however much one might believe in the equal worth of all. The role-holder
will never stand isolated from a ‘cultural’ context. At the same time, a role consti-
tutes a ‘functional’ context, with the pertinent ‘situation’ obtaining for as long as
the person occupies the role.91
89 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (London: Continuum, 1998), 108.

90 This is from Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels—Selected Works in Three Volumes, i (Moscow: Progress, 1966), 13.
91 The following works have been especially influential on my thought throughout this section:
Coady, Messy Morality; Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), chs 5 and 6; Michael Walzer, ‘The Problem of Dirty Hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 2/2
This section has some general relevance given that all societies feature some
role differentiation. It has special relevance for occidental historiography in that a
significant proportion of historical scholarship has focused on the actions of spe-
cial role-holders, notably political and military ‘great men’. The roles it considers
are political leadership roles, which explains the ‘political morality’ of the section
title, and functionary roles such as those of the warrior or bureaucrat. In each
case it identifies potentials for misunderstanding the nature of the roles, and thus
for misplaced criticism, praise, or exemption from evaluation. It also shows how
the particular obligations and legitimations of the roles nevertheless do not put
role-holders in completely separate moral universes to everyone else.
In any evaluation of the actions of role-holders, one needs to avoid two poles.
One pole, defined and discussed later, is ‘heroic realism’ (pp. 69–70). The other is
the dogmatic moralism that is blind to any variation in context. Moralism’s hard-
and-fastness means, for instance, that it cannot see that what is just bad faith in a
private capacity might be necessary subterfuge in a public or representative role.
Political or executive morality in the sense furthest removed from familiar
forms of interpersonal morality is an amalgam of partiality (to one’s own polity or
group), impersonality (polities and groups are suprapersonal entities), and possibly
selflessness (disregard of one’s own purely personal interests and commitments,
insofar as they can be separated from one’s special role). Note that this account of
political morality is defined in a maximally contrastive sense for heuristic pur-
poses. The idea is to bring the underlying issues into sharpest relief rather than to
capture every possibility. Thus, for instance, stress on the matter of a leader’s par-
tiality to his or her group as a very common feature of human history should not
be taken as denying the possibility of a cosmopolitan political morality or its
actual existence at this or that point in time. The boundaries of ‘groups’ are also
themselves objects of political contestation.
Considerations of political morality under the above-stated conditions some-
times entail measures on behalf of the collective that might be illegitimate in an
interpersonal capacity. Recognition of this fact may help us to contextualize
political theorist Hans Morgenthau’s claim that ‘Man’s aspiration for power over
other men, which is of the very essence of politics, implies the denial of what is
(1973), 160–80; Arthur Isak Applebaum, Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and
Professional Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Most of all, however, I have benefited
from the advice of Jonathan Leader Maynard. It is also pursuant to his promptings that I should clarify
that this section is not an attempt to define all of the boundaries of political morality. My focus on the
notion of delegated/representative/vicarious roles should not be taken to deny other relevant features.
Within political theory, scholars have proposed quite a number of different features of politics that
might make it some kind of distinct domain from other areas. Aside from the notion that leaders act
on behalf of others, other possibilities could include: a need to respect reasonable intercommunal
disagreement; a need to legitimate political policies to some degree within the community; a greater
priority of certain values such as order or justice; a greater concern with the determination of mem-
bership and communal identity; especially high stakes outcomes, intergenerational or otherwise; and
more besides.
the very core of Judaeo-Christian morality – respect for man as an end in himself.
The power relation is the very denial of that respect; for it seeks to use man as
means to the end of another man.’92 He could perhaps have added Kantian to
Judaeo-Christian morality, since one iteration of Immanuel Kant’s categorical
imperative was always to treat individual others as ends in themselves, never as
means to another end—though the interpretation of Kant’s imperative remains
the subject of great debate.
The public conscience of leaders and representatives cannot just or always be
an enlarged version of the individual conscience, as Thomas Jefferson thought it
could. It certainly may not be possible to heed the unqualified ‘thou shalts’ and
‘thou shalt nots’ associated with religious commandments or the dictates of
Kantian moral reasoning about the right thing to do irrespective of outcomes.
Making a martyr of oneself is different to martyring those for whom one speaks,
even in the improbable event of the entirety of the collective backing the same
purpose with the same strength of purpose. Equally, it may be necessary to sub-
ject or expose individual members of the collective—even quite large numbers—
to harm in the interests of the good of the all. Such considerations are familiar to
consequentialist theories of morality, of which utilitarianism is a well-known sort
and ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ a well-known expression.
Consequentialist theories are results-orientated theories, being concerned less
with what must be done for its own sake than with the balance of outcomes. The
coexistence of competing moral doctrines, when set alongside necessary subter-
fuge and dissembling, provides ample space for leaders and politicians to leap
opportunistically from one sort of moral justification to another, whilst lying
when it is just convenient rather than necessary. They also pave the way for mor-
alistic misunderstanding of political leadership under particular circumstances,
which brings us to Machiavelli.
Whatever the opprobrium heaped on Machiavelli around his time—in fact this
probably explains the opprobrium, since he exposed hypocrisies—he reasonably
saw himself as bringing out underlying principles of existing political comport-
ment. In clarifying those principles, he had to contest what were sometimes
almost wilful absolutist misunderstandings of political morality. When
Machiavelli urged that as a prince the good man had to learn to be evil, ‘good’ and
‘evil’ were oriented to absolutist ethics of the ‘thou shalt (not)’ sort. One of the
implications of the idea that one had to learn to will evil for reasons of higher
good was the Christian conceit that evil was otherwise a temptation to which the
weak succumbed, something that in the ordinary run of things was not desired as
such, unlike the good to which one had to be strong to cleave but with which one
92 See Hans J. Morgenthau’s introd. to Ernest Lefever’s Ethics and United States Foreign Policy (New
York: Living Age Books, 1959), p. xvi.
was automatically acquainted.93 (As it happens, from the outset Christian thinkers
found ways of accommodating the need for earthly rulers to get their hands
dirty.94) Equally, if it is important that a prince not be ‘too good’ to do what is
sometimes necessary, it is also important that he be ‘good enough’ as to register
the moral weight of his necessary actions. That awareness serves as a check on
unnecessary ruthlessness or deceit, which might be counter-productive in a spe-
cific political crisis or more generally by weakening faith in the projects and pol-
ities that leaders purport to embody and encouraging unbridled cynicism
deleterious to the necessary minimum of trust required for the conduct of polit-
ical affairs.95
When pondering different sorts of moral theory, whether in the private or the
public realm, it is important to recognize that people’s moral doctrines very often
blend elements of consequentialism and absolutism. Sometimes people do things
because they believe them intrinsically right, sometimes because they see them as
a price worth paying, and sometimes they fudge the principles. Sometimes, too, it
is possible to have both absolutist and consequential concerns about the same
action and for both concerns to point in the same direction. Furthermore, abso-
lutists and consequentialists have refined their positions in response to critiques
coming from the other side, such that it can be difficult to tell the positions apart
based on what they prescribe doing in most cases even though the principles of
derivation remain different: compare Kantian deontology with rule-utilitarianism
rather than act-utilitarianism.96 There is also a theory of ‘elite utilitarianism’
whereby consequentially oriented leaders perceive utility to flow from the incul-
cation of deontological stances amongst the masses—the idea that on the whole it
is best if people do believe in absolute, intrinsic rights and wrongs, even if their
leaders have an eye to balances of outcomes more than anything else. At the same
time, while consequentialism may be competent as regards certain forms of moral
‘method’—the calculus of means as against ends, ends as against competing ends,
and so forth—it cannot establish what is valuable or good simpliciter and what,
therefore, is fit to serve as a basis of those calculations. Here we come to the non-
relative rather than the relative element of thinking about ‘the greater good’.
Consequentialism is always based on a pre-consequentialist conception of what
counts as the good, success in working towards which counts as a positive conse-
quence. The precise character of this good varies for political leaders, though it is
apt minimally to include the survival of the relevant group(s) and, less minimally,
the relative thriving of the group(s). Let us leave open who gets to describe what
93 Walzer, ‘Dirty Hands’.

94 Joan D. Tooke, The Just War in Aquinas and Grotius (London: SPCK, 1965), ch. 1; and see here,
Part 3, History I.
95 Walzer, ‘Dirty Hands’.
96 On varieties of consequentialism, see Michael D. Bayles (ed.), Contemporary Utilitarianism
(New York: Anchor, 1968).
‘thriving’ means. What is clear is that for political leaders, it is their group(s),
however defined, that constitutes the primary community of obligation: group
members are the ones whose goods the leaders take solely or primarily into
account in moral reasoning. For leaders like Bismarck, Machiavelli’s prince, and a
vast, vast number of others besides, past and present, the primary community of
obligation is some subset of the globe and/or its human population, not the
entirety of either. When it comes to intergroup affairs the partisanship of such
leaders towards their community of obligation complicates any talk of conse-
quentialism as well as (say) of Kantian absolutism, as we shall now elaborate.
Partiality towards a subset of the world explains a lot about the character of
political morality that has been displayed historically and presently, whilst pro-
viding some with grounds for proclaiming that political morality is no morality at
all. In recent times, the ‘national interest’, however interpreted, has been an espe-
cially important name for the basic good that political leaders seek to maximize,
but we should think of it as a placeholder for a concept of ‘group interest’ that has
much broader historical applicability. It is not that ‘national interest’ and its off-
shoots like raison d’état are not themselves partisan concepts (they are), but
because claiming to act in the national (or group, etc.) interest is claiming legit-
imacy for acting in a way that would not apply in other contexts and for other,
‘lesser’ interests. One cannot, yet, claim the same sort of legitimacy by claiming to
act in the interests of the military-industrial complex or accountancy firms,
because the latter seem to imply some interest that is no more than extended per-
sonal self-interest, whereas acting in the national interest has the ring of ‘service’
about it. Indeed, where ‘interests’ are often opposed to ‘values’, this is not the case
with the national interest or its functional equivalents: very many people believe
that the national interest is a good and furthering it the right thing to do.
Obviously enough, the leader-servant’s acting pursuant to projects of national
(etc.) interest might bring her polity onto a collision course with the projects of
another polity, which presents another moral problem. Such conflicts can occur
internally too, most blatantly in the forms of civil wars and revolutions, but since
some of that terrain is covered in Part 2 under the rubric of legitimacy contests,
this section will keep the focus on relations between polities.
Morgenthau also wrote that the ‘denial’ of respect for ‘man’ as an end in ‘him-
self ’ is ‘particularly flagrant in foreign policy; for the civilizing influences of law,
morality, and mores are less effective here than they are on the domestic political
scene’.97 (Note that in light of Morgenthau’s whole oeuvre, statements like this
appear ambiguous as to whether he was merely making a descriptive claim about
common practice in international affairs, or a normative claim about the actual or
potential applicability of moral rules in international politics. Such ambiguity is
97 Morgenthau’s introduction to Lefever, Ethics and United States Foreign Policy, p. xvi.
not altogether rare in International Relations—‘IR’—debates.) Let us say that

there is a polity in which the egalitarian utilitarian formula ‘each to count for one,
none for more than one’ is observed. Unless that polity is coextensive with the
globe, its leaders and representatives will only be able to apply the principles of
equality internally. When acting externally they will obviously be thinking of the
consequences of their actions, but they cannot be said to be thinking in terms of
the application of consequentialist moral principles where every person every-
where counts as equal, since they are only acting on behalf of some of the global
population—the part whose overall well-being constitutes their primary commu-
nity of obligation—whilst potentially affecting other parts. Sacrificing others has
generally been preferable to sacrificing one’s own, and that has not changed in the
present, whatever the rhetoric of universal human rights. However the sociopolit-
ical order may be configured within the boundaries of a polity—whatever its
internal hierarchies, whether inside its borders it is individualist or communitar-
ian, liberal, fascist, etc.—when that order confronts another order it still tends to
be projected by its representatives as a corporate individual, and its representa-
tives may indeed act in ways that seem entirely at odds with its prevailing internal
political philosophy. This is, in fact, one of the major thrusts of key IR theories.
The argument goes that even were leaders interested in a broad range of moral
values, and even if these were part of their ‘role’ domestically, they would find
themselves constrained in their ability to adhere to/pursue those values by the
anarchical structure of the international system.
Morgenthau was a ‘Realist’ IR theorist, and his words need to be understood
against the backdrop of a widespread Realist assumption that an honest reckon-
ing with the realities of politics, especially international politics, is a precondition
for the existence of a domestic social order in which morality could play its full
part. Furthermore, despite some of his categorical pronouncements on the irrele-
vance of moral considerations to international politics, Morgenthau tried to
modify some of the amoral assumptions of other thinkers within the broad
Realist church.98 As a Realist—the IR school whose longest-standing theoretical
counterpart is ‘Idealism’ (a pejorative term developed by realists) or ‘Liberalism’—
Morgenthau was pessimistic about the possibilities for harmonization of inter-
national relations, or harmonization of ends and means.99 Nonetheless he was
concerned, for instance, to conceptualize ways in which the pursuit of the corpor-
ate individual’s self-interest vis-à-vis others need not result in omni-destructive
competition between polities. This aspect of his work has led to some scholars
calling him an Ethical Realist,100 a label that has nothing to do with the sorts of
98 Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, ‘Ethical Realism and Contemporary Challenges’, American
Foreign Policy Interests 28/6 (2006), 413–20.
99 For general Realist assumptions on this point, see Norman E. Bowie and Robert L. Simon, The
Individual and the Political Order (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 208–9.
100 Lieven and Hulsman, ‘Ethical Realism and Contemporary Challenges’.
‘moral realists’, alluded to in Part 3 of this book, who consider that there are such
things as mind-independent moral facts. There is certainly a prescriptive, as
opposed to purely descriptive, element to Morgenthau’s thought. Ethical IR
Realists prescribe that states should act according to what they consider their
interests rather than according to more abstract values, lest faith in values distort
true understanding of the way of the world and thus be self-defeating concessions
to an illusory moral order. Further, like other Realists they would argue that an
absolutist-moralistic approach to international relations is itself dangerous, being
so sure of itself that it is not subject to the judgement of prudence about the
necessity of compromise. But while they might prescribe the subordination of
means to ends in dealing with other polities, then—as with the laws of war, which
derived from pragmatism at least as much as principle—Ethical IR Realists would
be most prominent among Realists in proposing some limits on means, wary as
they are of creating a precedent for extreme measures, for spiralling retribution
and counter-retribution.
A focus on prudence, caution, and so forth, leaves significant areas of political
action unaccounted for, morally speaking, by Realists of any stripe. The conduct
of much nineteenth-century European foreign policy had a great influence on the
development of theories of Realism but let us consider more specifically the
Berlin Conference of 1884–5 at which the major European powers decided how
much of Africa would be carved up. The point of deciding to decide on how to
divide Africa, rather than engaging in a free-for-all, was to make sure that carving
up the relatively weak didn’t disturb relations between the relatively powerful. We
can infer that if Africans had been more powerful, their agendas would have had
to be factored in, up to the point at which dividing Africa would never have been
a realistic option for the Europeans. Since Africans were not powerful, one of
Thucydides’ Melian propositions seems confirmed: the strong do what they can
while the weak suffer what they must. Now the Ethical IR Realist might well just
shrug and state how this proves that the bottom line of international affairs is
indeed power. But let us not forget that the pessimism accompanying this shrug
itself connotes a value judgement, if not necessarily on any particular statesperson
(though it could be), then on the exercise of power. It is not a value-neutral pos-
ition—and for what it is worth, a number of key Realists who have addressed
normative considerations have reached conclusions tantamount to that of the
Realist and historian E. H. Carr, namely that ‘it is an unreal kind of realism which
ignores the element of morality in any world order’.101 Again we will note the
ambiguity between descriptive and evaluative terms in many such verdicts.
101 Carr quoted in Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 186. See also Donnelly’s analysis of tensions in the pronouncements of George
Kennan at pp. 163–4, 166–7. With other relevant thinkers in mind, including Thucydides, whose work
Donnelly analyses extensively in ch. 6, see p. 187: ‘For all their appreciation of the force of realist argu-
ments, Thucydides and Machiavelli, along with Carr, [Reinhold] Niebuhr, and [the ‘Realist Liberal’
Forms of Realism developed in recent decades do tend to claim to be purely

explanatory theories, neutral as to value, and these merit some mention, if for
nothing else than that political leaders may still infer prescriptions for action
from such accounts. Even if relevant Realist theories are value-neutral, that does
not mean that all ‘real-world’ choices that embrace a particular Realist precept
exist in a separate realm to that in which moral evaluation is appropriate. Like
military necessity, raison d’état is an implicitly moral argument that certain
unpleasant means can sometimes be legitimated in pursuit of certain ends. As
with the concept of the lesser evil,102 to recognize the normative weight of the
means is not to declare them a non-evil, or there would be nothing to ‘balance’.
Whatever its conclusions, the argument can only be had on moral terrain. Indeed,
even in the event that a certain leader refused to recognize any moral consider-
ations save that of his own ends, this scarcely renders moral thought irrelevant
because there will be any number of observers and peer-leaders who might think
differently.
While there is no space here to do justice to the diversity of all species of
Realism,103 it may help to think of them on the whole as conceiving leaders as
fulfilling the role of representative in an ‘adversarial system’—though this is not a
common metaphor in IR scholarship.104 The Anglo-American courtroom is a
paradigmatic adversarial system. There are lawyers whose obligation it is to act in
the interests of their clients. Only by representing those partisan interests zeal-
ously, so the logic goes, does the adversarial system work, and any client would
have reason to feel aggrieved at a lawyer who did not represent her vigorously. At
John] Herz, suggest an approach to international politics that is much more “realistic,” in the ordinary
sense of that term, because it refuses to be confined to the narrow and ultimately inhuman realm
defined by so-called realist laws.’
102 The lesser evil, like the greater good, is an intriguing concept because it compounds relative and
absolute elements. On one hand the lesser evil implies that some evils are greater than others, and thus
that the lesser one can be justified to ward off the greater: this is the relative element. On the other
hand it implies that an evil of whatever scale is still an evil, which means good and evil are not just
different points on the same spectrum, like higher as opposed to lower speeds. Accordingly, harming
someone in the name of preventing a greater evil may still be wronging that person, even if the harmer
has good or politically- or militarily-legitimate reasons for inflicting the wrong. At the very least, from
the perspective of any actor who subscribes to the concept, there is still a normative weight attached to
the act and consequences comprising the lesser evil. More than by Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), my thoughts on the
matter are influenced by Thomas E. Hill Jr, ‘Moral Purity and the Lesser Evil’, The Monist 66/2 (1983),
213–32 and Hill, ‘Making Exceptions without Abandoning the Principle: Or How a Kantian Might
Think about Terrorism’, in R. G. Frey and C. W. Morris (eds), Violence, Terrorism and Justice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 196–229. For a hard case, see C. A. J. Coady’s
disagreement with Frances Kamm, in Coady, Messy Morality, and Applebaum, Ethics for Adversaries,
147–8.
103 For the significant differences in Realist positions, see for instance the contrast between two
influential positions: the Defensive Realism of Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1979) and the Offensive Realism of John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
104 I borrow it from Applebaum, Ethics for Adversaries.
the same time, the analogy to the courtroom is imperfect, because there are less
well-codified procedures for the advocates (i.e. leaders) to adhere to in inter-
national affairs, and no non-partisan and sufficiently powerful superordinate
authority ( like a judge) to adjudicate on procedural breaches or to enforce judge-
ment on any and all parties. It is the absence of this referee that has coloured
many Realist portrayals of the nature of international affairs, with polities sup-
posedly behaving, in the absence of a superordinate power, in the same way that
individual people supposedly behave in a Hobbesian state of nature—a very influ-
ential metaphor in the field. This is a disputable account of individuals and inter-
national affairs, based on an erroneous assumption implication that morality is
no more than a function of enforceable higher law, and an accompanying carica-
ture of innate and untrammelled human selfishness that can be traced to deep
strands of thought in the occidental tradition from which so much Realist think-
ing derives. Besides, even if we assume that a claim about the polity’s interest con-
stitutes the primary normative consideration for the polity’s leaders, that does not
mean that those leaders cannot also consider other normative concerns to be
relevant.105
Clearly we are not bound to swallow this or that Realist theory whole, and,
more to the point of the present work, we should not think as if any historical
actor carried around an international relations textbook to consult in tricky situ-
ations. Leaders can lurch unconsciously or consciously from acting roughly in
accordance with the descriptive tenets of one of the IR doctrines to acting roughly
in accordance with the tenets of another. Furthermore, as with absolutism and
consequentialism in ethics, so with Liberalism and Realism in the study of rela-
tions between polities: in their practical elaboration the outcomes of Liberal and
Realist thought can converge despite the divergence in their founding assump-
tions. One might find that one’s group’s interests are best served by establishing
relations of trust with other groups, replacing beggar-thy-neighbour competition
with mutually beneficial commerce. Fostering shared values might further mutual
understanding and harmony. Some polities might even bind themselves formally
to other states by alliances, thus ceding some sovereign prerogatives in exchange
for other advantages. Treaties, confederations of islands and tribes: none of these
is a novelty. Polities can also form relations with non-state international actors
like corporations, the first of which in the occident were established in the Middle
Ages, or like the UN and NGOs. So even when the obligation to the group or the
territorial unit remains primary for its leader, honouring that obligation may
involve honouring other obligations that ultimately become difficult to distin-
guish from the primary normative obligation.
105 See Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, 161–7 on the points made in the final two
sentences, and, on influential Hobbesian concepts of ‘human nature’ Marshall Sahlins, The Western
Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press: 2008).
The IR theory of Constructivism comes in to criticize the sharpness of the

interest-value distinction in principle as well as practice. Along with Liberals,
Constructivists would say that at the very least interests can become bound to the
values that they invoke, however cynically, in legitimation—hypocrisy, again,
being the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Even in destabilizing action we see the
trace of common value as polities try to justify aggression by some principle other
than just self-interest; the self-defensive pretext for war is as old as recorded his-
tory. Constructivists observe that interests are never just given, outside value con-
texts, and even if we need not accept that ‘all the way down’, in the sense that the
meeting of some interests is a condition rather than a criterion of value, we can
still accept the thrust of the Constructivist point. By extension, Constructivism,
like Liberalism, questions the sharp Realist distinction between the internal and
external realms. External forces and developments clearly influence internal
orientations. Conversely, internal debates about values, identities, interests, and
the boundary of the primary political community of obligation on whose behalf
leaders act, will all have knock-on effects on external comportment.
One can adopt descriptive elements from the Liberal and Constructivist
accounts without subscribing to any of the optimism that accompanies some
Liberal visions of greater harmony or even value-convergence between polities.
The point of invoking these competing theories from the perspective of the pre-
sent book is not to provide substitutes for moralism in the form of hard-and-fast
yardsticks against which past behaviour can be measured. While theorists from
each camp draw often extensively on historical evidence, they also abstract from
cases in the interests of lawmaking. Historians with their taste for the specific may
find the approach problematic. Yet, as ever, they must consider whether, while
supposedly disavowing all theories, they are actually subscribing unawares to a
theory, and what such a theory implies for their own stance towards particular
historical actors. Above all, self-declared neutral historians must be careful that,
in their desire to be ‘realistic’ about the exercise of power, they do not unwittingly
adopt some version of Realism as a true account of power’s exercise rather than a
contested theory of power (and even of human nature), and adopt a series of
assumptions about the nature of political morality without questioning or per-
haps even recognizing them. Academics in their role as armchair warriors can be
as susceptible as anyone else to the desire to be seen as ‘hard-headed’, ‘tough-
minded’, and so forth, and can thereby replace moralism with heroic realism.
Heroic realism moves from acknowledging the moral quandaries of those in
special roles to an infatuation with the hard ‘necessities’ of power. For the histor-
ical actor, the sometime need for ‘dirty hands’ becomes a pride in ‘doing the dirty
work’, a test of mettle. When they are not lecturing on the impossibility of making
omelettes without breaking eggs, you will hear some heroic realists incanting that
the ends justify the means, without necessarily showing that the ends are them-
selves justified or that the chosen means are the only (as opposed, say, to the most
convenient) way of attaining the ends. The heroic realist tends not to think of the
‘lesser evil’ as an evil at all, while ‘greatness’ tacitly assumes its own particular
moral aspect, as when tabloid journalists talk of putting the Great back into Great
Britain. For the actor, so too, sometimes, for the observer: in La Renaissance
(1877), by the racist social Darwinist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Pope Alexander
VI advises Lucrezia Borgia that ‘For the kind of person whom destiny calls to
dominate others, the ordinary rules of life are reversed and duty becomes
quite different. Good and evil are transferred onto another and higher plane.’106
Note: ‘higher’ rather than just ‘different’ and ‘reversed’ as opposed to ‘sometimes
altered.’ Friedrich Meinecke’s teacher and Bismarck’s sometime cheerleader, the
nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke, was more nuanced but
nonetheless tended towards the heroically realist when he wrote:
No man ever went through life with absolutely clean hands and no clashing of
duties. In any case there is no walk of life more moral than the statesman’s, who
on his own responsibility guides his country through quicksands. . . . No higher
or harder moral task can be set for any man than to spend the whole strength of
his personality in the service of his people. We must not belittle or conceal the
tragedy of guilt which sometimes clings to great names, but neither should we
examine the leaders of the State with the eyes of an attorney. . . . The statesman
has no right to warm his hands with snug self-laudation at the smoking ruins of
his fatherland, and comfort himself by saying ‘I have never lied’; this is the
monkish type of virtue.107
As to ‘greatness’ as a value, ponder the pseudo-moral calculus hinged around the

‘but’ in this sentence from a History of England’s Plantagenet dynasty:
It is undeniable that during the Plantagenet years many acts of savagery, butch-
ery, cruelty and stupidity were committed, but by 1399, where this book ends,
the chilly island realm [sic] which had been conquered by William, the bastard
of Normandy, in 1066 had been transformed into one of the most sophisticated
and important kingdoms in Christendom.108
Heroic realism, the term that seems so apt in contradistinction to monkish virtue,
was adopted by the Nazi Werner Best, one of the architects of the SS’s police and
intelligence organization, as he averred that the ‘principle of recognition for each
people and its right of existence applies equally to the relationship with all other
106 Michael Biddiss, ‘History as Destiny: Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain and Spengler’, Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997), 73–100, here 77.
107 Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, i (New York: MacMillan, 1916), 103-104.
108 Dan Jones, The Plantagenets (London: Harper, 2013), p. xxviii.
nations. In times of conflict we will of course pursue the vital interests of our
people even to the extent of annihilating the opponent—but without the hatred
and contempt of any value judgement.’ He also claimed that anti-Semitism was
‘not a world view but a political, economic and cultural defence’.109 This we might
call ‘objectivity’ and objective necessity relative to the hard parameter of some
sectarian position, which was in this case extreme, paranoid nationalism.110 You
will guess from the loaded choice of example that it is just as easy to take this line
of thought too far—to run a very long way with subjective judgements of what is
necessary in the group interest, and also to meet ‘threats’ with the most extreme
violence—as it is to ignore its real salience. Historians will not perhaps be con-
vinced by Best but they might well evince their own versions of heroic realism,
which can tell us as much about their own pet theory of roles as about the histor-
ical object of inquiry.
As if in reflection on Alexander VI’s idea of a higher plane of morality, Bloch
once observed of his occidental present that even ‘when to die for one’s country
has altogether ceased to be the monopoly of one class or one profession, the [feeling
persists] that a sort of moral supremacy attaches to the function of professional
warrior—an attitude quite foreign to other societies, such as the Chinese’.111
We can see this feeling at work in another of our military historians. He concludes
his analysis of the British ‘saturation’ bombing campaign in the Second World
War with an apparent abrogation of judgement: ‘Easy judgements were my birth-
right because so many made difficult ones.’112 Another writes in the context of
‘passing judgements’ that ‘Those of us who have never been obliged to participate
in a great war seem wise to count our blessings and incline a bow to all those,
mighty and humble, who did so.’113 Such conclusions—whose subtext is actually
to endorse heroic realism as if that were the only alternative to ‘monkish’ moral-
izing—get things the wrong way around. ‘Difficult’ judgements are the ones that
most need serious moral reflection, and, like ‘complexity’, ‘difficulty’ is not a syno-
nym of ambiguity. The more serious the situation in which they were made, the
more important is reflection on these judgements. Assuming that we historians
are already trying to take people on their own terms, we may even take another
step and give them the benefit of the doubt for being in a difficult position, as
109 Ulrich Herbert, ‘Ideological Legitimation and Political Practice of the Leadership of the
National Socialist Political Police’, in Hans Mommsen (ed.), The Third Reich Between Vision and
Reality (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 95–108, here 105.
110 Eckart Menzler-Trott, Gentzens Problem: Mathematische Logik im nationalsozialistischen
Deutschland (Basel: Springer, 2001), 139.
111 Bloch, Feudal Society, 451. Note that he was writing in the late 1930s.
112 Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II
(London: Tauris, 2001), 163.
113 Max Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–1945 (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),
introd. Another military historian quotes precisely this passage by Hastings: Nick J. Guevara Jnr., West
Point, Bataan, and Beyond: Santiago Guevara and the War in the Philippines (Silver Spring, MD:
Garfield Street Publishing, 2016), 116.
Butterfield was prepared to.114 But that scarcely concludes the matter, and it
certainly does not remove it from the realm of moral evaluation, since we are
talking here about principles like mitigation or lenience, or charity in judgement,
or suspending judgement pending further consideration of the evidence.
We need not always agree with Butterfield, given the relationship between
power and responsibility and given that power can be enjoyed as well as endured:
think how unenjoyable it is to be powerless (see p.120). Of Louis XVI, Edmund
Burke wrote in 1790 that ‘misfortune indeed it has turned out to him that he was
born king of France. But misfortune is not crime.’115 Louis was obviously not
always as powerless—as ‘unfortunate’—as he became after the Revolution. And
what of the many who may have perceived themselves the victims of misfortune
to be born into an ill-run state? Here we have a form of charity distributed solely
among a circle of the elect by chroniclers of the elect. Better words than charity
for such beneficence might be deference or, more strongly, collusion; it is not neu-
trality or impartiality.
When thinking evaluatively about a political actor, one does not just adopt the
political standard she sets herself, even when one is thinking as a moral context-
ualist. There is also the standard that the actor must implicitly subscribe to if the
system which she purports to uphold is not to be threatened by the outcome of her
actions. Further, even in the unlikely event that a leader acted as if no moral con-
siderations of any sort applied, this would not stop evaluation of her rule accord-
ing to standards held within her moment, as judged, say, against the behaviour of
earlier leaders or leaders of other polities. It is one thing to claim that a politician
acted in the name of some definition of group interest, and quite another to say
that hers was regarded as a good interpretation of that interest or that she pursued
it prudently as opposed to counter-productively. Finally, whatever the heroic real-
ist might think, while some different moral considerations obtain in leadership
and executor roles than in private or personal morality, that is a far cry from the
claim that all of the moral considerations differ from one to the other.
If anything, the historian’s study of specificities will reveal just how little the
dictates of interest and value each point unambiguously in set directions. Were
that not the case, there would be little need for leaders, who could be economic-
ally replaced with a political sliderule. The requisites of power or the ‘national
interest’ are not just given; they have to be interpreted and applied at contextual
nexuses that are never precisely repeated. One of the descriptive strengths of IR
Constructivism is that it assumes neither ‘liberal’ convergence nor a permanent,
rather atemporal situation of ‘realist’ power politics in which the fundamentals
114 Herbert Butterfield, ‘Moral Judgments in History’, in Hans Meyerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of
History in Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 228–49, here 236–7; C. T. McIntire, Herbert
Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 221.
115 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, ed. W. Alison Phillips and Catherine
Beatrice Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 83.
remain the same even when the players shift places. Instead, Constructivism deals
in unpredictable conversation. Once we consider the different layers of this con-
versation, and the different parties to it, we must also take into consideration that
individual element that cannot be reduced to the functional contextualization of
the special role.
Conversation occurs not just across the porous boundaries of internal and
external affairs but also between public and private personae, between the person-
as-roleholder and the person-in-herself, as it were. Lord Salisbury (1830–1903),
twice British secretary of state for India, later foreign minister and later still
prime minister, was a devout Christian who nevertheless claimed to maintain a
distinction between public and private morality in pursuing British interests.116
We are not obliged to agree with Salisbury on this neat division of moral labour.
That he came up with the formula may tell us that he found it convenient to
accept at face value the proposition gesta Dei per Anglos, such that the division
was largely formal for him. Or it may tell us that he was adept at justifying things
to himself, which scarcely distinguishes him from many of us as we strive to
minimize cognitive dissonance in all areas of life. Most importantly, it is ques-
tionable where he managed the total separation of personae anyway. In later
reflection on the 1866 Orissa famine which occurred early in his first stint as
India secretary, Salisbury wrote:
The day I took office in that year [1866] Lord Ellenborough wrote to me warning
that there were indications of a terrible Famine, and urging me to take measures
in time. I was quite new to the subject—and believed that if any precautions
were necessary the local Government was sure to take them. I did nothing for
two months. Before that time the monsoon had closed the ports of Orissa—help
was impossible—and—it is said—a million people died. The Governments of
India and Bengal had taken in effect no precautions whatsoever . . . I never could
feel that I was free from all blame for the result.117
As it happens, Salisbury’s recollection is itself inaccurate in a self-serving

fashion,118 but the major point is that if he had genuinely managed to separate
public and private morality, he would only have felt this guilt in his public cap-
acity, not in his private one. To state the distinction is to undermine it. Whatever
he thought, Salisbury the person was still the arbiter of the morality of Salisbury
the statesman: the former entity had a hand in the interpreting of which interests
to pursue, how, and how far.
116 Peter Marsh, ‘Lord Salisbury and the Ottoman Massacres’, Journal of British Studies 11/2 (1972),
63–83, here 65–6.
117 Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 232.
118 For reasons provided in Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World, 232.
Were there a political slide-rule that told one what to do in any given situation,
one might be able to convince oneself that the role demanded that one obey the
slide-rule, but that would mean that one was not really making any decisions
within the role, only a decision about accepting the role. As soon as decisions are
to be made within the role, things must be weighed. These things do not just
include the facts of any given case but the counsel one receives. Few leaders are
without counsellors, however unwanted. The modern democratic leader may for
instance listen to the voice of her own convictions about the way the world should
be made to work, her own understanding of the best interests of the electorate as
things stand at that moment, or what the opinion polls or the newspapers tell her
about what the voters want, whatever she believes about voter-wisdom.119 How
she chooses is a matter for her, the person at the nexus of a specific set of contexts.
Where there is choice there is responsibility, and where there is responsibility
there can be evaluation.
The case to which we now move, that of the administrator or order-receiving
soldier, is different in some ways to that of the leader and order-giver, similar in
others. It is similar insofar as both are special roles with accompanying moral
permissions and restrictions. It is different insofar as within the official or sol-
dierly role there is less discretion in setting ends, more emphasis on finding the
best way to achieve the ends set by others, in a form of what Weber called
‘instrumental rationality’.120 When reflecting on the moral issues at stake, here
again one needs to navigate between two extremes of which a decontextualizing
moralism is one.
Consider a notorious case: the ‘Nuremberg defence’. The obloquy directed at
the plea ‘I was just obeying orders’ is based on the idea that obedience, like loy-
alty, sincerity, or courage, is a secondary virtue when the individual conscience
stands before its own sovereign tribunal or god. What matters more in this view is
the choice of cause to which one stakes one’s obedience. But such reasoning over-
looks the fact that bureaucrats, soldiers, police, and others, may commit to the
role before they commit to any of the particular things that the role demands of
them. That is, they make a general ‘initial’ moral choice that can be construed as a
choice of principle about forgoing specific moral choices in the subsequent enact-
ment of the role. This is a service ethic, one variety of what Weber called an ‘ethic
of responsibility’, and it is expressed by those agents acting as if what to others are
the secondary virtues of obedience, etc., are primary virtues to them. Functionaries
can claim that they are enacting the will of the leader in his or her role as expres-
sion of the group’s identity (or embodiment of divine right), or that they are
enacting the will of the group itself as constituted through some consultative or
119 Applebaum, Ethics for Adversaries, ch. 9.

120 For the sake of idealizing the discussion, I will ignore the fact that it can be practically difficult
to separate the question of how-to-implement from that of what-to-implement.
representative process. More than this, functionaries may congratulate themselves

on their moral self-sacrifice at forgoing what they might think of as their normal,
‘civilian’ prerogatives of moral discernment in order to work in the higher cause
of the collective whose needs impel them to act in ways that they might not as
‘civilians’. If pride is not opportune, they might go for self-pity—just the sort of
self-pity displayed by some former perpetrators of Nazi genocide as they bemoaned
having been put in the position of ‘having had’ to kill. After all, in discharging
that responsibility to kill they had, at least so they could tell themselves, been
selfless in a higher cause—the cause not being genocide, or at least not necessarily,
but rather service to their state whatever it demanded.
With Nuremberg in mind, one does not wish to be understood as sanctioning
apologia for sundry mass murderers: the reasoning provided above is not exhaust-
ive and there are legitimate objections to it, just as there is evidence that many
Nazi functionaries did what they did enthusiastically, not just because they were
ordered to. At the same time, let us not forget that it is often necessary for indi-
viduals in certain roles—warriors, police, administrators—to act in ways that may
be contrary to their personal convictions. Alongside self-defence, many signifi-
cant cooperative human activities would be rendered impossible without a ser-
vice ethic; whether we talk of ‘obeying orders’ or ‘implementing policy’, such an
ethic is essential for an anti-welfarist who in her capacity as civil servant nonethe-
less equitably administers social security payments. Furthermore, we happily fall
back on legitimation roughly along ‘Nuremberg’ lines in other cases. One of
Britain’s most famous historians wrote reassuringly of the aircrews that bombed
German cities in the Second World War that, unlike Nazi perpetrators, ‘their
intent [sic] was not dishonourable’. This claim does not do the work that our his-
torian wishes, and his terminological muddle underlines the conceptual problem,
for it is actually the bombers’ motives that he must mean to address, not their
intent.121 The substantive activities of the bombers are not the same as those of
the SS (though there were still consequences in terms of great civilian death toll)
but the explanations to motive, i.e. the explanation for why they did things that
they would probably not have done outside of their special roles, is not necessarily
different.
At the other extreme from a decontextualizing moralism that ignores matters
like the service ethic, one ought to avoid the assumption that the demands of and
commitment to a service role mark the end of the matter, evaluatively speaking.
At Nuremberg and other post-war trials, ‘I was just obeying orders’ was often
supplemented by something like ‘and I had no choice’, with accompanying evoca-
tion of the coercive nature of the totalitarian state. Notwehr was the legal name for
the claim, or, when it transpired that terrible consequences had not actually been
121 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London: Penguin, 2009), 571.
threatened for non-compliance, Putativnotwehr, the idea that such consequences

were subjectively perceived as likely. Whatever the sincerity of the claim, it
suggests that ‘I was just obeying orders’ simpliciter was by no means always in
practice seen as sufficient to justify participation. Even if it was strictly more in
the way of mitigation than justification, the spectre of sanctions for disobedience
was supposed to be seen as generally understandable in producing obedience.
Indeed there are cases like the Rwandan genocide and the Stalinist purges in
which bureaucrats and others much more obviously did participate out of fear to
life and limb; in such cases a role loses its moral specialness in the measure that
the agent’s actions were dictated by purely personal existential interests.
In further evidence that the special role does not hermetically seal the role-
holder from his or her person outside the role, some officials do object to specific
policies, and a characteristic expression of dissent is resignation from the role.
Resignation is actually consistent with the idea of general commitment to the
role, in the sense that when one finds oneself unable to justify (to oneself) enact-
ing a specific policy within the role, then rather than picking and choosing
between policies whilst remaining within the role, one resiles from the general
commitment to the role, perhaps with appropriate advertisement of the whistle-
blower variety. After all, while in some sense the general decision to commit to
the special role came prior to any of the specific things demanded by the role, in
another sense that general decision is constantly being tacitly reaffirmed by the
act of staying in post, and as such may at any point be countermanded.122 When
resignation from the role is not an option, objection to the specific task is then all
that is left if the opposition is strong enough. That may or may not mean refusal
to enact the task, given countervailing commitments, but, again, the choice about
weighing one commitment against another cannot be immune from judgement.
The Importance of Hindsight
Richard Evans encapsulates some grounds for reticence about such judgement
when he writes that the historian ought not ‘issu[e] arrogant verdicts on complex
moral issues based on the luxury of hindsight’.123 Now the moral complexity that
Evans invokes is only relevant in a context where moral issues are recognized as
salient, and the same goes for the concept of moral ambiguity that some people
wrongly treat as a synonym of moral complexity. If we remove the word ‘moral’
from Evans’s sentence, we have a decent description of what most historians do.
Whether a historian deserves the label ‘arrogant’ can only be judged on a case by
case basis. Evans’s main warning about hindsight is, however, clearly reasonable.
122 Which is a point Sartre made about the soldier. 123 Evans, ‘What Is History?’, 5.
The concern about hindsight is sometimes subsumed under the general fear of
anachronism, so some clarifications are in order. As the application to the study
of the past of after-the-fact knowledge, hindsight can constitute one strain of
anachronism. Another strain of anachronism is the application of after-the-fact
values. At the moment the focus is on matters that might but need not fall under
the ambit of the first strain, including matters that are central to so much of what
historians do, whatever they say about what they do. This section builds from
showing the importance of hindsight in any historical explanation to showing
that hindsight can be deployed for evaluative purposes without contravening the
perceived imperative to assess historical actors on their own terms.
It is amazing what fear of anachronism can do to the historian’s judgement, as
evidenced in the soldier and historian Mungo Melvin’s recent biography of the
Second World War German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Given the severity
of some of the crimes in which Manstein was implicated, including the mass
murder of Jews, it is impossible for Melvin to avoid the normative element in his
concluding summary of the soldier’s deeds. Yet he repeatedly justifies his inability
to call a spade a spade with intimations that whoever would use that designation
is somehow guilty of presentism. He tells us that the story is ‘complex: over time,
“good” and “bad” can never look in opposite directions from one single, fixed
position in history’. It is unclear what this means even if one ignores the prob-
lematizing inverted commas around good and bad. The picture is yet more
blurred given that by ‘bad’ Melvin denotes Manstein’s conviction as a war crim-
inal, which seems straightforward enough, while by the balancing ‘good’ he refers
to Manstein’s record as ‘the most gifted German operational brain of the Second
World War’, which is more a matter of competence than morality.124 Melvin refers
twice to Manstein’s ‘alleged war crimes’ (he was convicted on several counts).125
He concludes that with ‘twenty-first-century hindsight and with the benefit of
detailed research, of course, it is easy to cast doubt on the veracity of Manstein’s
evidence at Hamburg and condemn him for his failure to protect the lives of Jews
and others in the Soviet Union’, which might reasonably be translated as saying
that Manstein lied under oath and was complicit in the murder of Jews and
others. And again: ‘From today’s perspective of exposure and recrimination
against the Wehrmacht, a much less rosy picture of the individual emerges’, as if
the pejorative ‘recrimination’ were unrelated to the evidence ‘exposed’. Melvin
does not spell it out but the reader might reasonably infer him to be saying that
because the research was conducted at a later point in time than the deeds
researched, then its conclusions are tainted by ‘hindsight’ and a particular ‘per-
spective’. The corollary is that the criminal somehow becomes less guilty in pro-
portion to the time it takes to piece together evidence of his deeds, or, conversely,
124 Mungo Melvin, Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010), 505.
125 Melvin, Manstein, 504, 505.
that the further back we go in time towards Manstein’s deeds, the less morally
problematic they are to someone who understands history properly.126
As with ‘relativism’, the fear of ‘hindsight’ is such that historians tend not to
reflect on it even when it touches integral parts of their activity. In one obvious
way the historian is bound in most of what she does by hindsight in the sense of
after-the-fact knowledge. Historical patterns only become evident when they
have already established themselves, i.e. when they are viewed partly or wholly in
retrospect. Whatever the likes of Melvin might feel to be ethically appropriate or
contextually sensitive, it is only possible to investigate things when they have
occurred. Equally, some sorts of ‘significance’ vary with subsequent occurrence,
as is the case with the reinterpretation of texts across time. The memory of insult-
ing another person ten years ago gains more significance to me, here, now, if I
happen to have just been made the victim of his long-burning desire for revenge
than if I have not. Aftermaths can dictate some of the things that can be said
about what preceded them.127 Manifesting a new interest in something in the past
because it seems to prefigure a present-day phenomenon is one of the things that
keeps the historical profession alive. New historical interests, stimulated by the
new articulation of social forces, may also be read back into the past in a way that
may be relevant to the present without necessarily being distortive of the past, as
all manner of social History shows. The causes of any eventualization are only
identified as causes in light of what it is they are held to have resulted in. To
inquire after the causes of the First World War is to depend upon a perfectly
proper form of hindsight, since without the advent of the war we could hardly
talk of ‘the causes of the First World War’.
This account of the relationship between causal explanation and hindsight
might seem to be challenged by elaborated ‘counterfactual History’, but the
impression is illusory. Counterfactual History is based on the recognition that all
of the things that are normally accounted for in explanations of, say, the war
might have come to pass, barring just one, and the war would not have happened,
or not in the way or at the time it did, and so on. My objection, it should be
126 Melvin, Manstein, 505, 506. Further, if anyone can make sense of what Melvin is trying to say on
the moral and legal front in the second paragraph of p. 506, I should be keen to know, especially as
concerns the claim about the ‘apparent severity’ of Manstein’s sentence and Melvin’s torturous pro-
nouncement that ‘Notwithstanding the judgements at both the International and American tribunals
at Nuremberg, Manstein became the very personification—if not a scapegoat—of the Wehrmacht
under trial for its cruel misdeeds’.
127 The statement ‘Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica’ was true from whatever point he was
born on 15 August 1769 and remains true today. ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, later emperor of the French,
was born in Corsica’ is true today but only became so after he became emperor; it was not true on 15
August 1769. ‘The emperor of France, Napoleon, was born in Corsica’, was true for a time-limited
period from some point on 2 December 1804. ‘The spur to later European nation-state formation,
Napoleon I, was born in Corsica’, could only become true, if it is true, at some point after his reign.
‘The inspiration for some twenty-second-century leaders of France, Napoleon I, was born in Corsica’
will only if at all become true in virtue of events yet to transpire. Arthur C. Danto is the source of such
ruminations.
reiterated, is to elaborated counterfactual History because it will be a part of many

historians’ thinking to try to put themselves in the position Bloch recommended
before a past event, in order that one might ‘gauge its chances’ of materializing;128
if one is interested in some event’s confirming or refuting a general assumption,
then one will base some of one’s judgement on speculating how the world of
assumptions would have looked without the event’s having taken place. But this is
just a matter of recognizing contingency in history and writing so as not to make
what materialized seem inevitable. It is misleading to lay out what one thinks
would have occurred but did not.
What makes any elaborated counterfactual misleading is that it builds on that
single recognition of contingency a superstructure that is determined in the new
scenario. One factor is changed in a moment frozen in time, and then the future
interaction of other factors predicted as if there were no such thing as the fortuit-
ous interaction of yet other hitherto unforeseen factors, and as if the new inter-
action of the included factors was perfectly predictable. This undermines the
counterfactualist’s sensible insistence on the contingency of History. Consider
John Lewis Gaddis:
counterfactual reasoning can help to establish chains of causation: to argue that

the Japanese might not have attacked Pearl Harbor if the American oil embargo
hadn’t been imposed; or to claim that the Americans might not have chosen to
cut off the oil flow if the Japanese hadn’t moved into French Indochina—these
are perfectly legitimate positions for historians to take.129
‘Might not’ is the salient formulation here; ‘might’ is its counterpart—and the
reader of any account would have been able to make either inference for herself
insofar as the historian had established some connections between Japanese expan-
sion, American oil embargo, and Japanese attack. To take Gaddis’s thinking to its
conclusion would be not just to ask about the specific non-occurrence of Japanese
expansion and US oil embargo but also to hypothesize about what might (/not)
have happened at some other point absent those events. Perhaps Japan would have
expanded a little earlier or later, or not to quite such a degree, or to a greater degree;
perhaps the US response would have been more vociferous than an embargo, and
so on. If we simply replace the given facts of Japanese expansion and US embargo
with nothing at all, then we might—or might not—be hypothesizing about the US
and Japanese state regimes being different in outlook than they were, which would
open up yet further counterfactual thinking retrojected into the prehistory of the
‘events’ in question, with no end to where we might stop the process.
128 Cited in John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
100.
129 Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 102.
To dwell on historical counterfactuals is to dwell on the non-causation of non-

events, which is different to the important study of the ‘causation’ of non-events.
One does not, one cannot, go about with an infinitely long list of spatio-temporally
non-specific non-occurrences and inquire of all of them what and what if? Let us
clarify. In thinking of war-causation, it is perfectly proper to ask why in this or
that historical instance war did not occur when some of the omens seemed to
have been in view. But that inquiry would still require a specific state of affairs
(the non-occurrence of war there and then) as a focus for the establishment of
prior causal chains for war’s non-occurrence, involving positive causal factors
that forestalled conflict. Once the historian inquires only of the non-causation of
specific things, then she is in the fraught but useful business of trying to isolate vari-
ables in causation, which she cannot do with a no-variance study of war-causation
that only contemplates scenarios that did produce war. In that case, however, the
‘counterfactualist’ is not really that at all: she is just acting as a comparative historian
interested in different outcomes. Insofar as the counterfactualist does that which
is peculiar to counterfactual History, i.e. fleshing out a vision of new scenarios had
certain things transpired differently, then she is dealing with neither the causation
of events nor the ‘causation’ of non-events. She is doing something that claims
knowledge of all of the spatio-temporally non-specific ‘occurrences’ of the future
from her chosen point of manipulation onwards (and possibly hinting at a differ-
ent past, too, as in Gaddis’s Pearl Harbor example), and discarding them all except
one. She is free to do this because she is no longer constrained by evidence or by
having to take account of causal indeterminacy. It becomes clear why historians
have so often limited themselves to asking why what actually happened happened,
and to the further consequences of those happenings.
Contemplation of consequences and outcomes brings us to consider the way in
which historical evaluations can legitimately depend upon hindsight. Evans’s refer-
ence to ‘moral complexity’ could mean the complexity of choice—as in situations
where it was unclear as to what was the morally correct thing to do in accordance
with governing values—or it could mean the complex relationship between inten-
tions and outcomes. It seems that Evans means the former, but before getting to that,
we need to address the latter given the interest many historians have in causation.
Causation in human affairs is so complex that there will very often be interven-
ing factors that magnify, thwart, or refract human intentions. Where an intention
bears no fruit in outcomes it may still be of concern to historians interested in the
character of the historical actor; other historians might be drawn to the forces
and intentions that did the thwarting as they investigate the causation of non-
events just described. Where intentions are realized in outcomes, or are even
magnified, there is relatively little complexity in the relevant sense, and as such we
may proceed to inquire into the nature of the intentions that have shaped the his-
torical outcomes, including its moral aspects. Where intentions bear fruit, but not
of the sort intended, then the human actor has still involved herself in a causal
chain, co-producing an outcome that would not have been the same without her
contribution. This is perhaps where moral complexity is most obviously manifest,
but that complexity does not necessarily mean that we withdraw from moral
evaluation.
The idea that unintended consequences can affect our moral assessment of the
state of affairs that brought them about only seems peculiar, if it does, in the
abstract. One obvious qualifier is that some unintended outcomes are more pre-
dictable than others, which means that an unforeseen outcome might just be the
result of the actor’s failure to foresee it, where no superhuman perspective was
needed to envisage its possibility. To render a judgement on the predictability of
an unforeseen outcome is, if that outcome happens to have moral implications, to
render a judgement that touches on the morality of the actor. Here, we are appar-
ently not being anachronistic because, like Bloch, we are trying to place ourselves
in the position of actors contemplating possibilities from a situation prior to the
act and its possible outcomes. But the nature of the outcome is, again, important
to the nature of the assessment, which is where why we need to return to our
thoughts about causation and hindsight.
Given concrete examples, it becomes intuitively obvious that consequences
often must be taken into account in moral evaluation. If I promise to do some-
thing, then the promise itself can only be assessed in light of future events, i.e.
whether or not I come good on it. Even if it could be shown that I had definitely
intended to fulfil the promise at the time of making it, that will not be the only
thing in the balance if I nevertheless do not fulfil it: my mind might have changed
in the interim, or I might not have tried sufficiently hard to fulfil my obligation,
or I might have wrongly made a commitment that I was always likely to be unable
to fulfil, irrespective of my determination. If, in full possession of my faculties, I
throw furniture into the street from my second-floor window as a shortcut to
clearing out my house, I may or may not kill a passer-by. If I do not, then my
actions may be judged reckless, but they will certainly meet with greater disap-
probation if I do, and the legal punishment that ensues will be an approximate
quantum of that added moral weight. Now an example of the sort more likely to
appear in a History book: the general who takes a risk in battle may end up win-
ning thereby, or he may see slaughtered the battalions he dispatched on the risky
manoeuvre. The first outcome will bring him acclaim, the second will not. His
judgement will work to maximize the chance of success, but chance is still an
operative word. The name philosophers have given to this sort of moral problem
is, appropriately enough, moral luck.130
Moral luck can obtain before the act as well as during or after it. A child of
wealthy parents may never be confronted with the moral dilemmas that regularly
130 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); cf. Nagel,
Mortal Questions, ch. 3.
present themselves in violent areas beyond his gated community. The moral
(good) luck that allows him to preserve his moral purity, because he does not
have to use violence to repel an assailant or does not have to ingratiate himself
with local thugs to avoid being assaulted in the first place, lies in the circum-
stances of his upbringing. If a queen has to choose between war and surrender,
then she may be choosing between certain bloodshed and an uncertain military
outcome on one hand and probable humiliation and the servitude of her people
on the other. Whether or not she provoked the confrontation, she is presented
with a choice with moral consequences in either direction and it may just be her
moral (bad) luck that that is so.131
The queen’s dilemma perhaps encapsulates what Evans meant by a moral com-
plexity that forbids with-hindsight judgements. Indeed, there will be some dilem-
mas that do not seem to admit of even one less terrible outcome among more
terrible ones, whether those are viewed after the fact or with the greatest effort of
understanding about the perspective of the decision-maker. But identifying such
dilemmas is the result of moral inquiry into them, not of having such moral
inquiry already ruled out of court. Equally, moral inquiry will reveal many
instances where the moral issues are more clear-cut than they may first appear.
It would be a strange queen who did not think that her actions needed to be
assessed in terms of consequences as well as motives. As a rule of thumb people
who make decisions hope to see themselves vindicated by events. Many historical
figures have explicitly appealed to the verdict of posterity above the head of con-
temporary criticism. The philosopher Benedetto Croce described this rather
forcefully: ‘the feigned indignation which the accused often display in order to
cover their action, frequently take[s] the form of . . . an appeal to history’.132 ‘Let
History judge’ illustrates the extent to which decisions are bets on how things
look from the future. It would be hard to make sense of them otherwise, since the
future is what they hope to influence, and one of the reasons leaders get to leader-
ship positions is on the back of some special claim to be able to lead into that
future. Divine right, martial prowess, age-seniority, or manifesto-based election
are all justifications for leadership based on some alleged qualification to lead,
and ‘leading’, in whatever political direction, must entail moving from one situ-
ation to another future situation. Yet some bets do not come off, some predictions
are just wrong, some terribly wrong, and some more predictably so than others.
This is true in ordinary life, and it is true there that our opinion of someone
who makes decisions with significant consequences will be affected positively or
131 Note that my observing of these situations that ‘that is just the way it is’ is not pursuant to a
contention that nothing should be done about e.g. the sorts of circumstances that lead to great
inequality, gated communities, and so forth. It is just that these are matters to be arbitrated at the level
of social policy, and any moral critique is a critique at the level of the social system. Further to this
point, see p. 207.
132 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (Chicago: Regnery, 1970), 208.
negatively in line with those consequences. Had the 2003 invasion of Iraq resulted
in swift harmonization there, the debate around the invasion’s motivations would
be less heated.
Clearly these are arguments involving reference to consequences, but they are
not necessarily consequentialist in the philosophical sense of a particular moral
theory, any more than is the expression ‘all’s well that ends well’. One of the odd-
ities of so many consequentialist thought experiments, like ‘would you kill one
innocent person to save two more from certain death?’, or ‘would you torture a
suspected terrorist if this produced information that saved the lives of potential
bomb-victims?’, is that they assume certainty about outcomes, presenting the
decider with the actual occurring results as a way of helping her choose. In real
life, as it were, one rather assumes that very often the decision will be made with-
out certainty as to outcomes.133 Whatever information one gathers, there is often
still an element of a leap in the dark, with varying degrees of probability as to
outcome. We can well imagine some governmental policy, say of taxation or public
expenditure, which, after some time in train, has produced quantifiable changes
to what went before. If the new distribution of gains and losses is deemed more
desirable than what went before, the policies are continued. But clearly the deci-
sion to continue A when it has a track record of inducing outcome B is different
to the enactment of novelty X in the hopes that it will induce outcome Y. Saying
that the deed is justified by the outcome (which Richard Nixon may have said
at some point) is subtly different to, because more conditional than, what we
tend to understand when saying that the end justifies the means (which Nixon
definitely said). It is more open to the vagaries of the future. At the same time, it
underlines the significance not of slide-rule utilitarian calculations for action but
of prudence.
‘Prudence’ derives, via prudens/prudentia, from providens/providentia, meaning
foresight, and it connotes the reflective application to unique new situations of
general principles gleaned from experience. The degree of alignment of one’s
foresight with the way things actually turn out will influence others’ assessment
of one’s prudence, as, by extension, will the success of one’s contingency planning,
i.e. risk anticipation. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas felt that imprudence
was not itself a sin since no one would be consciously imprudent, and impru-
dence could not be erased by repentance. Nonetheless, if prudence is considered a
virtue, as Aquinas also believed, it might make sense to conclude that failure to
cultivate where possible the qualities we dub prudential is a shortcoming.134
Either way, imprudent action may bring down consequences of considerable
133 I think Bernard Williams a point along these lines, but I cannot locate the reference.
134 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province
(Raleigh, NC: Hayes Barton Press, 2006), 2555–6, 2576, and 2548–96 more generally.
normative weight, in connection with political as well as personal morality.135 The

CIA invented the term ‘blowback’ for the unexpected (but not necessarily unpre-
dictable) and deleterious consequences of self-interested intervention in the
affairs of others.136 Butterfield invoked blowback avant la lettre when he pointed
his readers to the geopolitical legacy of Britain’s encouraging Prussia into the
Rhineland in order to contain post-Napoleonic France.137 Once one is aware of
the possibility of blowback, one can try to factor it in to one’s prudential calcula-
tions, though only time will tell how successful one’s prognostications were.
Henry Kissinger’s successor as US National Security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
was interviewed in 1998 about the wisdom of US support for Afghan Mujahideen
religious extremists before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as a device to
increase the probability of Soviet invasion and thereby overstretch Soviet power.
He announced: ‘What is most important in world history? The Taliban or the col-
lapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the cold war?’138
There are, of course, limits to the role of hindsight in moral assessment. The
serial killer is not redeemed for the murder of three people if evidence subse-
quently comes to light that one of the victims was a terrorist intending to blow up
a passenger ferry. Nor do we applaud the inventor of mustard gas because a
derivative later became a chemotherapy agent. Once we travel too far down the
chain of causation away from the salient decision that—along with other fac-
tors—shaped the outcome, once we begin commenting on entirely unpredictable
(as opposed to just unpredicted) outcomes, we are in the realms of causal explan-
ation that has no ramifications for moral evaluation.
The upshot of this section thus far: (1) there is no such thing as decision
unconditioned by some sort of context over which actors have no control—hav-
ing to make a decision itself presupposes an assumption about the necessity of
deciding; (2) there is rarely a frictionless realization of the desired object of a
course of action; but (3) issues of responsibility are not thereby necessarily ren-
dered irrelevant, because of the potential for prior insight into possible outcomes
and the relative power inherent in the capacity to decide, irrespective of the pres-
sure to decide. Whether they are public or private, decisions are activated claims
about what is the right or good thing to do. ‘Right’ here can mean either or both
of ‘morally right’ or ‘correct for the attainment of a given goal’. If the decision
ultimately fails according to either criteria, or if it succeeds but at relatively high
135 For a discussion of the relationship between prudence and morality, Coady, Messy Morality,
21 ff.
136 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York:
Henry Holt, 2001).
137 Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949), 140.
138 Interview with Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 15–21 January 1998, trans. in
David N. Gibbs, ‘Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect’, International Politics 37 (2000),
233–46, here 242.
human cost, then it must be legitimate to interrogate the failure, or the means–
ends calculus, lest we fall into one of two traps.
The first trap is the heroic realism already addressed; the second awaits those
who proclaim ‘that is just how things were’, and proclaim that asking why things
were not otherwise is anachronistic, equivalent to empty wish-fulfilment, or mor-
alism in the guise of ‘writing history as it should have happened’.139 A good
example is William D. Rubinstein’s self-explanatory The Myth of Rescue: Why the
Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (1997). The book
begins by claiming that
no Jew who perished during the Nazi Holocaust could have been saved by any
action which the Allies could have taken at the time, given what was actually
known about the Holocaust, what was actually proposed at the time and what was
realistically possible. If there are any exceptions at all to this statement, their
numbers may be measured in the dozens or hundreds rather than in some higher
figure. All of the many studies which criticise the Allies (and the Jewish commu-
nities of the democracies) for having failed to rescue Jews during the Holocaust
are inaccurate and misleading, their arguments illogical and ahistorical.140
The book is replete with accusations of hindsight against historians who disagree
with its author. In keeping with a number of other prominent reviews, one notice
declared the book ‘an antidote to moral fantasy’.141 Rather than engaging with
Rubinstein’s often reasonable discussions about policy specifics, let us address the
sort of thinking laid out in the passage above.
In claiming that nothing more could have been done, Rubinstein claims that
everything plausible was done given the relevant contexts. He claims to know to
an impressive degree of precision how many more Jews might have been saved in
the event that his calculations were incorrect that no more could have been saved.
It is indeed a remarkable insight into History As It Might Have Been that he not
only knows that nothing more could have been done in a number of directions
but also knows the margin of error of his certainty. This is another species of
counterfactual thinking—it is inverted or negative counterfactualism in which
what occurs is accorded the honour of being the only thing that could ‘realisti-
cally’ have occurred.
139 For this accusation, see John Conway, review of Tom Lawson’s The Church of England and the
Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Martlesham: Boydell, 2006), in Reviews in History
online at http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/559. Tom Lawson’s response to the review is avail-
able at the same address.
140 William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More
Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 2000), p. x. Emphases in original.
141 The Observer, quoted on the cover of The Myth of Rescue.
Focusing on one aspect of Rubinstein’s argument helps make my point. In his

determination to limit the scope of available possibilities to those actually vocal-
ized at the time, Rubinstein ignores some alternative lines of inquiry that are just
as legitimate. He goes to one level of the hypothetical but not the next, which is
the level at which we ponder why what was not proposed was not proposed, and
why the circumstances were not different such that certain things not proposed
could have been proposed. We might speculate that, since some British and
American officials are on record as fearing that action on behalf of Jews might
spawn domestic anti-Semitism, these officials actively did not wish to give more
thought to possible means of rescue or intervention.142 What ideas might they
have come up with had they been prepared to put their heads together and think
harder? Would they have thought harder, or expended more resources, had it
been British POWs, or the Gentile population of France, being systematically
murdered? No certain answer can be forthcoming save the answer that just as one
cannot know that other developments might have occurred, one is in no position
to claim that what did occur was the only thing that could realistically have
occurred. The points just suggested are not elaborated counterfactuals but counter-
pre-emptive arguments against elaborated counterfactuals. They are designed
to show that, while no historian can claim the truth about what might have been
but was not, no historian can cover all counterfactual bases in the attempt to
shore up a claim about what must have been. Just like positive counterfactualism,
Rubinstein’s negative counterfactualism entails evoking alternative worlds,
whether to embrace or in this case dismiss them, in a way that is at best a waste of
time, and at worst a self-confirming exercise in pick ’n’ mix from the past’s real
and imagined offerings.
Another pundit wrote that Rubinstein had ‘established incontrovertibly the
terrible inevitability of the Holocaust’,143 which is the sort of claim that always
brings to mind A. J. P. Taylor’s saying nothing is inevitable until it happens. The
assertion shows that negative counterfactuals can produce more deterministic
accounts than non-counterfactual Histories need to. None other than the con-
servative historian Geoffrey Elton observed that hindsight can make the historian
‘into a tedious defender of accomplished fact’.144 Elton was criticizing a dispos-
ition that seems like the opposite of the anachronistic moralizing that Evans
rightly fears and the what-if?-ery that Rubinstein derides, but which actually con-
tains elements of both tendencies in mirror image.
142 On official attitudes, see Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge
143 ‘Enigma of Survival: What Bletchley Learned of the Holocaust—and When’, Daily Telegraph, 18
April 1999.
144 G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967), 99.
PART 2
WRIT ING HISTORY: PROBLE M S

OF N E U T R ALI T Y
Introduction
Underlying most of the arguments against evaluation is the belief that it is pos-
sible to write non-evaluative historianship in the first place, or the conviction that
non-evaluative historianship is a good, even if unattainable, standard to hold as
an ideal. This Part of the book considers both positions. It challenges the assump-
tion that, where it matters, it is either desirable or possible to avoid value judge-
ments and the sorts of evocative descriptions that imply or could reasonably be
expected to prompt such judgements. Unlike Part 1 it is not primarily concerned
with the moral contextualization of past actors according to the standards of their
time. It is concerned with the historian’s role in characterizing and explaining
past forces, actors, and developments within an integrated historical account. It
shows that such accounts often and legitimately introduce ‘external’ evaluations—
i.e. evaluations that need not accord with the governing ‘terms’ of the actors
whose behaviour is under explanation.
The first section makes some distinctions between History and particular trad-
itions within the social sciences, with the aim of showing why the ‘rules’ about
evaluation can be different in these differing endeavours. The second section
establishes the widespread existence of evocations and evaluations in the very
labelling and description of many historical phenomena. It suggests not just how
peculiar works of History would look in their absence of these evocations and
appraisals, but that their absence would often distort what is being reported.
These arguments are key to the distinction made in the third section about reject-
ing value neutrality as a governing ideal while insisting on truthfulness as a his-
torian’s primary duty. The fourth section highlights the nature of most historical
accounts as composites of a range of perspectives, as it considers questions of
context, agency, outcome, and experience. The composition gives rise to the over-
all impression, evaluative or evocative, provided by works of History. The fifth
section brings together a number of the chapter’s themes as it examines an
important case of the historian’s judgement—judgement about the legitimacy of

power in past worlds where legitimacy could be as contested as often today.
History versus Social Science
The sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) is associated above all others with the
imperative of scholarly neutrality. Along with his contemporary, the philosopher
Heinrich Rickert, he observed the distinction between subjective judgements
about social or historical values and the scholarly task of relating those facts to
values in an explanatory sense. For Rickert, ‘Valuations must always involve praise
or blame. To refer to values is to do neither.’ For Weber:
the investigator and teacher should hold as unconditionally separate the estab-
lishment of empirical facts (including what he establishes as the ‘value-oriented’
conduct of the empirical individuals whom he is investigating) and his own
practical evaluations of those facts as commendable or reprehensible (including
among such facts the evaluations made by empirical individuals that are the
object of an investigation).1
Before investigating the practicalities of such a separation it is worth reflecting

on the nature of Weber’s and Rickert’s distinction. They seem to be insisting that
the distinction is logical, but Weber also claimed to be able to show, by reference
to historians like Heinrich von Treitschke and Theodor Mommsen, how the
introduction of value judgements by historians interfered with the understanding
of ‘the facts’.2 On the face of it these are complementary positions, but there is a
tension between them. If establishing facts (including facts about past values) and
making value judgements are two logically separate things, then it is possible to
do both without the latter harming the former, as long as one makes it clear which
of the two operations one is engaged in at any given moment. If, conversely,
judgements must prevent understanding of the facts then the two things are not
logically separate after all, and so whatever the supposed problems of doing both
it is not a category error to do both.
As it happens, Weber never went on to show why historians’ value judgements
must interfere with historical understanding, as opposed perhaps to showing that,
in the wrong hands, value judgements might hinder such understanding. It is no
1 Rickert cited in Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Sciences (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992) 41; Weber quote from Max Weber, ‘Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der
soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften’, in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1985), 489–540, here 499.
2 Max Weber, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf ’, in Max Weber: Schriften 1894–1922, ed. Dirk Kaesler
(Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 2002), 474–511, here 498.
Writing History: Problems of Neutrality 89
proof in either direction, but merely suggestive that there are judgements of
different qualities, to note that one of the last British ‘Whig’ historians,
G. M. Trevelyan, contrasted Mommsen and Treitschke unfavourably with Albert
Sorel. Unlike the work of the Germans, Trevelyan claims, Sorel’s L’Europe et la
Révolution française was ‘impartial’, not because it forswore judgement but
because it engaged in ‘the just distribution of blame for the foolish and wicked
deeds by which men are perpetually destroying the hopes of mankind’.3
As to the basic principle at stake in at least one of his positions, Weber was
contending that evaluation is antithetical to understanding. Richard Evans took a
step in the same direction when he claimed that ‘The historian’s job is to explain;
it is for others to judge’, and that a moral approach to the past was ‘unhistorical’.4
The historian George Kitson Clark had earlier made the same distinction.5
Ginzburg agreed unequivocally: he saw the two concepts of ‘judging or under-
standing’ as presenting a ‘dilemma’, as if they were antonyms. Much the same
thinking is present in a work on collective violence that describes ‘the dual and
conflicting need to both understand and judge’ as an ‘aporia’—a fundamentally
irresolvable clash of principles.6 The claim is wrong. Exercising judgement in any
non-arbitrary sense of the concept presupposes some understanding, but nothing
in the concept of understanding precludes judgement.
Nor is it possible to sever explanation from evaluation by fiat like that of Bloch
as he observed that ‘value judgment has a raison d’être only as preparation for an
action’,7 ‘whereas’—and here the false dichotomy again—‘the historian’s sole duty
is to understand’.8 Oakeshott distinguished between the ‘practical’ use of the past
as it might obtain for politicians in the realms of will and value, and the academic
interest, which was categorically different. These are just assertions and prescrip-
tions without guidelines as to how to turn off one’s evaluative faculties and render
one’s prose value-neutral. With the Weberian distinction between reportage and
evaluation in mind alongside the arguments elaborated in Part 1, we might ask
which operation is in play when the historian establishes that a historical actor
met or fell short of a moral standard of her time. The answer is that here, as in
other cases to be examined below, the reportage and the evaluation cannot be
disentangled, any more than they would be disentangled by my saying that a con-
temporary of mine has met or fallen short of a moral standard of today. To say
that some act was in accordance with or transgression of some standard just is to
imply a judgement on the act. The difference between the assessment of past acts
and the acts of my contemporary is not whether they can be judged according to
standards but the different nature of the standards by which each can be assessed.
3 G. M. Trevelyan, ‘Bias in History’, History 32/115 (1947), 1–15, here 6.

4 Evans, ‘What Is History?’, 4–5.
5 George Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: The History Book Club, 1968), 209.
6 Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, 15; Leonhard Praeg, The Geometry of Violence
(Stellenbosch: SUN, 2007), 152.
7 Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 139, 142. 8 Bloch, Feudal Society, 318.
Weber might well have been correct to distinguish between reportage and
evaluation in the matter of, say, recording the laws of some foreign civilization
past or present. One can easily imagine History as a sort of retrospective ethnology
whereby historians just seek to establish the governing norms of particular pasts
alongside mores, aesthetics, and epistemologies. Weber’s own conception of an
ideal-type social model was of a part with that sort of ethnographic exercise as
it abstracted from a complex reality to generalize about the nature of governing
values and institutional relations at any moment in time. Clearly historians are
not constrained by these concepts of inquiry. (Nor, for that matter, are the social
sciences: it is only from this limited sense of ‘social science’ that the arguments of
this section distinguish History.) Where Weber’s ideal-types and structuralist
accounts (see pp. 215–6) create simplified cross-sections of societies at any one
moment, and where Durkheimian représentations collectives focus on what is
rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
shared by a society rather than what divides it, historians are apt to investigate
change and its causes, to address matters like conflict within and between soci-
eties, to consider agency and acts as opposed to abstractions, and even to con-
sider the human costs of particular social arrangements. Each approach has
strengths and weaknesses, but the latter sorts of approach will involve the histor-
ian in some evaluations or evocations whether she likes it or not.
Finally, for all this talk about actors and actions, humanistic-historical thought
need not be individualistic, and by extension the evaluative element of the
thought need not pertain to individuals. Many human relations are indirect and
fundamentally economic: they are products of situations in which individuals
recursively act in accordance with aggregated patterns that are themselves the
impression of multiple, accumulated individual actions. But identifying imper-
sonal causation is not necessarily the same as claiming natural causation, as in a
freak weather incident. When we call a famine ‘man-made’ the human element
may be the impersonal but nonetheless human-made mechanisms of distribu-
tion, hoarding, export, and pricing that prevent food getting to where it is most
needed. Structural inequality, while an impersonal condition at the point at which
it is encountered, i.e. at which it shapes individual life-prospects, as well as at the
point of its production, is not the same as the naturally-produced physical inequal-
ity brought about, say, by a genetically inherited disability. Structural inequality is
the product of established social arrangements that tacitly favour one part of
humanity over another; arrangements that might include, for instance, unin-
tended but practically significant discrimination against those with genetically
inherited disabilities. Competing philosophies past, as still now, debated the justi-
fiability of such social arrangements. As now, in the past it was perfectly coherent
to contend, with wrong (or right) in mind as well as harm (or benefit), that such-
and-such a structured arrangement or systemic logic was unjust (or just) while
not, or not necessarily, or only to an attenuated degree, criticizing (or praising)
right 2020. OUP Oxford.
those whose daily labour upheld the structures and systems.
EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/29/2020 2:47 PM via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - MAIN
Evaluative and Evocative Language
Words like ‘enslavement’ or ‘killing’ evoke particular responses. Depending on

circumstances one justifies, approves, or disapproves of killing, but, as on the
question of the right to choose, it is not something towards which one is neutral.
That may be a problem for the neutralist, but the neutralist needs to recognize
that neutral-sounding language can be just as deceitful as misplaced evaluative
language. The use of the word mistress to describe Sally Hemings’s relationship to
Thomas Jefferson’s obscures, and is meant to obscure, the fact that she was his
slave, his property, with all the associated implications of power asymmetry and
exploitation. Much the same goes for the 2015 Texas social studies curriculum
that described enslaved Africans as ‘immigrants’ and ‘workers’.9 Such evasions are
not remotely new. The King James Bible delicately deploys the terms ‘servant’ and
‘maidservant’ when the Hebrew and Greek words clearly denoted ‘slave’, and this
verbal tradition was maintained in the American South, where ‘warranteeism’
was also used in lieu of ‘slavery’.10 Historians of Britain and its colonial offshoots
may refer to the Norman conquest of Britain and are scarcely chary of using
‘invasion’ in other contexts but tend to prefer the gentler-sounding European
settlement of the Americas or Australasia; conversely, they may refer to the ‘Indian
mutiny’ of 1857 rather than the ‘Sepoy uprising’. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the
monasteries strikes a milder tone than the suppression of same. Various regimes
and leaders have advocated population transfer when meaning mass expulsion or
ethnic cleansing, while pacification remains one of those terms beloved of mili-
tary historians as much as media commentators and soldiers. Like the others
italicized in this paragraph it is not a euphemism—each of them works in the
sense it is intended to. But they are pre-emptive of evaluation; they are attempts to
command the tone. ‘Neutralization’ is in play, i.e. the attempt to render non-neutral
situations neutral.
Certain things cannot be described in non-evocative terms if one wishes to
describe them accurately, which makes one wonder how George Kitson Clark
reconciled his anti-judgemental stance with his dictum that historians ‘must not
gloze over ugly things, or avoid calling them by their proper names’.11 Consider
rape, specifically the matter of droit de seigneur, the ‘right of the first night’. This
may be a myth, though it is so interculturally widespread a trope that the question
cannot be said to be definitively settled. Even if just a myth it serves analytical
9 On these cases, see Britni Danielle, ‘Sally Hemings Wasn’t Thomas Jefferson’s Mistress: She Was
His Property’, Washington Post, 10 July 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/sally-hemings-
wasnt-thomas-jeffersons-mistress-she-was-his-property/2017/07/06/db5844d4-625d-11e7-8adc-
fea80e32bf47_story.html?utm_term=.dceb32eeda3a.
10 David Brion Davis, ‘Reflections: Intellectual Trajectories: Why People Study What They Do’,
Reviews in American History 37/1 (2009), 148–59, here 157.
11 Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, 208.
purpose, not least because the cultural ‘memories’ of the practice are marked by
resentment of it, rather than acceptance of the lord exercising the ‘right’ in ques-
tion, namely the right to sexual intercourse with a woman prior to consummation
between the newly-weds. Given resentment and its predictability, then whatever
else it might be, a commitment to exercise droit de seigneur would be a commit-
ment to the probable necessity of coercion, on the principle that even outward
compliance from the victim (‘victim’ being an evocative term that is also descrip-
tively appropriate) likely stemmed from fear of the consequences of refusal. The
‘right’, is, amongst other things, a right to coerce. That does not make the coercion
disappear, and coerced sex is reasonably described as rape, whenever in human
history it occurred. Whether the actual word rape is used or not, the only way a
description of the situation could avoid an element that lends itself readily to
negative evaluation would be if it avoided the coercive element of the sexual
encounter, which would be significantly to misdescribe what is entailed in the
exercise of the picturesquely named droit de seigneur.
Now let us consider the concept ‘anti-Semitism’ as it appears in the work of
Steve Rigby, one of the most accomplished historians at blending empirical and
theoretical approaches. Rigby’s English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class,
Status and Gender excels in testing social scientific theories of stratification
against the evidence of this particular national case. One of the ‘status-groups’ he
considers is Jews in the thirteenth century, up to their expulsion by Edward I in
1290, through the lens of growing anti-Semitism. His inquiry as to whether
enhanced hostility can be attributed to the Crown, the Church, or popular senti-
ment concludes on all three, as it interweaves political, religious, economic,
cultural, and social factors at a particular conjuncture.12 During the explanation
he uses the term ‘anti-Semitism’ repeatedly, as defined ‘in the broad sense of anti-
Jewish sentiment’. Like ‘racism’, ‘anti-Semitism’ describes an outlook that no
reader regards neutrally. There is no neutral alternative: possible formulations
like ‘the belief that Jews as Jews were inferior, or sinful, etcetera’ are just different
ways of making the point that anti-Semitism is a blanket belief about a particular
people, and it is precisely this blanket belief that non-anti-Semites reject as prob-
lematic, however sincerely it is held. Putting aside the question of whether it is
possible, would it be desirable in the interests of understanding for us not to have
some evaluative attitude towards anti-Semitism? This is doubtful on the face of it
and it would be unnecessary anyway since, again, evaluation is not antithetical to
understanding. It is perfectly possible to hold in one’s head an explanation as to
why someone espoused anti-Semitism and a belief that anti-Semitism is wrong—
or right, if one is an anti-Semite.
12 S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995), ch. 8; all quotes in this discussion from pp. 284–90 of the book.
When Rigby talks of the general thirteenth-century regnal ‘onslaught’, as

against a twelfth-century ‘halcyon period for the Jews in England’, he reveals the
existential stakes in evocative language that, again, seems perfectly appropriate.
There is a general tendency, in the absence of justificatory argument to the con-
trary, to prefer halcyon days to onslaughts, and even among those who prefer
things the other way around, the predilection is not a consequence of disinterest.
As to the explanation for the intensification of anti-Semitism, in one of Rigby’s
thematic strands we read of Edward’s ‘impoverish[ing] the Jews by punitive taxa-
tion’. Then, having availed himself of other sources of credit than Jewish money-
lenders, Edward saw no advantage in continuing to give Jews legal protection.
Early on in the thirteenth century King John had already shown that protections
and privileges were ‘extremely tenuous and . . . likely to be ignored according to
the convenience of the Crown’; he had engaged in ‘persecution’ and ‘extortion’.
These explanations to venality are apt to put John and Edward in a negative light,
and well might that be the case if the evidence points to their venality.
Some evaluations just can be warranted by the evidence without fear of
anachronism. Take the concept of a deceitful act. Since every culture (or society,
etc) has standards, every culture will have a concept of failing to meet those
standards and of better and worse reasons for failing to meet those standards.
Even where criteria and types of truthfulness vary across cultures, the claim that
someone has been deceitful stands or falls purely on the evidence of transgressing
that norm. Accordingly, one can have evidentiary warrant to describe someone in
the past as having acted deceitfully—it is a legitimate, bona fide ‘research finding’,
as they say—but the description as to deceit will colour the impression of the his-
torical actor. Now ‘cowardice’. Standards and types will vary—compare ancient
Greek martial concepts of honour with some contemporary sense of moral cow-
ardice—but the idea of failing to live up to some standard in relation to a pressure
on one’s interests (say fear) is general. While a specification may be needed as to
the standard of courage/cowardice at issue, it is as legitimate to use the word ‘cow-
ardly’ to characterize the actions of a Homeric Greek who shies from battle as it is
to describe the behaviour of some academic who fails to defend a junior colleague
against the bullying faculty-head.
The cases of deceit and cowardice encapsulate an obstacle to ‘quarantining’ the
evaluative valence of certain historical judgements to the historical period under
investigation via the ‘moral contextualism’ discussed in Part 1. ‘Deceit’ and ‘cow-
ardice’ illustrate the point in a different way to the way in which it is illustrated by
the discussion of anti-Semitism. We can understand that anti-Semites might find
themselves justified in their actions and beliefs, i.e. that some anti-Semites might
be perfectly sincere in their anti-Semitism and would reject the negative connota-
tions of the term. This is rarely the case with ‘deceit’ or ‘cowardice’. When we
deploy such terms, as when we identify King John’s venality, we are making evalu-
ations in light of standards that we have reason to believe that those transgressing
the standards would recognize. But even in these cases the evaluation in some
way exceeds the cultural context of the deceitful or cowardly act. The fact that
some actor, let us call her Helen, transgressed the extant values of system 1 for
reasons that were non-virtuous by the light of those values is scarcely going to put
Helen in a good light from the perspective of any other moral system, since all
moral systems perforce imply the restraint of certain interests in the light of
certain values, and consistency in adherence to values.13 This reasoning holds
even if Helen’s act, while transgressive in system 1, happens not to be transgressive
in system 2 and even praiseworthy in system 3.
Rhetoric and Truthfulness
One need not use the actual words ‘deceit’ and ‘cowardliness’ (etcetera) to prod-
uce the evocative effect that their deployment elicits—the implicit judgement on
King John’s motives is present even though Rigby does not use ‘venal’. Richard
Evans is getting at something like this point when he writes that
a historian who uses terms like ‘wicked’ and ‘evil’ about a person or persons in
the past will only succeed in looking ridiculous. It is perfectly legitimate, how-
ever, to point out in factual terms when people in the past, such as monks and
nuns, behaved in private in a manner quite different to that which they advo-
cated for other people, and boasted of themselves, in public.14
The second sentence is clear and unarguable but the first requires analysis in
order to reflect on what exactly Evans is ruling out and why.
Let us consider three possible reasons for Evans’s rejection of labels like ‘evil’
that are also rejected by the fifty-eight Oxford scholars mentioned in the
Introduction (pp. 4-5). These reasons are: objection to any sort of evaluation per
se; objection to specifically moral forms of evaluation; or objection to words like
evil and wicked on grounds particular to those words. If the objection is to
evaluative language of any sort, whether aesthetic, prudential, or moral, then the
words ‘lazy’, ‘foolish’, or ‘blinkered’ are just as objectionable as ‘evil’. If the objec-
tion is only to moral forms of evaluation, then alongside ‘wicked’ it is not accept-
able to use words like ‘callous’, ‘avaricious’, or ‘oppressive’. (By his own lights,
Kitson Clark should perhaps not have deployed the adjective ‘ugly’—see p. 91—
which is a case of an aesthetic term adopted for moral purposes.) While less
extreme labels than evil, none of these is any less judgemental, and each probably
13 On e.g. truthfulness and reciprocity, see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in
Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal,
‘Evolution of Responses to (Un)fairness’, Science 346/6207 (17 October 2014).
14 Evans, In Defence, 45, 44.
has wider applicability. Moving from the language of criticism to that of praise, it
is equally untrue that historians who deploy positive language, even highly posi-
tive language, are perforce deemed ridiculous. William Hague’s biography of a
slave-trade abolitionist concludes with the sentence ‘In the dark historical land-
scape of violence, treachery and hate, the life of William Wilberforce stands out
as a beacon of light, which the passing of two centuries has scarcely dimmed’, yet
that did not prevent the author winning the 2008 History Today–Longman
Trustees’ Award for History.15 There are few biographies of Winston Churchill or
John F. Kennedy that hide their authors’ feelings about their man. In sum, judge-
mental language of both the moral and non-moral sort is acceptable as judged by
widespread practice. Of the three sorts of objections enumerated, the third
seems to have most force, perhaps because of the quasi-theological nature of
terms like ‘evil’; though even then a number of academic works pertaining to
Nazism have ‘evil’ in their title, as does the collection entitled The Problem of
Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform (2007). ‘Evil’ and
‘wicked’ differ importantly from some of the other terms of disapprobation here
in that they do little descriptive work. They are purely, and thus imprecisely,
evaluative, and have the air of unhelpful, generalized pronouncement. In that
sense they are not representative of the majority of evaluative terms that carry
with them some indication of why they are being used. But Evans does not make
the distinction between sorts of evaluative terms, and so rather casts all of them
out together.
As to one of the major concerns of this section, namely rhetoric, Evans writes:
Historians have far more powerful rhetorical and stylistic weapons at their
disposal than mere denunciation: sarcasm, irony, the juxtaposition of rhetoric and
reality, the factual exposure of hypocrisy, self-interest, and greed, the uncom-
mented recounting of courageous acts of rebellion and defiance. All of this can
be achieved without the direct application of the transient moral vocabulary of
the society that the historian is living in.
Again, there is much to agree with here, but there are also some tensions and
some implications that need drawing out. Putting aside the potential conflation of
‘denunciation’ with the use of any and all evocative terms, this passage does not
provide an argument against evaluation, and so sits slightly askance to other
things Evans has written against value judgement—here his argument is only
against explicit evaluation. Further, the objections to explicit evaluation seem to
be split between the point that it would be embarrassing for the literary sophisti-
cate and the point that it would be ‘transient’. But if transience is a concern, along
15 William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London:
Harper Perennial, 2008), 515.
with its relationship to anachronism, then it is a concern for implicit judgement

just as much as explicit judgement, unless, that is, one intends to leave things
ambiguous by one’s implicitness. Evans does not appear to be espousing ambigu-
ity, but one does need to dig deeper into the various functions ‘rhetoric’ can fulfil,
recognizing that it can dilute, and obscure, but also that, in Meinecke’s words
(p. 10) it can have an effect ‘more profound and moving than if the evaluation
were to appear directly in the guise of moralizing’. In other words, rhetoric can be
a good tool for surreptitious evaluation as well as for implicit evaluation.
An elegant analysis of the techniques of the surreptitious judge is provided by
the historian of science Robert A. Richards in his discussion of ‘the moral struc-
ture of narrative grammar’.
The historian can orchestrate outrage . . . by cutting quotations from an actor into
certain vicious shapes. Or, like Gibbon, the historian can evoke feelings of moral
disdain with little more than the magical mist of antithetic possibilities. As a
result, readers will have, as it were, a sensible, even an olfactory understanding:
the invisible air of the narrative will carry the sweet smell of virtue, the acrid
stench of turpitude, or simply the bittersweet of irony.
Of Gibbon, Richards cites that part of The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire that addresses Julian’s motives while his soldiers were advocating
his accession to the imperial throne still occupied by Constantius II. From
Gibbon:
The grief of Julian could proceed only from his innocence; but his innocence
must appear extremely doubtful in the eyes of those who have learned to suspect
the motives and the professions of princes. His lively and active mind was sus-
ceptible of the various impressions of hope and fear, of gratitude and revenge, of
duty and of ambition, of the love of fame and of the fear of reproach. But it is
impossible for us to ascertain the principles of action which might escape the
observation, while they guided, or rather impelled, the steps of Julian him-
self. . . . He solemnly declares, in the presence of Jupiter, of the Sun, of Mars, of
Minerva, and of all the other deities, that till the close of the evening which pre-
ceded his elevation he was utterly ignorant of the designs of the soldiers; and it
may seem ungenerous to distrust the honour of a hero, and the truth of a phil-
osopher. Yet the superstitious confidence that Constantius was the enemy, and
that he himself was the favourite, of the gods, might prompt him to desire, to
solicit, and even to hasten the auspicious moment of his reign, which was pre-
destined to restore the ancient religion of mankind.16
16 Richards, ‘The Narrative Structure’, 3.

While agreeing with Richards’s general points one could make a strong case that
Gibbon’s evaluations in this particular excerpt are neither surreptitious nor
unconscious, merely implicit.17 As a general principle, the literary theorist
Marshall Gregory suggests that ‘every work of literary art extends to its readers at
least three invitations’, of which one is indeed the invitation to feel and the third
and final the invitation to judge, but there is also the invitation to belief.18 One
might pretentiously translate this into the terms of the classical rhetorical trad-
ition, where to evoke feeling is to use pathos; to evoke belief, logos; to evoke
judgement, iudicium. For Gregory’s second and third invitations to be accepted,
substantiation is required. The question for Gibbon is whether he had empirical
warrant for his insinuations. If he did, then his evaluation should be acceptable
to whoever understands that rhetoric can mean communicating well, rather
than deceit.
Depending on the case, disguised evaluative elements may feature in prose that
lacks any of Gibbon’s purple colouring and avoids the everyday dramatizations
achieved by hyperbole, aposiopesis, paradiastole, or simple descriptive vivid-
ness.19 One such instance is the sparser prose of the ‘realist’ if that minimizes
troublesome elements via ‘full disclosure’ hastily mentioned then discarded, or
provides summary justifications passed off as self-evident in the real world of
tough decisions, or merely avoids the trickiest questions in the hope that the
reader does not know to ask them. Here, ‘realism’ functions more like rhetoric
understood as legerdemain.
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides is one scholar whose qualifications as
a realist vary depending upon whether that epithet applies to his mode of histor-
ical writing or his view of international relations. Either way, his scholar Walter
Robert Connor commends the Thucydidean use of straightforward reportage as
artifice. There is, Connor writes, nothing wrong with ‘using objectivity as an
authorial stance rather than as a principle or goal’. Connor invokes the journalist
and historian of the Vietnam War, Jonathan Schell, who opened one essay with
the avowed intention of recording ‘what is happening to Vietnam—to the people
and the land—as a result of the American military presence. I shall not discuss
the moral ramifications of that presence. I shall simply try to set down what I saw
and heard first hand.’20 The student of evaluation is, however, bound to inquire
after the similarities between what Schell did and what historians can legitimately
17 For Gibbon’s inconsistencies, his difficulty in dealing with changes in character over time, and
his tendency to make overall judgements on people as well as motivations in specific instances, see
Charlotte Roberts, Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
27 ff., which focuses in particular on Julian.
18 Marshall W. Gregory, ‘Redefining Ethical Criticism: The Old vs. the New’, Journal of Literary
Theory Online 4/2 (2010), 273–301, http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/287/879
19 Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 69–70.
20 Connor, Thucydides, 7.
do, and thus whether Connor is correct to deploy them together in support of his
contention. There are good grounds for believing him to be incorrect.
Despite disavowing moral comment, Schell was aware of the contexts in which
he would be read; his words would provide moral ammunition in the Vietnam
debate. He was trying to establish awareness in order to shift the centre ground of
the field of common sense on which arguments about Vietnam were conducted.
Rather than being pre-emptive, trying to establish the terms of debate by getting
in first, he was being counter-pre-emptive.21 Not a political or moral argument as
such, and more reportage rather than analytical contemporary History, his piece
was a preliminary to such arguments. It was legitimate in that capacity insofar as
it helped correct a presumptive balance of official or popular opinion that down-
played the consequences of the American military presence for Vietnam by the
ever-useful device of simply ignoring them. Schell’s was a provision of evidence to
be taken into account in a future reckoning. Historians are not in the same situ-
ation, however. On the whole they deal more in integrated explanations than
prolegomena or polemic, as elaborated below in the discussion of Histories as
compositions (pp. 102–113). For the historian to deploy ‘objectivity as an author-
ial stance rather than a principle or goal’, is to enter that terrain of ambiguity
between implicit and surreptitious judgement into which Meinecke strode when
he commended ‘abstain[ing] from value judgements . . . as an artifice’. At worst it is
to pronounce at the reckoning without even alerting the reader that a reckoning
had occurred.
Ultimately, when making explicit judgement or deploying rhetorical devices
from the romantic to the ‘realist’ varieties, the question is of authorial responsibil-
ity, but responsibility to what? The answer must prioritize some conception of
shared scholarly standards, but that does not get us too far since some think neu-
trality should be a standard. If we define neutrality as precluding any explicit or
implicit value judgements of any sort, then for reasons already provided that
standard is ill-conceived. It seems unobjectionable to state instead that whatever
else the historian’s responsibilities are thought to include, they must include and
indeed prioritize a commitment to truthfulness.
Truthfulness is an ethical commitment. It does not guarantee locating the
truth, however truth is defined, but it is a commitment amongst other things to
rigour in making inferences from evidence, and because it is therefore also a
commitment to taking account of thesis-challenging evidence, it is a commitment
to acting without fear or favour in coming to conclusions. This is not to say that
everything can be judged according to the rubric of truthfulness, and certain
value judgements cannot be, but it is to say that when there is a clash between the
principle of truthfulness and another principle, truthfulness must win out.
21 To use the term ‘counter-pre-emptive’ in the sense deployed by W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on

Social Theory, i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 339.
In order to fulfil the commitment to truthfulness, historians have to be careful

to establish legitimate and illegitimate meanings of concepts like ‘balance’, ‘impar-
tiality’, and ‘fairness’. An illegitimate meaning is that to which critics of the British
Broadcasting Corporation rightly gesture when they invoke the BBC’s ‘fairness
bias’ or ‘balance bias’. Concern to air a ‘balance of opinions’ can result in the
scientific expert in the study of climate change being paired off with a corporate
climate-change denier. One way to improve the situation would be for the BBC to
‘balance’ opposing opinions from authorities of roughly equal relevant intellec-
tual stature and commitment to investigative principles, but the sort of ‘playing
off ’ involved there is more akin to what the textbook-writer tries to achieve as she
summarizes and juxtaposes key arguments in some debate for her readers. When
the historian is engaged in her own research project or work of synthesis, neither
of these sorts of ‘balance’ pertain. For the historian in the mode of original inves-
tigation, ‘balance’, like ‘impartiality’, relates to treatment of whatever is considered
to be the evidence—it makes no sense to talk of ‘balancing arguments’ in a way
that is separate from the processes of inference from evidence that lead to the
production of the argument.
‘Even-handed’ may or may not be a synonym for ‘impartial’ in that final sense.
When the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote of David Cesarani’s Major Farran's
Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain's War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945–1948 that
Cesarani tried to be ‘even-handed’ despite having ‘Zionist sympathies’,22
Wheatcroft did not elaborate upon the grounds of his conclusion. What we may
say is that the only legitimate grounds on which Wheatcroft could accuse another
historian of being un-even-handed was in contrast to Wheatcroft’s own evidence-
based idea of what a really even-handed treatment of the historical issues would
look like. Having decided, presumably, that Cesarani’s account fell short in this
respect, and that the shortcomings were sufficiently consistent in one direction,
Wheatcroft attributed the situation to Cesarani’s political views, as opposed to
some accidental oversight of research or shortcoming in understanding. The rea-
son it would have helped if Wheatcroft had been clearer is that expressions like
even-handedness are so often used in relation to interactions between humans.
Even other historians who should be more alert to the potential pitfalls may read
‘even-handedness’ as pertaining to: the interests of concerned parties in the pre-
sent; the behaviour of the relevant parties in the past; or the evidence of the
behaviour of the relevant parties in the past. The last sort of even-handedness is
the only sort to which historians should aspire as historians.
Even-handedness, fairness, balance, and so forth, must pertain to the histor-
ian’s truthful treatment of evidence, without regard to historical parties or audi-
ence. The imperative of truthfulness might involve stating that as far as one can
22 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘On Trying to be Portugal’, London Review of Books 31/15 (6 August
2009), 32–3.
infer from the evidence, historical character or interest group X was responsible
for inciting a race riot against ethnic group Y. Since we tend to view such incite-
ment as bad whenever or wherever it happens, this will colour contemporary
perceptions of X. Political implications may flow from the findings, but insofar as
political considerations consciously shape the historical claims from which polit-
ical implications might be drawn, the historian needs to relabel herself a
propagandist.
The historian is exposed to many influences in the present, and those influ-
ences may push in various directions. While presentism is considered to be a
major problem with historical value judgements, the demands of the present can
equally conduce to the partisan withdrawal of certain historical phenomena from
evaluative consideration. To make the point from the reverse direction, consider
Evans’s statement that especially ‘in periods of mass destruction such as the years
1914–45, it is difficult for the historian not to take a moral stance’.23 The statement
itself is just honesty: what would it say about us if devastating war, genocide, and
totalitarian dictatorship did not arouse some moral response? But questions
remain about the implied threshold that needs to be passed for a moral stance to
be non-controversial, and the nature of that threshold may tell us more about the
present than the past.
To take but the most obvious candidate from the 1914–45 period, Nazi
Germany and its deeds, it is not just a matter of the level of ‘destruction’ but the
nature of and unquestioned responsibility for some of that destruction. While
some scholars have deployed, unscorned, terms like ‘evil’ in discussing Nazism, it
is also possible to discuss some of the historical issues in an understated way pre-
cisely because of widespread knowledge about and disapprobation of Nazism,
because the moral stakes are taken as given, and because no mainstream voices
speak to the contrary. (Exemplary in its understated power is the work of the his-
torian Christopher Browning on the evolution of Nazi policy and the motivation
of perpetrators of the Holocaust.24) Once the principle of value judgement is
admitted, however, it is strange to restrict it to instances such as the Nazi case,
where judgement is obviously merited to anyone who is not an extreme racist.
Such a restriction would tie the historian to the state of popular consensus, and
scarcely coheres with the principle of her acting without fear or favour, letting the
chips fall where they may once one she has exercised due rigour in making infer-
ences from evidence.
If a value judgement on the past is deemed controversial, that may just mean
that it is an unwelcome intervention in some present context, not that the warrant
23 Evans, In Defence, 45.

24 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Christopher Browning with Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins
of the Final Solution (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
for the judgement was questionable. By the same token, writing in such a way as
to cause no ructions in the present can be distinctly loaded, perhaps overtly ideo-
logical.25 The tendency may bespeak a conscious desire not to please or displease
some constituency in the contemporary audience. Or it may reflect a less con-
scious disposition, which in turn is the product of a general socialization whereby
certain practices have become so normalized—‘neutral’—in the present that they
seem perfectly normal in the past too, seeming to warrant no comment.
Treatment of them as neutral in the past reinforces their normalization in the
present. (See Part 4.)
In yet other cases the appraisal may be less categorical or extreme, but that
does not mean it is any the less necessary or legitimate or evaluative. It may suggest
that evaluation is relatively complicated, and thus requires more qualification and
insight. In such instances someone who has spent much time getting to grips with
the historical particulars is singularly well placed.
If the issues are more balanced or fundamentally irresolvable, in the terms
under discussion the balanced or unresolved arguments would still be moral
ones, and a conclusion as to such balance or unresolvability could only arise as
the result of applying evaluative thought in the first place. Consider the ‘standard-
of-living debate’, which concerned arguments about improvement or decline in
the life conditions of workers during Britain’s Industrial Revolution, especially the
period 1790–1840. The social theorist W. G. Runciman pointed out that while it
was possible to come to some general agreement on changes in real wages during
that period, such agreement was unlikely to be reached in other areas, given the
contestedness of concepts like life conditions and the varying ways in which the
revolution affected different people. But the absence of agreement is not a denial
of the stakes, as reflected in Runciman’s own evocative prose.
Is it or isn’t it an ‘improvement’ for the agricultural labourer of the late eight-

eenth century to exchange lower wages and the relatively better sanitation of the
countryside for higher wages but a greater chance of the death of a larger pro-
portion of infant children in the town? . . . How far should the presumptive
improvement in well-being reflected in the statistics for increased per capita
consumption of beer and spirits be offset by evidence for the need to have
recourse to alcohol to assuage feelings of exhaustion, degradation, and
despair? . . . Can the improvement in the welfare of a half-starved crofter’s son
living on potatoes in a hovel in a rain-swept Highland glen who has become a
skilled cotton operative living in a four-roomed house in Glasgow and eating
meat every Sunday be said to compensate for the decline in the welfare of a
hand-loom weaver of the previous generation from a once-prosperous Yorkshire
25 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘Objectivity and the Historiography of the Armenian Genocide’, Armenian

Review 31/1 (1978), 79–87, here 83.
dale who ended up coughing his lungs out in a filthy cellar in Leeds after being
driven to pawn the tools of his only available livelihood?26
Once one reflects on the intimate relationship in a humanistically inflected dis-

cipline between description and the sort of evocative language that encourages or
is tantamount to evaluation, one appreciates how much effort must go in some
cases into avoiding evaluation, and how question-begging that activity itself is.27
Emphasizing the characteristics of language, and the relationship between
description and evaluation, is not to suggest we are in thrall to evaluations beyond
our control. When we use evocative nouns, adjectives, and adverbs we must
acknowledge that they are apt to evoke particular sentiments and ‘own’ the conno-
tations of the verbal choices we make. We also need to think harder about deploy-
ing evaluations consistently and with a determination to ignore the demands
(say) of ‘balancing’ sensibilities in the world of the historian’s readership. There is
no necessary relationship between being controversial or non-controversial in the
present, or between seeming gauche in one’s explicit judgement or suave in one’s
rhetorical insinuations, and being a procedurally sound historian who uses lan-
guage that she deems appropriate to communicate truthfully something that she
infers about the past.
Combining Perspectives
The argument of this section is that a work of History provides an overall impres-
sion whether or not the historian admits it and, depending on topic, this impres-
sion will have evocative or evaluative implications. The historian’s authorial
choices as she creates her composition will not remove the impression; they will
only influence what sort of impression it is. The choices include where to begin
the story, how to contextualize, which perspectives to invoke, and when to move
from an internalized, actor’s perspective to one or more external perspectives.
The way that the historian relates to outcomes caused by the historical actors on
whom she focuses is another element of the composition.
When Jonathan Schell reported the American impact on Vietnam (pp. 97-8),
he substantiated the assertion of the historian Agathias of Myrina (536/7–c.582 ce)
26 Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, i. 325–6.

27 Isaiah Berlin contended in his Historical Inevitability that were the historian to succeed in
expunging from her prose the nouns, adverbs, and adjectives that connote evaluation, the final result
would not be a neutral tale since the very act of expurgation would be so obviously unnatural that it
would arouse the suspicion of the reader. For similar points, see Cracraft, ‘Implicit Morality’. See also
Robert J. Richards, ‘The Moral Grammar of Narratives in History of Biology—the Case of Haeckel
and Nazi Biology, in David L. Hull and Michael Ruse (eds), Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of
Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 429–51, and Richards, ‘The Narrative
Structure of Moral Judgments’.
that the ‘physiognomy of events suggests praise or blame’.28 Whatever rhetorical

skills may be used to present events in a way that minimizes their evocative effect,
or channels it in favourable directions, it remains the case, as Orwell pointed out,
that it is sometimes easiest just to sideline certain matters altogether.29 Polybius
(200–118 bce) exemplified this approach in his attempt to ‘frame the debate’, i.e.
control the evaluative tone. Polybius was critical of the earlier historian
Phylarchus, whose purpose he deemed to have been ‘to emphasize the cruelty of
Antigonus and the Macedonians and also that of Aratus and the Achaeans’ in the
action against the Mantineans in 233 bce. ‘In his eagerness to arouse the pity of
his readers and enlist their sympathy through his story’, writes Polybius, Phylarcus
‘introduces graphic scenes of women clinging to one another, tearing their hair
and baring their breasts’. While mixed with a call for a sort of dry analytical
History, as against Phylarcus’ ‘ignoble and unmanly’ account, this is Polybius’
attempt to control the cause in which the reader’s blood is stirred by the simple
device of not talking about one thing and instead talking about something
else.30 Polybius goes beyond explaining things according to the perspective of a
set of actors past, here Antigonus, the Macedonians, etc. He agrees with their
perspective. He is suggesting that the Mantineans had it coming in virtue of
their earlier treachery, and as such that their suffering merits no sympathy, nor,
therefore, the coverage that might lead to sympathy. He enters the game of
evaluation himself, and whatever we might think of his tactics, he is at least
open about what he is up to.
Much less open are those scholars who adopt the official position of the Turkish
state on what befell the Ottoman population of Armenian Christians in 1915.
These scholars are clearly involved in a blame game. They seek to blame the popu-
lation that was deported and attacked by focusing solely, and exaggeratedly, on
factors that they think justify the policies of the Ottoman regime of 1915, such as
Armenian secessionism and wartime disloyalty, as opposed to the increasingly
chauvinist ideologies of the Ottoman rulers. Under the name of ‘balance’ against
‘Armenian propaganda’, the clearest favouritism is evinced towards a historical
party and a particular present-day statist agenda, which helps explain how little of
this ‘scholarship’ makes an impression in scholarly citation indices outside Turkey.
The first thing to say is that the defences do not even work in their own terms. To
claim that the ‘Young Turks’ believed that the entire Armenian community con-
stituted a security threat—or, the same thing more artfully phrased, that for the
28 Agathias, History of His Own Times, preface, repr. in Arnold Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought
(New York: Mentor Books, 1952), 87–92, here 91.
29 Orwell, Critical Essays, 17: ‘the apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors’,
and that goes for other objects of historical inquiry too.
30 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Penguin, 1979), bk II,
§56. For this not-uncommon feature of Greek and Roman historianship, Victor d’Huys, ‘How to
Describe Violence in Historical Narrative’, Ancient Society 18 (1997), 209–50.
regime ‘security’ was conceived in ethno-religious terms—is really to say that the
Young Turks were after all prejudiced against Armenians, since the harbouring of
beliefs about the collective agenda of an ethno-religious group is just how ethno-
religious prejudice manifests itself. But with a mind to Schell and Polybius, the
whole process of trying to shift the normative focus is much easier if one minim-
izes or just ignores what was actually done by tens of thousands of perpetrators
from Ottoman Muslim state and society, as Armenians were robbed, knifed,
drowned, sawn, cudgelled, shot, crucified, abducted, raped, mutilated, disem-
bowelled, immolated, and left to starve or die from disease. Further, that these
things were inflicted on women and infants, often after their menfolk had already
been killed, and were inflicted systematically in a pattern that reproduced itself
across a vast area, much of it far beyond any war zones, are facts that have to be
downplayed lest the whole narrative of ‘realistic’ security measures against dan-
gerous insurgents is compromised. At the very least, readers might ask whether
anything could really have justified the outcomes in question.
The Turkish case raises in stark terms the general issue of exclusion and inclu-
sion in any historical account. What is and ought to be in a work of History? This
is a difficult area. Focusing on A rather than B for explanatory reasons is clearly
different to following Polybius’ lead by avoiding B for fear that it will influence
evaluations of A. Nonetheless the effect on the overall impression provided by the
historical work might be the same in either case and those emulating Polybius are
more likely to appeal to the principle of freedom of inquiry than to advertise their
partisan tactic. Finally, even if historians wish to, they simply cannot look at
everything, far less look at everything from every perspective. This selectivity
cannot be regretted intellectually since it is a condition of completing any signifi-
cant project of inquiry.
While taking freedom of focus as given, the rest of this section is effectively a
reflection on the responsibility attending that freedom and the legitimate criti-
cisms that may follow from certain uses of it. The aim is to highlight the potential
intellectual and moral problems of exclusive concentration upon the perspectives
and motivations of particular causal actors. The focus of criticism hereafter is by
no means just bad-faith scholarship of the Turkish denialist sort, because bad-
faith scholarship implicitly recognizes the intellectual and moral stakes. A more
important audience comprises those who refuse to admit the evaluative stakes
and just want to get on with providing what they see as valuation-free historical
accounts. Within that broader audience, particular confusion is created by those
who believe in good faith that historical explanation is coextensive with seeing
through the eyes of their chosen historical actors. One even encounters thinkers
whose highest goal is adopting the perspective of their historical actors, as if blind
to the fact that such an approach itself prejudices the issue of justification that
cannot be separated from explanation in morally salient matters.
We have already seen that the opposition between understanding and judge-
ment is a false one, but manifestly we also need to avoid equating the two things
under a title like ‘empathy’ (further discussed at pp. 260–1). Tolstoy approached
such an equation in War and Peace, when he wrote ‘il faut se mettre à la place de
chacun: tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’—‘one should put oneself in the
place of each other person: to understand all is to forgive all’. The polymath
Gustave le Bon (1841–1931) went further. Commenting on the historiography of
the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Hugenots in 1572, which had been charac-
terized by enthusiastic participation, le Bon wrote that ‘When time had some-
what cooled religious passions, all the historians, even the Catholics, spoke of St.
Bartholomew’s Day with indignation. They thus showed how difficult it is for the
mentality of one epoch to understand that of another.’31 Indignation was equated
with misunderstanding, and understanding with enthusiasm for the massacre, as
if understanding the motivating passions was the same as sharing them. A host of
homespun wisdoms point in broadly the same direction. The anthropologist
Bronisław Malinowski was simply wrong that ‘to judge something, you have to be
there’.32 What system of evaluation, from the courtroom examination of acts con-
ducted elsewhere in the dead of night to the study of the moral philosopher to the
citizen’s probe into secret official malfeasance, could ever function under such a
principle?33 Only if metaphors like walking a mile in another’s shoes retain their
metaphoricity can they retain their force. We cannot be swayed by Kitson Clark.
Arguing against ‘judgements on dead people’, he wrote that it is impossible ‘to
know enough of the circumstances of those on whom they are to be pronounced’.34
This is true of living people too, but judge their acts we nevertheless do, and
routinely.
Returning from the empaths to the self-professed neutralists, the likes of
Robinson and Gallagher do not themselves want to think as Victorian officials
thought: reasonably enough, they want to portray to their readers what they infer
the officials thought in order to help their readers understand the officials. But
understanding historical actors involves more than understanding their own
account of themselves. In certain respects historians can understand past actors
better than those actors did themselves, and past societies better than their inhab-
itants did. This is not because of inherently superior capacities of insight. It is
because the historian has an external perspective, which means that she can
observe some of the conditions of the actors’ beliefs that were invisible to the
actors. As part of their explanations we expect historians to provide such external
insights, which is one of the things we are getting at when we talk of establishing
the contexts of actors’ lives.
31 Gustave le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution (1913; Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision Publications,
2010), 25. ‘Ils montrèrent ainsi la difficulté de comprendre la mentalité d’une époque avec celle d’une
autre.’
32 Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the West Pacific (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922),
cited in Ryszard Kapuściński, The Other (London: Verso, 2008), 88.
33 Arendt makes similar points to those of the two sentences preceding this footnote in her
postscript to the revised edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 295–6.
34 Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, 209.
Identifying matters that were not considered by contemporaries is not necessarily

the same as treating them anachronistically or imperially. Anthropologist Mark
Hobart puts a great burden on the ‘may’ when he writes that in choosing ‘contexts
in preference to those used by the participants themselves, we may be guilty
simultaneously of an act of distortion and a subtle kind of epistemological
domination’.35 The historian’s access to evidence that was not available to contem-
poraries enables her to discern agendas or patterns or actions that may have been
hidden at the time, which is why the time machine that deposits us at the same
spatio-temporal point as the actor would not solve all the historian’s investigative
problems. The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote that one should not look
to the actor for the meaning of her acts, but ‘to the acts themselves’. In any society,
many relations are indirect, ‘economic’ in the previously specified sense (p. 90).
Acts may embody some systemic logic that is lost on individual actors. The quest
to understand systemic or otherwise institutionalized power relations will not
necessarily be furthered by listening to what individuals from past societies might
have believed. The historian may be interested in interrogating things that seemed
mundane or given in their historical context, and while this new interest may
issue in tales of the marginalized (e.g. females in male-dominated societies), it
will also issue in greater understanding of the marginalizers, since one learns a
great deal about a social order by that which it takes, unquestioned, as given. The
nature and function of social structures is often more easily discernible from
beyond those structures than from within them.
The combination of external and internal perspectives is one of the hallmarks
of the composition created by the historian. Collective memory illustrates the
amalgamation of different elements, as when, for instance, impressions of
Winston Churchill interpenetrate with what the British are apt to call Dunkirk
spirit, or the actions of Roosevelt fuse with impressions of what Americans are
apt to call the greatest generation. This fusion happens all the time in works of
professional History too. A proverbial historian of Germany in the eighteenth
century might write on the Enlightenment in general and the thought of Kant
specifically, yet the book as a whole will not leave the reader with an impression
of two entirely separate entities; rather, students of the German Enlightenment
will recognize the interpenetration of the ‘spirit of the times’ and one of its most
innovative manifestations as they chart the uncertain, interactive relationship of
agent and context.36 It is not that historians cannot establish the volition and
35 Mark Hobart, ‘Introduction: Context, Meaning, and Power’, in Mark Hobart and
Robert H. Taylor (eds), Context, Meaning and Power in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1986), 7–19, here 8.
36 The point about combining different perspectives was made in embryonic form by John Dewey,
‘Historical Judgments’, in Meyerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time, 163–72, here 168. It
has been elucidated elegantly in Jörn Rüsen, Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit. Grundzüge einer
Historik II: Die Prinzipien der historischen Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986),
ch. 2.
motivation of actors and set those things in relations of tension or harmony with
structures of social function, meaning, and value. Given appropriate evidence, all
such discriminations are possible within a work of History, and they influence
individual choices of words and phrases. Rather, the overall impressions of events,
periods, places, etcetera, that are created by a History cannot be distilled to just
one side of any of the duos subjective vs objective, internal vs external, human vs
structural, motive vs outcome, etcetera. Well might this be so, as is illustrated by
contrast with a hypothetical alternative.
Imagine a historical actor, Ivan, and an exclusively internalist account, by the
end of which we readers have come to understand why, by Ivan’s thinking, he
performed morally significant act X. Does such an account fulfil the criteria of
neutral explanation? Well, explanation of what? If what is supposed to be
explained is Ivan’s beliefs themselves, then even if we say neutrality has been
achieved, what is produced by the internalist account is a description of elements
of his beliefs and only a peculiarly aetiolated explanation of them: an explanation
of someone’s beliefs is at best only partially available from within those beliefs. If
what is supposed to be explained is the act X, we have a peculiarly aetiolated
explanation of X for the same reasons that we have a peculiarly aetiolated account
of Ivan’s beliefs; furthermore, the only view of X’s justifiability that we readers will
be exposed to will be Ivan’s. If that is what a neutral account involves then it is not
desirable on intellectual or moral grounds. The account will not have addressed
questions like: how did Ivan’s agenda compare to those of others in Ivan’s pos-
ition?; were the Freemasons really in a conspiracy against the State when he
decided to launch a campaign against them?; was the girl really ‘asking for it’ by
her behaviour? Had the text addressed such questions, then it would have
betrayed the principle of internal explanation by tacitly characterizing Ivan’s
behaviour by standards other than Ivan’s; standards, wheresoever they might
come from, pertaining to the justifiability of X. As things stand we have no idea of
whether Ivan is deluded, unusually prejudiced, cynical, and so on.
A heuristic purpose of this extreme thought experiment is to stress that what is
left out of a historical account is as important as what goes into it if the excluded
material would have changed the impression given by the content. This rather
banal-sounding claim gets its importance from the fact that on the whole we do
tend to prioritize what historians and other pronouncers say rather than what
they do not say. Part of the explanation for that tendency is surely that we recog-
nize that pronouncers cannot say everything, but another part is that it is more
difficult to make positive inferences about what they ‘mean’ by exclusions than by
those things that they do attend to. It is easier to engage with what is said and,
when one has prose to refer to, one can point positively to the grounds for one’s
inferences, rather than speculating as to the reason for and character of omissions.
Nonetheless a rich history of hermeneutic reading techniques and rhetorical
argumentative techniques reminds us of the structuring role of absences as well as
presences. The expression ‘constitutive silences’ encapsulates the point.37

Historians can write what they wish, given empirical warrant, but that is not the
end of the matter. They may still be held accountable by readers who recognize
that the written account is constituted as much by what it omits as what it
includes, and who may find certain exclusions bewildering, suggestive, or down-
right suspicious.
The intellectual problems arising from a focus on particular agent perspectives
have a moral element insofar as they pertain to justification in its moral sense.
Mein Kampf is, we can infer, an expression of Hitler’s world-view, and since it is in
his own words it is a particularly important document. Yet while it is important to
transmit the content of Hitler’s views on ‘Jewish conspiracy’ or social Darwinism
because it helps explain what he did when in power, it would be strange indeed
were the historian of Hitler’s beliefs effectively just to precis the relevant parts of
Mein Kampf as opposed to providing some additional, externalized perspective on
why Hitler subscribed to such beliefs—an account which could not but highlight
that some of his beliefs were not justified. In The European Civil War (1987), the
conservative scholar Ernst Nolte depicted Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941
as a sort of pre-emptive strike, effectively a self-defensive action, and in the way he
related Soviet crimes in the 1930s with the Holocaust, he gave the impression of
assimilating his perspective as investigator to that of Hitler, or of Nazism.38 Nolte
seemed not just to be saying that the Nazis felt themselves justified in their
actions—which scarcely distinguishes them from most warmongers and mass
murderers and anyone else—but that in some sense they were justified, objectively.
This is what the Turkish justifiers do in the Armenian case, alongside their denial.
One needs to be clear about whose perspective is whose, and on that front
Robert J. McMahon’s generally excellent History of the Cold War has a problem-
atic passage:
When the Soviets dispatched military equipment and technicians to support

the fledgling regime of Patrice Lumumba, the Americans dispatched an assas-
sination team in an unsuccessful attempt to dispose of the embattled Lumumba,
an ardent nationalist whom they wrongly tagged as a wild-eyed radical and
Russian stalking-horse, In 1961, pro-American Congolese forces murdered
Lumumba . . . at the same time, Joseph Mobuto, America’s favoured candidate,
emerged as the dominant figure in a new Congo government. The United States
thus managed temporarily to thwart Soviet ambitions in central Africa, if at the
cost of imposing Cold War geopolitics on an impoverished, strife-torn former
colony.39
37 The name most recently and famously associated with reading for absences is Jacques Derrida.
38 Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1987).
39 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 85, 88.
In the first sentence McMahon establishes the ‘internal’ American perspective of

the time on Lumumba whilst applying an external perspective that suggests the
inaccuracy of that American view. By the first clause of the final sentence
McMahon brings the external perspective into line with the internal American
perspective, implying that the internal perspective was accurate, and thus that the
US successfully thwarted an actual threat. But then in the second clause of the
final sentence McMahon returns to the corrective form of the external perspec-
tive, as he states that the US, not Lumumba or the Soviets, ‘impos[ed] Cold War
geopolitics’ on Congo. Knowing what really went on here is not unimportant in
understanding the Cold War, the course of Congolese history, and subsequent
attitudes to US neo-imperialism. Knowledge of CIA perspectives is a contribu-
tion to historical knowledge but so is the contention that those outlooks were
incorrect, if we have evidence to believe that they were. Both the understanding
of the perspective and understanding of the mistakenness of the perspective con-
tribute to the historian’s composite and give it a different tint to that which it
would have had were the matter explored no further than to the point of claiming
that American actors believed themselves justified in trying to assassinate a for-
eign leader and then supporting his overthrow.
The relationship between causal explanation and assessment of moral respon-
sibility is always close to the surface in the historiography of the Cold War and its
origins. Given that so much of the debate revolves around each superpower’s
understanding of the other’s intentions and actions, it is incumbent upon histor-
ians to be maximally clear about what they are claiming in any given instance.
‘Was it justified?’ is a different question to ‘did the relevant actors feel it was justi-
fied?’ In principle historians can make the relevant distinctions as they deploy
internal and external perspectives; in practice it may well be difficult to make
those distinctions given the role of perception, but under such circumstances the
historian must not muddy the water even further. In another generally excellent
study, this time of superpower confrontation in South East Asia, Steven Hugh Lee
alternates between invoking an objective ‘communist threat’ or ‘Soviet threat’40
and a more subjective ‘perceived [US] need to undermine the bases of Soviet
power’, culminating in a confusing blend of the objective and the subjective: ‘a
perceived need to counter the increasing global threat of the Soviet empire’.41 The
problem for the reader is not understanding what American actors perceived, but
rather understanding what Lee is claiming in explanation and justification of
those perceptions.
The competing influence of two old historiographical traditions can still be
detected in the ‘debate’ about perspectives. Embodying one tradition we have the
40 Steven Hugh Lee, Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vietnam and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia,
1949–1954 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 3, 4, 5.
41 Lee, Outposts of Empire, 8, 9.
likes of Agathias of Myrina with his conviction that the very ‘physiognomy of
events suggests praise or blame’. Agathias was writing in the spirit of the major
Greek and Roman historians before him and many medieval historians after-
wards as they recorded worldly events with a view especially to the exemplary
quality of notable deeds that would ring down the ages. Let us call this a more
externalist tradition. The other tradition we may call internalist. It was the her-
meneutic tradition of interpretation developed by theologians as they read sacred
texts in pursuit of religious meaning. Over time the hermeneutic approach was
applied to a much wider range of actual texts and human activities and then the
texts of other cultures and their other creative objectifications, like art and archi-
tecture. Hermeneutics was vital in shaping traditions of historical source criti-
cism and indeed the techniques of interpretative anthropology. Worldly
objectifications of meaning are the starting point of the inquiry, and the herme-
neut then works backwards inferentially to the minds or cultures which pro-
duced them.
The two traditions are not quite opposites, but tensions may arise between
them in virtue of their significantly different priorities. We may detect the influ-
ence of the ‘internalist’ hermeneutic tradition in the thought of the historically
minded philosopher Martin Heidegger as he denigrated the ‘ocular’ perspective.42
In Collingwood’s influential account of the historical discipline, the historian’s
investigation ‘may begin by discovering the outside of an event, but it can never
end there; he must always remember that the event was an action, and that his
main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent’.
Since ‘all history is the history of thought’, the object must be the ‘inside’ or
‘thought-side’ of events rather than the ‘outside’ in the sense of things that might
be ‘described in terms of bodies and their movements’. For the hermeneutic phil-
osopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the key was ‘the movement of understanding from the
external to the internal’, to ‘what is inaccessible to the senses and can only be
experienced inwardly’, away from the ‘outer clamour of history’.43 Historical events
were ‘a manifestation of the mind in the world of the senses’, but the quest was for
the mind beyond the world of the senses.44 The medievalist R. J. W. Southern
described ‘the valuable deposit of the past’ as comprising people’s ‘thoughts and
visions, moods and emotions and devotions’.45 The contemporary historian of
emotions Susan J. Matt enjoins recovering ‘the history of subjectivity’, uncovering
‘intention, motivation, and values that might be invisible if only external behav-
42 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), 400: the expression ‘okularen
Bestimmung’, ocular ascertainment, was that of Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg.
43 Parts of Collingwood and Dilthey cited in Mark Salber Philips, ‘Distance and Historical
Representation’, History Workshop Journal 57 (2004) 123–41, here 134. Other Collingwood citations
and context from Collingwood, The Idea of History, 213, 315–20.
44 Esteve Morera, Gramsci’s Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990), 16.
45 R. W. Southern, History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern, ed. R. J. Bartlett
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 100.
iors . . . are traced’.46 All well and good, but there is a rub if the preoccupation is
with accessing the inner meanings of authors, actors, and architects: the rub is
that objectifications of motives and meanings may be inscribed on other people’s
corpses as well as landscape, canvas, or vellum. A worker’s crooked spine is an
objectification of a particular system of labour. Acts may structure the existence
of other parties: one man’s internally stimulated behaviour is another’s experience
of a blow received; one group’s quest for resources to sustain itself is another
group’s eviction or servitude. A victim of domestic violence might be one of patri-
archy’s objectifications. She is also a subject with her own interiority, conceptual-
izations, and capacity for suffering and ascribing meaning to her experiences. Just
how problematic indenture to some authorial or internal perspective can be varies
with the sort of History in question.
Let us create another heuristic distinction, this time between historians who
focus more on change and its causes and those who focus more on the texture of
life at any given point in the past. We might parse the distinction as that between
Histories of doing and Histories of being. Histories of doing/cause and of being/
lived texture cover most if not all historianship. Given the focus on texture, the
relative importance of actors disappears. Any person or group, no matter what
their relative power status, is as eligible for consideration as anyone else in terms
of how they lived and experienced bits of life, how they felt about their situation,
and so forth. To put it differently, once one is concerned with texture and the
experience thereof, one may be concerned with subjectivity or internality purely
for its own sake. It jars, however, if the historian of cause restricts her interest
entirely to the subjective realm of relatively powerful agents, given that we tend to
be interested in such agents in the first place because of what they brought on
others through their power.
Event-oriented historians work back inferentially from an event in order to
locate its causes, in a way that is analogous to hermeneuts contemplating the
meanings that drove the creation of their texts, but the endeavour is only given its
impetus by some sense of the significance of the event under explanation, just as
the inquiry into the ‘mind’ or milieu of the artist begins with the painting she
produced. Where does this sense of the event’s significance come from? There are
many sources: if the sense is not provided in the selfsame History that examines
the causes, it may issue from other works of History, or from collective memory
which may be informed by anything from films to memorials to educational cur-
ricula. Some events are well known, and accorded significance in the public
sphere, others not. We have suggested that one can find books that address the
causes of the First World War with little reference to the slaughter of the Somme,
or the legacy of the war in international relations, but it is the fact of battles like
46 Susan J. Matt, ‘Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out’,
Emotion Review 3/1 (2011), 117–24, here 118.
the Somme, or the war’s legacy, that fires so much interest in the causes and
invests them with such significance, moral and otherwise. By the same token a
great deal of antiquarian inquiry into the minutiae of the conflict stems from a
belief in reflected significance, and this is if anything even more true of the
Second World War. In any given historical inquiry that discusses some outcome
or the causes of that outcome, the historian will need to establish a claim on the
outcome’s significance unless she assumes an existing appreciation of its signifi-
cance among her audience. Perhaps she will wish to assert a certain significance
as opposed to a pre-existing estimation of significance. Any assertion of signifi-
cance, whether from scratch or corrective in nature, and whether deflationary or
inflationary in its evaluative implications, will have to deploy its own externalized
evocative terms to describe the event and/or to orchestrate its own evocative illus-
tration of the impact of the event on parties in the past by deploying the ‘voices’ of
those parties. And whether asserting or assuming significance, the historian is
already ‘in the significance game’; she is trading on significance, whether she rec-
ognizes it or not.
Let us say that an attribution of historical causal responsibility takes into
account, as it should, the contexts within which this responsibility was accrued.
Depending upon the assumed or asserted character of the event caused, or act
authored, such contextualization might be tantamount to justification, mitigation,
or aggravation of the actor’s behaviour according to certain inferable local stand-
ards, in accordance with the practice of moral contextualization. But it does not
follow in principle or in widespread practice that descriptions of the acts them-
selves, or their consequences, are aligned evocatively/evaluatively to the ‘terms’ of
the authors of the acts, any more than the imputed significance or appreciation of
a work of art is necessarily aligned to an understanding of the artist. Take the
sentence: ‘For reasons now to be explored heretics were persecuted by Church
and State in the high Middle Ages.’ It would be hard to argue that ‘persecution’
was not an appropriate term for what the authorities embarked upon and the her-
etics were exposed to—they were targeted collectively on grounds of their beliefs.
As such, we can say that labelling something as persecution catches something
inferable about the past. But ‘persecution’ is manifestly evocative of evaluation:
nobody, including those who think it a good thing, stands neutral to it. Perhaps
the sentence could be supplemented by: ‘Heretics were persecuted by Church and
State in the high Middle Ages because the authorities viewed the heretics as a
threat to Christian society and suspected that if the tables were turned the heretics
would have engaged in their own persecution.’ Here we have a mitigating, in some
eyes justificatory, contextual explanation of the Church’s actions. That explanation
could further be modified to make reference to the centralizing, regulating agenda
of the Church and of various States at the time. Each modification enhances the
understanding while giving a different tint to the explanation of motivation, but
either way the descriptive-evaluative word ‘persecution’ remains to attribute a
particular character to the Church’s actions against the heretics, as in the perfectly
appropriate adjective in the title of R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting
Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 (1987).
Legitimacy Contests in the Past
‘Legitimate’, like ‘illegitimate’, is one of those concept-terms that is at once descriptive

and evaluative. Like all such terms it can be used directly or its meaning can be
alluded to, so the coming discussion is not limited to cases where the word is
deployed.47 McMahon’s History of the Cold War exemplifies the allusive route in a
tacitly evaluative and eminently justifiable conclusion, as it distinguishes ‘between
a Soviet empire that was essentially imposed on much of Eastern Europe and an
American empire [in Western Europe] that resulted from a partnership born of
common security fears and overlapping economic needs’.48
The concept of legitimacy has far broader reach than the sense of modern
democratic legitimacy, as Montesquieu observed against the conceits of the
European social contract theories of his age.49 In medieval Europe the concept of
the just king was associated with the king’s executing his mandate to rule in a
spirit appropriate to someone acting as God’s trustee. Later on, monarchs claiming
the divine right of kings were still at least notionally constrained by the precepts of
divine or natural law. In China the concept of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ has existed
for about 3,000 years and is related to the concept of a just ruler rather than inher-
ing in the person of whoever happens to be ruling. To be sure, the doctrine served
the instrumental interests of successful insurgents who wished to claim legitimacy
for their fait accompli and imply possession of a divine mandate to rule. But such
legitimacy claims are always double-edged: the very implication that power could
legitimately be wrested under certain circumstances tied rulers to certain precepts.
When the concept of the Mandate was established, as the West Zhou dynasty
(1100–771 bce) supplanted the Shang dynasty, the Zhou leaders claimed ‘heaven
does not favour anybody; only morality makes heaven trust you’.50
47 The historian David M. Potter was making a closely related point about the relation between
description and evaluation in this connection when he wrote: ‘it is a paradox not generally recognized
that the historian cannot make a simple descriptive observation about the degree of group cohesion
among an aggregate of people without inadvertently registering a valuative judgment as to the validity
of the powers that this aggregation may assert for itself. If he were applying a standard of ethics, it
would be recognized at once as a valuative standard, but since he seemingly applies only a measure of
relationships, it is easy to overlook the valuative implications.’ Potter, ‘The Historian’s Use of
Nationalism and Vice Versa’, American Historical Review 67 (1962), 924–50, here 929.
48 McMahon, The Cold War, 33.
49 A point made and nuanced in Plamenatz, Man and Society, i. 262–3. See also John Macmurray,
Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), ch. 9.
50 Yanqi Tong and Shaohua Lei, Social Protest in Contemporary China, 2003–2010: Transitional
Pains and Regime Legitimacy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 28.
As with concepts like deceit or cowardice, historians will be aware that differ-
ent standards of legitimacy obtained at different times, and, given evidence as to
the nature of the standards, historians will be able to make the relevant adjust-
ments in assessing its presence or absence. This section reflects on the conditions
by which a historian might infer that a given dispensation was legitimate or not.
As with ‘deceit’ and ‘cowardice’, the conclusion will still have an evaluative qual-
ity whose valence is not quarantined to the past in question. As with ‘persecu-
tion’, the conclusion as to legitimacy cannot just be a function of what the
powerful party felt was appropriate. With its emphasis on the contestation of
standards within the past, this section serves as a conclusion to Part 2 and a
segue into Part 3.
It is understandable that those who wish to downplay the evaluative nature of
their undertaking or have just not considered the evaluative implications will
assert or assume legitimacy and then move on swiftly to discuss other matters
‘neutrally’ against that tacit backdrop. Sometimes they will surely be correct in
their assertions or assumptions. Yet at other times they might be subscribing to
what we can call the historicist fallacy, which is one of two almost opposing errors
in the consideration of legitimacy in societies past. The historicist fallacy is that
tendency whereby referring to some act or arrangement in the context of its time
is effectively an injunction to understand it as being legitimated by its authorship
there and then, rather than its merely being conceivable, which is axiomatic.
There was an appropriation of Darwin that assumed moral improvement over
time, by which logic the latest form of life must be morally superior to its prede-
cessors. This book does its bit towards further discrediting that idea (see pp. 234–6).
But there was an equally problematic competing appropriation of Darwin that
played on the concept of niche adaptation. This appropriation can be traced back
at least as far as the nineteenth-century historian and critic Hippolyte Taine.51 For
a more recent version of the position, take The Evolution of English Justice (1999)
by Anthony Musson and W. M. Ormrod. They applaud the ‘neutral stance which
judges change by its success or failure in adapting to new environmental condi-
tions’. Quoting biologist Stephen Jay Gould, they ask rhetorically, ‘if an amoeba is
as well adapted to its environment as we are to ours, who is to say that we are
higher creatures?’ They describe their stance as one of ‘moral neutrality’ for the
historian. They do not address why it might not be appropriate to treat human
social arrangements in the way that one might treat amoebas’ evolutionary
adjustments.52 Far from being ‘neutral’ as to values, this sort of niche-thinking
51 Martha Wolfenstein, ‘The Social Background of Taine’s Philosophy of Art’, Journal of the History
of Ideas 5/3 (1944), 332–58, here 339–40.
52 In fact there are a number of tensions in their words, which make it hard to identify any underly-
ing philosophy except a standard rejection of judgementalism. They find that ‘moral neutrality has
particular advantages for the study of later medieval English law, since fourteenth century political
rhetoric was often preoccupied with a perceived deterioration of public order and the apparent
can lead to an almost naturalistic legitimation in the sense of saying that values
and arrangements X were ipso facto appropriate for place-time Y because they
evolved there. Durkheim took this position when claiming: ‘History has estab-
lished that, except in abnormal cases, each society has in the main a morality
suited to it, and that any other would not only be impossible but also fatal to the
society which attempted to follow it.’53 Likewise the American social scientist
W. G. Sumner (1840–1910) in his classic Folkways: ‘Everything in the mores of a
time and place must be regarded as justified with regard to that time and place.’
‘Hence our judgments of the good or evil consequences of folkways are to be kept
separate from our study of the historical phenomena of them, and of their
strength and the reasons for it. The judgements have their place in plans and doc-
trines for the future, not in a retrospect.’54
Ranke partook of a version of this niche-thinking: when he described every
epoch as ‘immediate unto God’ and each as equidistant from eternity,55 at the
same time as validating other ways of life in the past, he was effectively giving
absolute sanction to his social order in its actions in the present. To remove the
self-serving element while staying true to the more inclusive side of Ranke’s pre-
scription, let us replace the idea that all social orders are perforce divinely
approved with the idea that no given social arrangement was/is privileged in and
of itself just by virtue of existing. Unless we historians believe in divine warrant
for this or that social arrangement, we need to avoid any implication that, for
instance, negative attitudes towards acts or dispositions that we now term homo-
sexual, or positive attitudes towards chattel slavery, just are appropriate to a cer-
tain time or place. These attitudes never ‘just’ existed—they were brought into
being out of situations in which they were only one possibility among others.
reduction in the will, or the capacity, of the crown to deliver justice to its subjects . . . It has been
accepted for some time, however, that increasing public criticism is no real measure of the supposed
failure of the late medieval judicial system: indeed, as K. B. McFarlane pointed out, it can actually
imply the exact opposite, by signifying that society had higher expectations of that system and was
more conditioned to working with, rather than against, it. Evolution theory here allows us to avoid
assumptions about whether the judicial system became either “better” or “worse” in the course of the
fourteenth century, and instead calls for a more objective assessment of the extent to which the law
and its agencies, as social institutions, adapted successfully to the environmental changes going on
around them.’ Despite the authors’ disavowal, their language in the final sentence is shot through with
tones of evaluation according to standards of ‘success’: how is success to be judged other than by better
and worse approximations to whatever the standard in question? They equate moral neutrality with
the possibility of ‘objective assessment’ of whether such standards are attained, which is not obviously
a stance of neutrality. Prejudicially, they equate moral non-neutrality with ‘assumptions’ instead of
with substantiated reasoning. Indeed, whilst combating negative evaluation they open the door to
positive evaluation with an example of McFarlane’s sophisticated evaluative reasoning. Musson and
Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 4–5.
53 Émile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (1906; New York: The Free Press, 1953), 56.
54 W. G. Sumner, Folkways (1906; New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 58–9.
55 Daniel Fulda, Wissenschaft aus Kunst: Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen
Geschichtsschreibung, 1760–1860 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996) 183–4.
Lord Acton (1834–1902), a historian often dismissed as a moralist, was alert to

the problem of automatically privileging successful dispensations. If all value is
relative to local, historical, norms then is it just a matter, as Lenin put it, of kto-
kogo?—who (rules) whom?—and gets to determine the prevailing norms.56 The
philosopher of science Karl Popper called it moral positivism, or ‘the theory that
there is no moral standard but the one which exists; that what is, is reasonable
and good’.57 Popper might as well have had in mind the historian Thomas Carlyle,
who wrote that ‘all goes by wager of battle in this world’ and ‘strength, well under-
stood, is the measure of all worth. Give a thing time; if it can succeed, it is a right
thing.’58 E. H. Carr sometimes echoed Carlyle from a very different political
position.59
Knee-jerk legitimation, stemming from an undiscriminating fear of anachron-
ism, can produce entertaining results. In autumn 2008 the British justice secre-
tary was petitioned to grant posthumous pardons to the women and men
executed for witchcraft in Britain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Two years before, the British Government had created a precedent for such action
by granting posthumous pardons to British soldiers executed during the First
World War for cowardice, when some may well have been suffering from neuras-
thenia (‘shell-shock’). The historian Geoffrey Alderman provided what he must
have assumed to be an authoritative historian’s perspective on an illegitimate
politicization of History. He objected to the principle of posthumous action,
asserting that all of ‘those executed for desertion remain guilty as charged’. As to
the witches: ‘whatever the outcome of the petition invoked on their behalf, [they]
remain, in historical terms, as guilty as hell’. What was ‘then’ considered ‘ “right”
may now be considered very wrong’, he argued, and such pardons amount to the
use of contemporary ‘law to rewrite history’.60 At one level the debate revolves
around what we understand by ‘guilty’. If we mean guilty in the eyes of the law or
the State then of course these ‘witches’ and oft-shell-shocked soldiers were guilty.
But the same would be true today of someone successfully framed for murder by
corrupt policemen. If, however, we mean ‘guilty because they did what they were
accused of ’, whether that be desertion because of cowardice or the practising of
witchcraft, then, along with our framed ‘murderer’, some of the soldiers and most
if not all of the ‘witches’ were not guilty. It may well be that some of the soldiers
were simple deserters, and Alderman is correct that in these cases the men did
what was charged of them and with the appropriate mens rea, or guilty state of
mind. All that that illustrates, however, is the existence, on one hand, of a fact of
56 Lord Acton, Historical Essays and Studies (London: Macmillan, 1908), 436–7.
57 Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, ii (London: Routledge, 2003), 227.
58 Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, repr. in Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero-
Worship, Past and Present, ed. G. T. Bettany (London: Ward, Lock and co., 1892), 105.
59 For a nuanced treatment, see Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982
(London: Verso, 1999), ch. 8.
60 Geoffrey Alderman, ‘The Witching Hour Has Passed’, The Guardian, 3 November 2008.
the matter, namely whether people had practised witchcraft or deserted through
fear. On the other hand, there are only competing beliefs about that fact of the
matter, some of which were and are correct and some of which were and are not.
What happened in the past, as far as we can tell, is that courts sometimes found
people guilty for things that they had not done or had not done with the mens rea
that the courts claimed. No harm is done to the past to acknowledge that, as if it
were anyway possible to change the past. No one proposed to deny that the courts
made the decision they did, or to locate seventeenth-century trial manuscripts in
the British National Archives, cross out guilty verdicts, and replace them with the
opposite. This is not the same as Stalinists airbrushing murdered former col-
leagues out of photographs to pretend that they had never been comrades in the
first place.
The path to Alderman’s conceptual misunderstanding was paved not just by a
misplaced fear of anachronism but also by an equally misplaced sense of what
‘proper’ historical understanding must involve in the sphere of moral discourse.
In Alderman’s failure to distinguish a fact of the matter from one perspective on
the matter, he adopts the view of dominant forces in the past. We are left with a
peculiar legal-moral positivism retrojected: if a state once declared that Catherine
was an artichoke, then Catherine was indeed an artichoke, and must be remem-
bered as such. What the dominant power decreed was ipso facto correct.
While it would be bizarre to pretend that every society had the same set-up
and values, and pointless to suggest that they should have done, that does not
mean one needs to opt for Darwinian niche-thinking or Alderman’s peculiar legal
positivism, and nor ought it lead to embracing a roughly opposite error. That
faulty alternative is the vulgar Marxism that sees all claims to legitimacy as the
camouflaged expression of some sectional interest. Such Marxism carries with it
the tacit allegation that legitimacy is/was not real legitimacy and accuses those
masses who accept the claim to the legitimacy of an order of suffering from false
consciousness. This line of thought suffers from at least one of two significant
problems, one empirical, the other conceptual. Insofar as the Marxist makes a
claim about false consciousness, or an inauthentic ‘second nature’, he must have
some claim on what real consciousness or an ‘authentic’ outlook would look like,
but such a claim has no empirical grounding since humans are not available for
interrogation in a pre-socialized state. The claim may merely reflect the Marxist’s
own preferences. When the vulgar Marxist makes a claim to the effect that social
orders are held together by a species of moral propaganda for governing material
interests, then he is cutting off the branch on which he sits insofar as he tries to
make the case for a truly legitimate new order. He has already undermined the
idea of there being any such thing as true legitimacy to which to appeal. This self-
undermining is a problem of ‘crypto-normativity’.
Crypto-normativity is also a characteristic of the work of the philosopher-
historian Michel Foucault. In his descriptive mode he differed from the early
Marx in denying the existence of a real consciousness that is subverted by false

consciousness. There was, he claimed, no given nature of the human, only varying
conceptions of what it is to be human that were produced by historically contin-
gent ways of conceiving the human. In many ways this was just a restatement of a
sociological commonplace that humans are products of differing societies, but
Foucault gave a particular character to his discussion of subjectivity by relating it
to the workings of power. He conceptualized power in a specific way, especially by
relating it to a web of interlocking knowledge-claims in the human sciences from
psychiatry to economics, claims that he called ‘discourses’. In his best-known con-
ceptualization he also attributed power a dispersed, impersonal, invisible character.
(Towards the end of his life Foucault implied a more commonplace conception of
power that militated against the impression of his work on power-knowledge.61)
This Foucauldian power is cryptic: it doesn’t chain you to a galley bench or have
you beheaded but it speaks through you and makes you, eliciting consent and
creating the conditions for you to be free—which may, again, just be a way of stat-
ing the banal truth that freedom presupposes a structure within which it can be
exercised. For Foucault at that stage of his work, all we are left with is power-
effects. For the individual whose subjectivity is constituted by ‘discourse’, or
‘power-knowledge’, those effects quite simply comprise reality and its social fea-
tures like morality. Yet while he made these descriptive claims Foucault also
manifested a marked distaste for modern regimes of power, both in his historical
work, in which for instance he took sides with those individuals subjected to new
psychiatric and institutional regimes when the asylum was born, and in his later
prescriptive work on resisting regimes of power-knowledge and engaging in lib-
erationist acts of self-creation. His crypto-normativity is manifest in the way his
prescriptive views and his evocative historical accounts undermined his claim to
be presenting a view of power as disinterested and neutral. His concern with the
subjectivity-creating effects of power raised the unanswered question of the justi-
ficatory basis of his own critical stance towards that power, which left him in this
respect in the same conceptual dilemma as the vulgar Marxists.62
At the descriptive level one may contest Foucauldian claims about the cunning
and subtlety of power, for instance by reference to James C. Scott’s work on the
failure of sundry centralized state ‘modernization’ projects.63 Power may be blind,
even foolish, getting away with those shortcomings only because in the last
61 See the distinctly ‘old-fashioned’ connotations of Foucault’s account of power in Michel Foucault,
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 296–9.
62 On crypto-normativity, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1990); Nancy Fraser, ‘Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative
Confusions’, Praxis International 1/3 (1981), 272–87. Jonathan Hearn, Theorizing Power (Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2012) 91–2, 104–5 on domination and on Steven Lukes’s claim that Foucault often really just
deployed ordinary sociological concepts in radical-sounding ways.
63 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
instance it just can, simply in virtue of its coercive capacity and the prohibitive
costs of challenging it. For those nobles and English churchly chroniclers who
could only conceive of the mobilized peasantry of 1381 as an animalistic rabble
instrumentalized by a devious leadership, the unappreciated truth of the sophisti-
cation of the movement made no difference to its quashing. And that is not just a
medieval challenge from before the age of sophisticated modern power-discourse:
think of the ‘shock therapy’ visited upon the transitioning Soviet Russian econ-
omy at the end of the Cold War. The ‘shock and awe’ campaign inflicted on Iraq in
2003 was by name tribute to what Foucauldians would call a premodern theatri-
cal display of power, overt rather than covert, and is appropriate to that least sub-
tle instantiation of force, the bomb.64 The invasion was ‘justified’ in a way that was
manifestly half baked, and it was succeeded by a murderous chaos that many a
specialist had warned of but no one in power cared to hear about. Iraq prompts
two deflationary retorts to the self-appointed speaker of truth to power, and while
one is in some sense Foucauldian—what makes you think that power doesn’t
already know?—the other is: what makes you think power cares?
Sometimes power cares, and sometimes not, but explaining that distinction is
impossible without a subdivision of power’s instantiations. What of power that is
wielded openly, either because its wielders hope that their main constituency is
not sufficiently troubled to protest too long and loud or because the wielders have
some mandate, i.e. some legitimacy, predicated on ‘authority’ in political philoso-
pher Hannah Arendt’s sense as something conceptually prior to power?65 Without
a concept of legitimacy, which Foucault gave little attention to, one cannot make
any critique of, say, the invasion of Iraq as illegitimate, because the concept of
illegitimacy is parasitic on that of legitimacy.
Basic questions to be asked of any distinctly Foucauldian conception of power
must pertain to the possibility of resistance worthy of the name—i.e. resistance
that is not itself already subsumed or inevitably to be subsumed by the power
regime it seeks to challenge.66 Such questions must, by extension, address not just
power’s production or self-representation, but its consumption, rejection, or
manipulation by its putative objects. Think of some of the subjects of Scott’s work,
who lead us to the conclusion that it is not a matter of fighting against some
omnipresent but intangible ‘power’, but fighting with power and for it, against
64 On ‘shock and awe’, and other relevant examples, Raewyn Connell, ‘Northern Theory: The
Political Geography of General Social Theory’, Theory and Society 35/2 (2006), 237–64, here 261.
65 Arendt, Between Past and Future, ch. 3.
66 The Foucauldian formula that power implies resistance (Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth,
292–3) does not do the work often claimed for it in Foucauldian rejoinders to allegations of the irre-
sistibility of power in Foucault’s best-known conceptualization of it. It is true that, as opposites in
some discursive settings, power and resistance each imply the existence of the other, as is true of legit-
imacy and illegitimacy, night and day, and so forth. But while saying that one concept implies the
existence of its opposite works at the level of conceptual possibility, this does not mean it works in any
given empirical case. Thus if I say that someone is dead, I am implying the concept of life of which the
dead person is bereft, but I am not saying that the person is actually still slightly alive.
other instantiations and possessors of it, however asymmetric such battles can
be.67 Such work also reminds us, in the face of any crypto-normative critique of
power as such, that the state of powerlessness is scarcely desirable. While the pos-
session of power is not a criterion of the good it is a condition of achieving the
good in the world beyond the mind.68
Among what Scott calls the ‘weapons of the weak’ is the ability to use estab-
lished norms and rules against those who seek at any moment to bend them too
far for their own purposes, on the basis that all political systems carry with them
some constraint of power, whether axiomatic or customary. On resistance more
generally, Scott’s work reveals a ‘secret dossier’ of transactions in which subaltern
groups seek the best way to mitigate the impact of regimes of power on their lives,
and even to exploit the small opportunities for criticism and subversion. Study of
medieval carnivals shows that the authorities who allowed these festivals as ways
of permitting the peasantry to let off steam ultimately had to clamp down on the
unusual freedom of expression thus permitted; the upshot was yet further
manoeuvring by the peasantry as part of an unequal but ongoing conversation
about the prerogatives of official power.69 Legitimacy’s dual-edged character is
apparent in the vocabulary to which authorities had to subscribe to justify their
actions, and in their furious attempts to delegitimize the most serious challenges
to them, as, say, in 1381. Authorities could stretch and modify the vocabulary of
legitimacy but not overstretch or discard it. The very idea that the vocabulary
could be contested presupposes competing interests that acted upon it rather than
the nature of interest simply being dictated by it.
An alternative to knee-jerk legitimation à la Alderman or Sumner and to
crypto-normative delegitimation à la Foucault is to consider dispensations of
power and systems of value as contested social matters. However people view
their society, they tend not to view it neutrally. As long as social power has existed,
thus throughout the history of human societies, so has the scope to use it in dif-
ferent ways, and so have contemporary perceptions about whether it is used more
or less well and more or less justly, and whether its underlying principles are
agreeable or objectionable.70 It is not an invention of the contemporary world to
distinguish between fairer and more corrupt officials, more and less equitable
rules, more and less exploitative or capricious leaders.
The alternative position adopted here incorporates some of the thought of the
Marxist Antonio Gramsci, although it accords more attention to legitimacy in the
67 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale
68 Hearn, Theorizing Power, makes this point about powerlessness.
69 Scott, Weapons of the Weak; C. Humphrey, The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval
England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
70 Colin Richmond, ‘Mickey Mouse in Disneyland: How Did the Fifteenth Century Get That Way?’,
in Linda Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century, v. Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late
Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 157–70, here 166.
way already characterized. Gramsci believed that there are always at least two
hegemonies actually or incipiently in conflict. By hegemony, he meant not just
domination by hard power, but rule by control of the moral tone, which puts him
at a point on the road between the Marxists who talk of false consciousness and
Foucault’s sociology. Gramsci did not use ‘hegemony’ consistently, seeing it some-
times as dependent upon consent and at other times on coercion; but his point
was its instability, and here is where this section’s interest in legitimacy contests
kicks in.71 Morality and would-be hegemonic dispensations are rarely coexten-
sive. Things change, morality, laws, economic practices, ruling factions, etc., and
not always in the same rhythms, so even in the event that at any moment the logic
of the dominant social dispensation overlaps morality entirely, it is yet more
unlikely that that situation will last. The society with consistently perfect overlap
we would call the fully integrated society. It may be that there is a tendency
towards full integration. There are good functional reasons for the tendency: pre-
dictability, replicability, and harmony of social behaviour. Yet the completely inte-
grated social system that possesses no internal potential for conflict is an ideal
model not a reality. The same goes for the feared state of anomie at the other end
of the spectrum.72
The best-integrated orders, one might expect, are to be found in societies of
relatively small scale in relative isolation—those which figure less in occidental
historiography than in anthropological inquiry. But complete integration still has
to be substantiated rather than assumed, and such assumptions have often been
shown to be the product of a rather orientalist assumption about certain peoples
living in a timeless stasis, rather than deep acquaintance with such societies.73
Some of the same stereotypes have also been applied to the pre-modern, aka
‘traditional’, occident. Consider the following from the social historian Edward
Shorter:
By ‘traditional’ I refer to European rural and small-town society between 1500

and 1700. It was a period of cultural homogeneity in which all popular strata
behaved more or less the same, having similar social and sexual values, the same
concepts of authority and hierarchy, and an identical appreciation of custom and
tradition in their primary social goal, the maintenance of static community life.74
71 Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review 1/100 (1976), 5–78.
72 John Rex, Key Problems of Sociological Theory (London: Routledge, 1961), 102–5.
73 ‘If social and cultural distinctiveness and mutual separation were a hallmark of humankind, one
would expect to find it most easily among the so-called primitives, people “without history,” suppos-
edly isolated from the external world and from one another.’ Thus wrote the anthropologist Eric Wolf,
before going on to show how much this expectation, which is related to the assumption of complete
integration, was thwarted by the empirics. Eric Wolf, Europe and the ‘People Without History’ (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 4.
74 Shorter, ‘Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution and Social Change in Modern Europe’, in
Theodore K. Rabb and Robert I. Rotberg (eds), Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary
History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 65–120, here 88.
This vision of social History with politics replaced by herd mentality may be
contrasted with the accounts of rural discontent in one European country in that
period by the historian Andy Wood, whose titles are self-explanatory: The 1549
Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England and The Politics of Social
Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770.75
The inconstancy of values across time and place is held to be one of the
main arguments against moral evaluation across time and place. The most
powerful argument in that direction, the argument of relativism, will only be
fully addressed in Part 3. For the moment let us note that a complication at
least for some of the most influential relativisms is the contestedness of values
within any given time and place. Even if some of the bases of morality might
gain general recognition at any given time, emphases and applications may be
in tension.
In the past, as now, the only thing needed to judge some arrangement as
good, bad, just, or unjust, and thus potentially to stimulate a challenge to it, is
some standard. That standard can come from any place, or any time. Perceptions
of relative beneficence or justness may be shaped by (1) contrast with other
communities, (2) contrast with the history of the same community, or (3) con-
trast with an imagined future. (The corresponding denunciations of the con-
trasters are (1) ‘traitors!’; (2) ‘nostalgiacs!’; (3) ‘utopians!’.)76 The historian
Christopher Hill encapsulated the attitude of many Protestants in English soci-
ety at the time of the Reformation when he wrote that the ‘appeal to conscience
against authority is an appeal to the present against the past. For the society in
which men live forms their consciences, whereas authority gets fossilized in a
set of institutions or writings.’ But equally one could invoke the prerogatives of
the past against the impositions of the present, as was the case with the miners
of England’s peak country in the mid-seventeenth century or the insurgent
peasants of 1381 and 1549.77 The economist Friedrich Hayek remarked at a
very different historical juncture that the path was still blocked ‘by the most
fatuous of all fashionable arguments, namely, that “we cannot turn the clock
back” ’, expressive of ‘the fatalistic belief that we cannot learn from our
mistakes’.78
In the past, as now, in the words of one social scientist:
Right and wrong, good and evil, justice, duty, conscience, are operational con-
cepts, gripped into social action. Morality, then, is that system of rules and
75 Published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 and 1999 respectively.

76 I think Terry Eagleton made this point before me.
77 Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (London: Penguin, 1969), 199; Andy
Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
78 F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 284.
standards which gives significance to the activities of individuals in relation to

one another in society. . . . It justifies conduct, even in opposition to major struc-
tural principles. Associated with the perception of inconsistencies in action, it
may even set the seal on opposition as one of its social functions.79
Compare those words with Sumner’s (p. 115):
For the men of the time there are no ‘bad’ mores. What is traditional and cur-
rent is the standard of what ought to be. The masses never raise any question
about such things. If a few raise doubts and questions, this proves that the folk-
ways have already begun to lose firmness and the regulative element in the
mores has begun to lose authority. This indicates that the folkways are on their
way to a new adjustment.80
In Sumner’s account impersonal forces have the agency and people follow where
they lead. ‘The times’ mysteriously change, and with them people, rather than
people (say, civil rights protestors) changing ‘the times’, which really means chal-
lenging what was considered to be acceptable at any given ‘time’.
Knowledge of the contestation of principles and of legitimacy is necessary
to the explanation of repression, but also of reform and revolution. If the once-
influential theory of structuralism (pp. 215–6) proposed something like a biopsy
of social order freeze-framed at any moment in time, then it perforce could not
gauge which elements might be emergent, ascendant, or declining. It might give a
false picture of harmony, mistaking a wrestling match for an embrace without the
before and after of the snapshot, or it might imply complete success for some
regime of power that was actually under imminent threat. The sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu was in principle as alive as Friedrich Nietzsche had been to the prob-
lems of separating ‘sociology and history’, by which he meant synchronic and
diachronic study. One ‘cannot grasp the dynamics of a field . . . without a histor-
ical, that is, a genetic, analysis of its constitution, and of the tensions that exist
between positions in it’.81 It is instructive that Foucault was weak at explaining
change, whatever his avowed rejection of structuralism.
The philosopher Stephen Toulmin once provided his own thumbnail sketch of
a development of morality whose function is ‘to reconcile the independent aims
and wills of a community of people’ as that community emerges from a prior state
79 Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organisation (London: Watts, 1963), 213.

80 Sumner, Folkways, 59.
81 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity,
1992), 90. For an assessment of the way Bourdieu and Foucault dealt with the issue in practice, see
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1988), ch. 4. Further on Foucault, Neil Brenner, ‘Foucault’s New Functionalism’, Theory and
Society 23 (1994), 679–709.
in which the motto is ‘every man for himself ’. In the communal arrangement, all
‘the principles, which together make up a moral code, can be related to some
institution within the society’. Every institution from the family to representative
assemblies comprises a subsystem of duties and privileges, leading to actors
within those institutions referring to things like ‘My station and its duties’. One
possibility is that ‘those in effective control’ of any of these institutions tries ‘to
“freeze” the moral code and institutions: to assert their absolute authority, to
legislate for every possibility’, to ‘discourage independent speculation and the air-
ing of grievances, and to provide a communal aim which the citizens must like—
or lump’. Such an arrangement might well lead to disaffection from that particular
idea of community and associated moral code: the very communally oriented
‘development which first takes us from “Every man for himself ” to “My station
and its duties”, leads us later to criticize the “duties” and “stations” as at present
established, and to suggest changes’. This criticism may indeed lead to changes in
moral codes and social institutions, but it might also lead to the hardening of the
power-response. If that hardening process prevails over the desire for change,
then it cannot be justified as a legitimate claim of the powerful, since it is ‘the
outcome of mutually contradictory desires’. The rulers ‘want to insist on the citi-
zens’ fulfilling absolutely a set of “moral obligations” towards them, which, at the
same time, they want to be excused from respecting towards the citizens—thus
presenting in the guise of “morality” a collection of privileges without foundation
in ethics’. Here it is the separation of a moral code from the social interactions
that necessitated the code in the first place that render the code no longer moral
in the sense its contemporaries claimed, if moral at all.82
This skeleton argument hints at the truth that might does not in and of itself
make right. If only as a self-justification, power seeks the support of interpret-
ations of the right and the good and so pays them vice’s tribute to virtue. We lack
evidence of a polity in which might alone, i.e. utterly arbitrary might, wielded in
disregard of all rules and conventions, was equated with right by all affected par-
ties. Some decisions will favour some inhabitants of the social order more than
others, as in matters of resource exploitation and allocation, rights, and so forth,
but beyond a point differential treatment will bring into question the idea of the
order as an embodiment of any collective interest and shared values and threaten
its existence. Beyond a point the dependence on force to sustain a social order
invalidates the adjective ‘social’. It marks the point where politics has either failed
to sustain integration or succeeded in ‘othering’ potential or erstwhile members
of the community of obligation so that they may be dealt with by extra-political
82 Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950),
170–1. Note that ‘My Station and Its Duties’ was the title of a relevant essay by the philosopher
F. H. Bradley.
means like civil war, mass expulsion, or genocide.83 Where hierarchies are sustained
more by overt force than anything else, as for instance with Greek and Roman
slavery, or the slavery of the old American south, the situation, which is effectively
a perpetual, one-sided warfare, approximates more closely Gramsci’s idea of
straightforward domination than his idea of hegemony. That is, the slave-owners
might have tried to justify slave-owning to themselves, as Aristotle tried and
failed to,84 but they were not concerned with persuading all the slaves of its
legitimacy. Any consideration of what was actually entailed in sustaining such
systems of incarceration and repression cannot but cast negative light on the
architects, upholders, and beneficiaries of those systems—unless the reader is of a
very particular disposition.
Whatever the variable content of any social understanding of legitimacy, legit-
imacy only makes sense if it is conferred as much as presumed. In any society
legitimacy can be retracted or argued about irrespective of the desires of the most
powerful, even if the argument ends up with the wholesale slaughter of the weaker
party. Even the historian who takes care to establish the legitimacy of some prac-
tice at some point in the past has to be careful not to assume that its legitimacy
endured, or she may end up embracing the same historicist fallacy as the histor-
ian who automatically legitimates every act of power with reference to some sup-
posedly general ‘standard of those times’. If some historical actors or interest
groups presumed to embody legitimacy, the historian ought not take them at
their word. When historians intimate legitimacy and illegitimacy they are making
a judgement that is at once empirical and evaluative.
Could the historian circumvent the evaluation issue by just referring instead to a
stew of competing legitimacy-claims? That approach would run into much the prob-
lems described above for any attempt to provide a purely internal actor’s perspective
in lieu of a more integrated causal explanation: any given legitimacy-claimant could
be radically deceived. The approach would also duck the fact that legitimacy is a
matter of perceptions, but not just the perceptions of those who claim it. All percep-
tions have a subjective element, but we may distinguish between perceptions that are
purely relative to individuals and those that may be relative to certain contexts but
are intersubjective or shared within those contexts. Contentedness can fall into the
first category. If someone feels content, we may reasonably say that they are content,
whatever we might think about whether they should feel content. Legitimacy is not
like this. The perception of legitimacy must be shared to some degree beyond the
circle of those claiming the power to act with it, which may well mean other histor-
ical parties than the party that constitutes the historian’s major focus.
83 My thinking here is informed by Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 3–6.
84 On Aristotle, see Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1993), ch. 5.
To be sure, it will not always be a question of establishing the legitimacy of one

party versus the illegitimacy of another. There may genuinely be multiple candi-
dates with powerful claim. We may also talk of diminished, enhanced, or chal-
lenged legitimacy. But these are all matters of nuance in judgement, and from the
fact that one set of cases are finely balanced or equivocal it does not follow that all
will be so. We will not be able to distinguish one class of cases from the other
without engaging in a form of thought that is suitable to reflection on entities
who are capable of forming an opinion on the nature of demands made of them,
sometimes unto death.
PART 3
J UST IF YING J U D GEM E NT ON

T HINGS PAST
Introduction
Since it is impossible to justify all of this book’s arguments in accordance with the
prevailing standards of historianship, those standards have to be challenged.
Mounting a challenge would be difficult enough were the standards the product
of purely specialist consensus within the confines of an academic discipline. The
task is greater still when the specialist standards cohere with popular thought.
There is indeed a link between a popular orthodoxy in Western moral thought
and orthodoxy in an academic historiography that bears the hallmarks of the cul-
ture from which its norms evolved. That link is the reason for the occidental focus
of this Part of the book. Hereafter the common orthodoxy will be refered to as
‘internalist’, whether it refers to the interior mental/spiritual world of an individ-
ual or that of a cultural group.1 These internalist positions, while different, have a
common origin in strands of religious thought that retained their hold amid
secularization.
However entrenched the academic convention that historians refrain from
moral evaluation, it is contestable in principle as well as being undermined by
commonplace practices. Accordingly, revising the standards in question is less a
quixotic tilt than a matter of showing the standards to be unfit for purpose while
underwriting some features of historianship that exist in disregard of the stand-
ards. The clarifications provided here will also imply guidelines on what sorts of
judgements ought to be resisted.
1 I use the term ‘internalist’ in a slightly different but nevertheless related way to the way it is often
used in ethical theory. In that ethical theory it is common to talk of ‘motivational internalism’, ‘judge-
ment internalism’, etc., which refers to the supposedly necessary connection between moral judge-
ments and moral motivation—if I judge that X is the right thing to do, then I am immediately
motivated to do X (I don’t need an additional desire to motivate me as I would when I judge that e.g. Y
would be beneficial to my career, fun, expensive). In the present book I use ‘internalism’ to denote the
idea that individual or collective actions can only be judged according to standards that the individual
or collective accepts as appropriate. The close relationship between the two sorts of ‘internalism’ is
elaborated at p. 247, n. 320.
The basic issue when thinking about the past (and this goes for the present too)
is again contextual understanding and some of the injunctions that have arisen
around it. Beyond their surface instruction these pronouncements hint at some
underlying philosophy, because taken literally ‘you have to understand these
people in context’ may, given the many meanings alloted to ‘context’, mean noth-
ing more than ‘you have to understand these people’. Part 1 of this book addressed
the literal instruction, working through the evaluative connotations of the histo-
rian’s commitment to take her chosen historical actors ‘on their own terms’. The
underpinning philosophies are less clear: for instance what do those historians
who echo cultural theorist Fredric Jameson’s imperative ‘always historicize!’ think
that will achieve?2 Clarification would be desirable even if it set one historian
against another, because while ‘historicization’ can just mean contextualization it
can also have relativist valence.
Encapsulating one interpretation of Jameson’s dictum, historian Dan Stone
writes that ‘history is the most radical of all the disciplines’: ‘history destabilizes
everything precisely by historicizing it’.3 Stone does not reckon with Ranke and
theorists of niche-adaptation (pp. 114–15) who intimate that particular arrange-
ments are validated precisely because of their historical specificity. Each historian
points in his own ways towards relativism, nonetheless: Ranke in the ‘positive’
sense of according each group and time its own truths; Stone in the ‘negative’
sense of dissolving universal truths in the ether of time’s passage and cultural
variation. Ranke’s classical historicism and Stone’s secular neo-historicism (see
pp. 40–41) correctly hint that the discipline of History has indeed contributed to
the rise of relativism, moral relativism included, at least as much as having been
shaped by relativism.
While some trends in History and the social sciences have enhanced the con-
ceptual problems at issue, historical explanation can also serve clarificatory pur-
poses, and that is the task of the three Histories comprising the first three sections
in this Part of the book. Now we need to be clear at the outset about what exactly
historical accounts can and cannot achieve in the sphere of social or intellectual
critique. Historical contextualization-cum-explanation may destabilize existing
arrangements, but it need not; it does nothing necessarily to legitimate or delegit-
imate any given view or claim. One cannot prove or discredit the coherence, logic,
or critical purchase of a belief just by explaining its historical origin or develop-
ment. Far, then, from deploying ‘contextualization’ or ‘historicization’ to do sur-
reptitiously critical or crypto-normative work, many of the arguments hereafter
address head-on the shortcomings of ‘internalist’ moral thinking. They show that
when we judge consistently with internalist models, we are unable to do justice to
2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1983), p. ix.

3 Dan Stone, ‘Surviving in the Corridors of History or, History as Double or Nothing’, in
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (ed.), Federman’s Fictions (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2011), 203–13, here 205.
Justifying Judgement on Things Past 129
many of the consequences of individual or collective action for other individuals

or collectives. At the same time, the historical investigations in which the moral
arguments are embedded do serve to defamiliarize; illustrating the thoroughly
contingent origins and development of ‘our’ internalist beliefs helps to bring those
beliefs under the scrutiny they rarely receive because we take them for granted.
These historical investigations also show how alternative models of thought were
never entirely banished in internalism’s rise. We already often act, and configure
our social arrangements, in ways that implicitly justify non-internalist models of
morality, hereafter called ‘relational’ models, even while we continue to stress the
internalist models in our self-idealizations. Attending to those partly obscured
‘relational’ elements helps us to make sense of some of our activities in the world,
including in the sphere of evaluations in historical scholarship.
History I charts the rise and problems of a Western preoccupation with the
interior of the individual person as a final court of appeal, with particular reference
to the development of Christian theology.4 The problems include the sort of
thinking involved in what the sociologist Edvard Westermarck called ‘that beauti-
ful modern sophism which admits every man’s conscience to be an infallible
guide’.5 History II addresses the rise and problems of a justificatory focus on the
collective interior, especially the cultural and national interiors. History III charts
relations between individual and collective internalism to the present.
To be sure, different levels of ‘internality’ may pull in different directions. The
emphasis on collective internality tends to heteronomy, with the person’s values
and choices conditioned from outside, by cultural norms, say. The argument to
individual internality can point in the direction of moral autonomy of the Kantian
sort, with the person determining her own path. However, the tension between
individual and collective internality can be illusory since individual freedom can-
not operate without structures that facilitate it and culture is one such structure.
And when we move from the logical relations between individual and collective
interiors to analogical, genealogical, and metaphysical relations between them, the
two levels of internality can complement one another, as examples from occiden-
tal history show.
On the matter of analogies between the individual and the collective, Plato
modelled his ideal society on a well-ordered soul: different social classes should act
in union just as the parts of the soul do. A medieval illustration of the relationship
of individual to social whole was John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (c.1159), depicting
a literal body-politic, with its image of the prince as head, peasantry as feet, senate as
4 On different sorts of individualism, see Koenraad W. Swaart, ‘ “Individualism” in the Mid-
Nineteenth Century (1826–1860)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 23/1 (1962), 77–90. Swaart identifies
three sorts of individualism: economic, political, and romantic. The sort on which I primarily focus
has more in common with his romantic type, but I am much more interested in its religious origins
and character.
5 Cited in Timothy Stroup, ‘Westermarck’s Ethical Relativism’, Ajatus 38 (1980), 31–71, here 39–40.
heart, judges and regional governors as senses.6 In the modern period nationalism
began as a liberal doctrine, even if it developed illiberal traits. The analogy from the
individual and her self-determination to the collective and its self-determination
maps onto the analogy between liberalism and nationalism.7
One can actually only think of collective identity in certain ways given certain
conceptions of the individual, which is a claim that brings us to genealogical link-
ages between different levels of internality. The historicist historian Gustav
Droysen (1808–84) wrote that ‘Insofar as I consider the past from my standpoint,
from the thoughts of my nation and state, from my religion and past, I stand high
above my individual ego. I think, as it were, from a higher ego, in which the slag
of my little persona has been melted away.’8 Droysen’s idea of an individual ego
needing consciously to be transcended presupposes the idea of the individual
ego that really does stand separate to culture, society, past, etc., in the first place.
Droysen’s case suggests how the individualist tendencies of so much popular
thought share origins with the impersonal contextualisms of so many historians,
even while the stances seem to be opposed, with historians generally scornful of
the failure of ‘ordinary people’ to appreciate how much their own lives are shaped
by historically evolved norms and structures. While History II and History III are
more obviously relevant to historians because of their attention to collective,
group-level interiority, History I, which addresses individual interiority, is the
foundation on which connections between different levels of interiority are
established.
What of the metaphysical linkage between different levels of internality? A brief
survey of relevant ideas will prepare the ground for what is to come in the first
three sections. Linking individual people to a worldly community and to God,
Matthew’s Gospel (18:20) tells us that ‘Where two or three are gathered together in
my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ The same thought was expressed in the
Jewish oral tradition, with which Jesus was probably familiar.9 Paul’s First Letter to
the Corinthians (10–15) uses ‘the body of Christ’ for the eucharistic invocation of
Christ’s body on the cross, the Corinthians as a community, and the resurrected
body that all shall receive at the end of days.10 This was perhaps the earliest written
conception of the universitas fidelium, the earthly body of the faithful that com-
prises the assembly of God and represents the new society. Individual Christians
6 Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 29.
7 See also Samuel Fleischacker, Integrity and Moral Relativism (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 170–1,
207–10.
8 Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
307.
9 It was later recorded in the Talmud: ‘If two are sitting and studying the Torah together, the
Divine Presence is with them’ (Berakhot 6a). Thanks to David Patterson for this information, as for
much else of relevance.
10 On the Corinthians, see Conrad Leyser’s introduction to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two
Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. xxii.
were brought together by their beliefs, thus conjoining two senses of liturgy, each
derivable from the root of ‘communion’: the sense of liturgy as forging a vertical
connection with the divine from within each individual and the sense of it as
establishing a horizontal community of values between individual liturgists.
Developments and tensions within the Christian community are a key part of
both the History I and History II sections. When Christianity rose to the religion
of state in Rome, ‘the juridical person of the Roman respublica became trans-
formed into the mystical person of Christian society’. Subsequently, the respublica
christiana, Christendom, transcended state boundaries, though each state could
comprise a different sort of universitas in its own right, as John of Salisbury illus-
trated. At the head of Christendom was the pope, microcosm of the whole, at
once representative and embodiment of the corporation.11 At a time of doctrinal
and political strife within Christendom, Nicholas Cusanus (1401–64), sought to
establish harmony within the institutional Church and, within the universitas
fidelium, harmony between temporal and spiritual power, using models of hier-
archy and equality that drew on analogy between the human body and soul.12
Drawing on Cusanus and the classical concept of the monad, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646–1716) provided the groundwork for an especially influential way
of conceptualizing the link between different levels of unique interiority—from
the individual soul through confessional units and polities to, in principle at least,
the entirety of humanity—after western Christendom’s religious unity had been
broken by Protestantism, and after Protestant teaching had emphasized inner dis-
positions rather than external deeds.
History II establishes the relevance down the centuries of the tradition of
thought to which Leibniz made such a contribution. His metaphysics, ethnog-
raphy, and linguistics manifest a linkage between the Lutheran focus on individ-
ual internality and the later Lutheran-tinted concern with uniqueness and
cultural-linguistic self-expression. Cultures constitute the sort of collective singu-
lar that preoccupied major ‘early Romantic’ thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder
and likewise nineteenth-century historicists. Leibniz’s influence may be traced in
the anthropological models of the late nineteenth and early–mid twentieth cen-
tury created by Franz Boas and his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.13
There is an affinity, for instance, between the ‘patterns’ in Benedict’s 1934 Patterns
11 Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law, 29–32, quote from 29.

12 Marica Costiglielo, ‘Organic Metaphors in “De Cordantia Catholica” of Nicholas of Cusa’, Viator
44/2 (2013), 311–22.
13 Fleischacker, Integrity and Moral Relativism, 168–9, 207–9, 217; Jürgen Trabant, ‘Humboldt et
Leibniz: Le Concept intérieur de la linguistique’, in Tullio De Mauro and Lia Formigari (eds), Leibniz,
Humboldt and the Origins of Comparativism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 135–56; Matti Bunzl,
‘Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition’, in George W. Stocking, Jnr. (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and
Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 17–78; Hans F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and
Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
of Culture and the self-sufficient, unitary wholes that Leibniz called monads.14
Boas and his students were known as historical particularists or historicists, after
the eponymous nineteenth-century intellectual tendency. The ‘structural histori-
cism’ of Marshal Sahlins also fits this pattern, with its conception of the cultural
‘unity’ that ‘defines all functionality’,15 and there are family resemblances in the
work of Geertz (pp. 216–18).
It is key for the story as it unfolds that, as well as being a contribution to reli-
gious harmony, Leibniz intended his thought to be politically irenic at a moment
threatened by inter- and intra-state strife. In that sense it was of a part with Ruth
Benedict’s wartime anti-racist pamphlet The Races of Mankind, which celebrated
the union of culturally diverse peoples in fighting the racist Axis,16 and with the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Race and History (1952), which was written
at a time of decolonization and anti-colonial warfare. So far so good for the
Leibnizian tradition. But what of Benedict’s 1946 book The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword? In considering the Japanese, ‘the most alien enemy the United States
had ever fought in an all-out struggle’,17 Benedict contrasted what she thought
was a Japanese ‘shame’ culture with an occidental ‘guilt’ culture.18 The book
sought to explain Japan to Americans in the name of tolerant understanding of
difference. However, its elements of caricature and misunderstanding about
shame and its relationship to guilt (see pp. 139–42) did little to combat the belief
of those who perceive themselves to belong to conscience-based guilt cultures
that shame cultures are inferior. Indeed Benedict bolstered a sense of superiority
when she associated the very intercultural tolerance that she purported to pro-
mote with a trait—individualism—that was supposedly connected to the subject-
internality of the western ‘guilt’ culture. In the end some cultures just were more
desirable than others.19 Benedict’s works at once explain the appeal of a certain
sort of ‘monadic’ thinking and suggest its problems. A doctrine developed to cele-
brate difference, possibly with a view to higher unity, may end up constructing or
exaggerating difference, hardening the Us–Them divide and homogenizing the
14 Fleischacker, Integrity and Moral Relativism, 168–9; George Gurvitch, ‘Is the Antithesis of
“Moral Man” and “Immoral Society” True?’, Philosophical Review 52/6 (1943), 533–52, here 548.
15 Cited in Li, ‘Marshal Sahlins and the Apotheosis of Culture’, 219.
16 Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee,
1943).
17 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946; Boston:
Mariner, 2005), 1.
18 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum, 222–4 on matters of variable balance between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’
across different cultures, and for her summary characterizations of the differences between the two
sorts of culture. See also p. 14 against the argument that cultural differences are superficial.
19 On the relationship between individualism and tolerance, see Christopher Shannon, ‘A World
Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’, American Quarterly
47/4 (1995), 659–80, here 670–6. For criticisms of Benedict’s characterizations, John Lie, ‘Ruth
Benedict’s Legacy of Shame: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Study of Japan’, Asian Journal of
Social Science 29/2 (2001), 249–61; Clifford Geertz, ‘Us/Not-Us: Benedict’s Travels’, in Geertz, Works
and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 102–28.
Them, if not also the Us—and there is no way of guaranteeing that the differences
thus portrayed will actually be celebrated. Thinking at the political level, and to
the hundred years or so before the publication of The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword, such is the story of nationalism, as the idiom of self-determination for
peoples with unique cultural characteristics morphed into that of cultural narcis-
sism, paranoia, and existential struggle between groups.
Monadic thinking, as we might call it, could never do the political work hoped
of it. In particular we must distinguish between religious conscience and moral
conscience, and between tolerance of belief and tolerance of action. If, as is con-
tended in History I, a certain modern concept of individual autonomy developed
from the paradigmatic basis of tolerance of conscience in the sense of internal
orientation towards a deity, then that concept has little significance for the devel-
opment of conscience-as-morality in the sense of acting towards others in this
world. As part of showing that certain concepts of culture and the nation devel-
oped analogously to the development of thinking about freedom of individual
conscience, History II shows that these concepts pertained to collective systems
of belief and value in a purely internal sense, with the national-cultural spirit—
Volksgeist—being emblematic. It is precisely this self-contained, ‘monadic’ cul-
tural model on which influential moral relativisms draw, and insofar as relativists
claim any practical significance for their doctrine it is hard to see how the claim is
borne out when cultures and their physico-political vessels collide, or when ‘a
people’ turns out to be internally heterogenous, its culture a battleground rather
than a common script for internal harmony. The doctrine of freedom of religious
conscience was an important achievement in a world when, as sometimes now,
people might be killed purely on grounds of what was going on inside their heads.
But the considerations remain different as regards moral conscience, individual
or collective, when the beliefs of one person or group issue in acts affecting other
people and peoples.
Discrepancies between religion and morality, and between ‘personal morality’
and the law, have done nothing for conceptual clarity in the matter of moral
evaluation. Key terms and concepts are multivalent. Consider that resort to reli-
gious vocabulary when one appeals to ‘good faith’ or ‘good conscience’ even when
one is not talking about religion. ‘Right’, Recht, droit, may ground the moral sense
of rectitude, the idea of a just or merely given order of things as something that
can be appealed to (objective right) and the idea of having a personal right to
some particular (subjective right). Then there is ‘guilty’ which, as in the case of
Alderman’s deserters (pp. 116–17), can refer to a subjective feeling or an objective
legal pronouncement. Whatever the clarity achieved by some moral philosophers,
there is no consensus over choice or blend of theories in their guild either. For the
rest of us, and likely the philosophers too when they are not philosophizing,
moral thought is a hotchpotch of only partly congruent factors, owing something
to our immediate interests and at least as much to our history as to any process of
systematic thought. How different, though, would be the balance of historio-

graphical common sense at the level of collective life, and so much occidental
moral ‘common sense’ at the level of individual life, if the broader cultural envir-
onment had been more shaped by other strands of Christian thought than those
that did gain ascendance, or indeed by Jewish thought? The difference is in the
relationship between exteriority and interiority. Judaism is a religion of the deed
more than the creed, which is why Judaic other-facing morality and ‘inner’ faith
are inseparable, while since Luther at the latest, and arguably since Paul, it has
been possible to separate the corresponding elements of Christianity and to pri-
oritize faith and the world of the spirit (pneuma, Geist).
While the three Histories help substantiate my claims about the moral prob-
lems of internalist moral, the fourth section summarizes the conceptual differ-
ences between internalist and relational thought. That section and the following
one are of a less historical, more purely analytical nature. The fifth section brings
relational precepts to bear on moral relativism and prescriptions like a blanket
tolerance in one’s consideration of foreign countries past, or indeed present. The
sixth section constitutes a segue from the concerns of Part 3 of the book to those
of Part 4.
A ‘relational’ concept of morality in the way it is presented here is not a theory
in the sense of something that purports to provide criteria for judging any given
thing as right or wrong. Such criteria are just what is in question: the variety of
often clashing moral theories helps promote relational thinking in the first place.
Relational thinking is just moral thinking insofar as we take morality to pertain to
relations among people, however indirect or distant, rather than between any
given person or group and some actually non-separable entity called their con-
science, their beliefs, their faith, their culture, or the Volksgeist of which they
partake.20 Once one adopts a relational model one heads towards evaluation on
the principle that no one is an island, and only the powerful have ever been in a
position to act as if they were. Relational thought, which can rarely be escaped in
practice whatever we are told in principle, legitimates a range of evaluations
across cleavages of belief and identity while reminding the judge that she cannot
insulate herself from the judgement of external others by a philosophy of spiritual
self-certification or moral relativism. Judge and be judged, as it were.
History I: By Faith Alone
When Herbert Butterfield warned against evaluation, issues of context were

important, but also the recognition that the historian could never know whether
20 To be precise I should say that morality pertains to relations among people, but not everything
that pertains to relations among people involves moral considerations.
one person or another ‘made the most of the opportunities heaven gave to each’.
Once near the ‘intimate interior’ of historical personalities, ‘we are inevitably
brought to a halt before those final recesses which the technical historian cannot
reach’.21 For Butterfield, as for Kitson Clark when he opposed ‘judgements on
dead people’, the idea seems to be that all evaluation must be of the form of
Gibbon or the Roman biographer Suetonius forming a verdict on the person as
such, as if they were allocating individuals to heaven or hell. The equation of
evaluation with something like divine judgement explains the experiences of the
moral philosopher Claudia Card, who recalls being interviewed and asked
whether Saddam Hussein was evil as opposed to whether what he had done was
wrong.22 The idea of judgement on the soul as either separate from or more
important than evaluation of the soul-bearer’s comportment is characteristic of
the problematic dualisms that Christian civilization has specialized in.
On trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the former SS officer Adolf Eichmann relied on
precisely the defence that his acts of wrongdoing said nothing about who he really
was. Whatever he had done in administering genocide, he had not followed his
‘innerer Schweinehund’—he had not compromised himself at the deepest level of
interiority.23 Eichmann was trying to explain his outer conformity precisely by
disowning actions that in his account were never authentically ‘his’ to begin with.
Eichmann the spiritual or inner being was divorced from what Eichmann the
actor did. However sincere or insincere the appeal was, and no one could ever
know, it was nonetheless an appeal to a real cultural trope, a version of the thing
quietly dissenting Germans invoked when they referred to their ‘inner emigra-
tion’ during the Nazi period. Apparently inner emigration had also been com-
monplace in the turmoil created by the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which gives
an indication of its cultural depth. Certainly, decades before the Nazi assumption
of power the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey had applauded and Nietzsche criti-
cized what each saw as a particularly German concern with the internal mental-
spiritual world, with Nietzsche invoking ‘the German’ who ‘cannot be judged at all
by an action and remains hidden as an individual even after this deed. He must, as
is well known, be measured by his thoughts and his feelings.’24 Such inwardness is
not a solely German speciality, though: there is evidence from the wider West in
the present of a religious emphasis on ‘the inner experiences of isolated individ-
uals, cultivated and evaluated largely by those individuals’, and this helps to
21 Butterfield, Christianity and History, 45, 43, 18, 110.

22 Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 5–6.
23 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 25–6.
24 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 139; Wilhelm
Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makreel and
Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 117, 199–204. Nietzsche, On the
Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 24–30, quote at 26.
explain attitudes towards ‘spirituality’ as a widespread source of personal

gratification.25
Erstwhile British prime minister Tony Blair once justified his role in bringing
Britain into the invasion of Iraq in 2003. ‘Do I know I’m right? Judgments aren’t
the same as facts. Instinct is not science . . . I only know what I believe.’26 When an
official inquiry criticized all of his major judgements, and rejected his claim that
the violent chaos pursuant to the invasion had been unpredictable with reference
to actual predictions, Blair took solace in the fact that the inquiry had not
impugned his ‘good faith’.27 Let us ignore the fact that the good faith defence con-
stituted a major change of tack from Blair’s pre-invasion appeal to history—i.e. to
the way he predicted that events would unfold—as his judge.28 Again, the major
point of interest is the trope of self-certification: invoking integrity as a final court
of appeal. Not long after the publication of the war report, a British athlete who
had taken medicines with known performance-enhancing side effects clarified
that he had sought no advantage, as if that rendered evaluatively irrelevant the
question of whether he had, predictably, gained advantage.29 Like Eichmann,
Blair and the athlete allude to some sort of self-justificatory inner purity that
morally superseded whatever they had predictably brought about. A related phe-
nomenon is manifest in those cases today where someone in the public eye makes
a racist or sexist remark and then defends themselves on the basis that that
remark ‘is not who I am’.
As if in supportive preparation for these self-justifications, in the Discourse on
Inequality the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of
‘social man’ who ‘lives always constantly outside himself, and only knows how to
live in the opinions of others’.30 By the later twentieth century, by the offices of the
likes of the anthropologist Benedict, the ‘social man’ thus characterized had
become restricted to a certain sort of ‘traditional’ society, one now called an
honour or shame society. Of shame/honour societies, the sociologist Bourdieu
wrote: ‘the point of honour is the basis of a moral code of an individual who sees
himself always through the eyes of others, who has need of others for his
existence’.31 How the alchemical change away from honour societies had occurred
in the West is a good question. Rousseau would likely have claimed that it had not
25 Cited in Robert C. Bishop, Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 111.
26 Catherine Bennett, ‘Never Mind the Facts, Trust Tony’s Faith’, The Guardian, 30 September 2004;
Jamie Whyte, ‘Is Tony Sure he Exists?’, The Times, 1 October 2004.
27 e.g. Independent staff, ‘Chilcot Report Published: Read Tony Blair’s Statement in Full’, The
Independent, 6 July 2016.
28 Jackie Ashley and Ewen MacAskill, ‘History Will Be My Judge’, The Guardian, 1 March 2003.
29 Owen Gibson, ‘Bradley Wiggens Tells Andrew Marr “I Did Not Seek an Unfair Advantage” ’, The
Guardian, 25 September 2016.
30 Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses (London: Dent and Sons, 1973), 116.
31 Bourdieu, cited in Douglas Cairns, ‘Honour and Shame: Modern Controversies and Ancient
Values’, Critical Quarterly 53/1 (2011), 23–41, here 23.
actually occurred, and there are grounds to agree on that score. What had happened
was that the ideal of the person whose opinion of himself was grounded entirely
in his pristine interior—an ideal Rousseau helped foster—had become more
profoundly emphasized. The seed of this ideal was planted far before modernity
or the Enlightenment. It was nourished by Christian theology before, as a flower
in bloom, its scent infused theories of relations between individual, God, state,
and society.
We begin with early Christianity, which may not be insulated from non-
Christian influences. Some of the metaphysical structures Christianity inherited
can be traced back at least to Plato. As to morality, the Roman Stoic of the first
century bce, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and Jesus’ contemporary Seneca, elaborated
ideas of guilt, sin, and expiation, including the Latin term conscientia itself.
Conscientia corresponds precisely to the Greek syneidêsis ( ). It was the
word used by Jerome to render syneidêsis when he translated Paul’s letters from
the Greek in the production of the Vulgate in the fourth century. Conscience and
consciousness share a root, connoting knowledge (scientia), in this case of good
and evil. The syn/con part of the term connotes ‘with’ or ‘together’. It can indicate
a human community of customary value in the sense of inherited, shared pre-
cepts, but the ‘relationship’ can also be reflexive—it is knowledge that one has of
oneself, and that one shares with oneself as if in inner conversation.32 A further
element was stressed in Seneca, though it was not original to him: as with
Socrates, the inner voice can be associated with a higher voice. In the Stoic tradition,
following this voice is a way of coping with external vicissitudes with equanimity,
more than imposing oneself on the world.33
Despite such debts, some cardinal Christian virtues were set with varying
degrees of strength at different moments against representations of some of the
cardinal Graeco-Roman virtues, and ‘Jewish’ virtues too. The ‘pagan’ ethics of
achievement of Achilles, Alcibiades, and Caesar, celebrated in poetry, prose, and
at the forum, promoted egoism and elitism. And had not Plato disparaged ‘effem-
inate’ lamentation and empathizing? ‘Pharisaic’ morality, meanwhile, allegedly
promoted blind obedience, being apparently a merely external matter. What of
conscience, humility, inner disposition, the good heart?34
32 Paul Strohm, Conscience: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
8–10; Anders Schinkel, Conscience and Conscientious Objections (Amsterdam: Pallas, 2007), 172.
Thanks also to Douglas Cairns for discussions on this point and many others of relevance in this
section.
33 Gabriele Thome, ‘Crime and Punishment, Guilt and Expiation: Roman Thought and Vocabulary’,
Acta Classica 35 (1992), 73–98; Matthew B. Roller, Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors
in Julio-Claudian Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 82–8. See also pp. 21 ff. of the
same book on the social dominance of more externalist conceptions of ethics in the world in which
Seneca made his intervention.
34 For these juxtapositions in a sharp form, see Bob Zunjic, ‘The Sermon on the Mount: An
Outline’ at http://jakavonyte-philosophy.yolasite.com/resources/Zujnic%20on%20Sermon%20on%20
the%20Mount.pdf , here pp. 3–5.
Christian views of Hebrew morality have been dogged since the beginning by
misunderstanding, not so much of the prominence of Halakhah—the body of
law—in much Judaic teaching, as its function in that teaching.35 Augustine,
author of that seminal document of ‘internality’, the Confessions, contributed to
the depiction of literalism as being a result of Jews’ failure to understand the spir-
itual meaning of Scripture, their having been blinded by God in order that their
blindness might serve as witness to Christianity’s truth. ‘Like the donkey in the
sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), they carried all that was necessary for the mystery
of salvation, but they themselves did not comprehend that mystery.’36 Augustine
was unaware of the oral traditions laid down in Talmud, Midrash, and Kabbalah,
which were still in the process of being recorded when he was alive. Many centur-
ies later Kant had no such excuse when writing that the Ten Commandments
were ‘given with no claim at all on the moral disposition in following them
(whereas Christianity later placed the chief work in this) but were rather directed
simply and solely to external observance’.37
Rather, if the law is an expression of God’s will, then acting in conformity with
it is following God’s example, acting as God would want rather than you might
choose. This is an end in itself. It is also intimately associated with the sustenance
of human community, with relationships to other flesh-and-blood beings. A com-
mandment is a mitzvah, a word that derives from the Aramaic tzavta, which
means connection. To observe a commandment is to make a connection with
God and with fellow human beings at once. There is no relation to God without
the human relation.38 Of the Decalogue, the Utterances on the first tablet that
Moses brought down from Sinai listed human duties to God, while those on the
second tablet enumerated responsibilities to other people. For Jews, rather than
strictly being commandments, these ten declarations are more like classificatory
headings for more detailed individual commandments, of which there are, by the
most conventional count, 613 in the Torah.
That combination of seemingly antithetical ideas—that we always and every-

where think about what it is that we’re doing, that we always and everywhere
think beyond what we’re doing—lies at the heart of a religion so dedicated to the
extraction of the sacred from the profane, of locating the sacred within the
profane, that it encircles human action with 613 commandments, lest any
moment or gesture of a Jew’s life be without thought of God.39
35 E. Owen and Barry Mesch, ‘Protestants, Jews and the Law’, Christian Century, 6–13 June 1984,
601–4.
36 Frans van Liere, An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 118.
37 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 131.
38 I thank David Patterson for this information.
39 Corey Robin, ‘The Trials of Hannah Arendt’, The Nation, 1 June 2015.
The outside moral world is not separable from the inside one, which makes
Judaism necessarily a social theory as well as a religion, and a religion of the deed
more than the creed. Indeed, the caricatured transcendent impersonality of the
Hebrew god may be a condition of ‘his’ societal valence, in the sense that God
remains distinctly ‘other’, non-assimilable to the individual human ego, and
therefore stands as a reminder as to how other humans should be treated. As in
the thought of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it is not a matter of compre-
hending God but of ‘enacting God through responsibility to the other through
justice’.40 Putting aside the religious element (though that would make no sense to
a devout Jew) there is psychological and sociological sophistication to all this. As
Aristotelian virtue ethics and psychology both tell us, developing patterns of
behaviour can shape one from the outside inwards. In Judaism, following the law
is itself a form of betterment by ongoing self-creation through accumulated right-
eous behaviour which accustoms one to acting rightly.
We might add that one of the great strengths of an abiding emphasis on justice
rather than love—to stereotype the chief virtues of the Jewish and Christian tradi-
tions respectively—is that love can only be given, whereas justice, whether inter-
preted in either Aristotelian sense as law-abidingness or as equitability, can be
demanded by the aggrieved.41 Justice is more egalitarian, as also manifest in that
traduced doctrine of ‘an eye for an eye’,42 the lex talionis. The convention
enshrined general reciprocity in order to forestall personal, disproportionate ret-
ribution (two eyes for one) and grudge-holding, and was not necessarily literal, in
the sense that material compensation (e.g., in a later, early medieval setting,
wergeld) could substitute for non-material loss, as it still can today under civil law.
Martin Luther King misunderstood the doctrine when claiming it tended to uni-
versal blindness.
If Christianity sometimes defined itself against a Jewish faith that supposedly
kept its transcendent-cum-social externality external, then Homeric Greece, or at
least the Greece of Homeric description, may be characterized by its more purely
social externality. In the ‘progressivist’ strand of classical scholarship, with its
Christo-centric leanings, the Homeric age was characterized as a shame culture
lacking in a mature sense of agency and responsibility and was thereby
40 Section 2.4.5 of Bettina Bergo, ‘Emmanuel Levinas’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 edn), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/levi-
nas/. Note that Judaism is repeatedly used hereafter, heuristically, as one contrast to Christianity. I am
conscious that the image of Judaism that I present thereby may appear to be homogeneous and
unchanging, which does scant justice to the reality. For some relevant continuities in Jewish thought
over the long term through Levinas, see David Patterson, Genocide in Jewish Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 1.
41 Macmurray, Persons in Relation, 188.
42 For some of the roots of this traducing, see Augustine, Contra Faustus, bk XIX §3, at Augustine,
The Works of Aurelius Augustine: A New Translation, ed. Marcus Dods, v (Edinburgh: Clark, 1872),
328–9.
exaggeratedly distinguished from its successor civilizations. Like other ‘shame

cultures’ in the present and recent past, which equally stood in contrast to the
modern Western way of course, it was given an air of undesirability by its link to
hierarchic status-consciousness, conceptions of distinctly male, probably martial
honour and, often by extension, a sexist preoccupation with female chastity.43
One preliminary way of balancing the picture is to show how unattractive the
nominal opposite of externalist thinking can be. Let us say that the internalist
‘ideal’ of the ‘guilt culture’ is, improbably, achieved in its purest form; would the
outcome be desirable? It requires prodigious self-confidence, not to say egotism
bordering on sociopathy, to ignore the outside world completely—people’s reac-
tions to one, one’s standing in social contexts, and so forth—in forming an esti-
mation of oneself, shaping one’s life decisions, and ascertaining what, if anything,
one should feel guilty for.44 Consider that incorruptible man of conscience, the
Rousseau aficionado Robespierre, or the French-educated Suong Sikoeun of the
genocidal Khmer Rouge: ‘Robespierre is my hero. Robespierre and Pol Pot: both
men have the same quality of decisiveness and integrity.’45
In any case, whatever we might like to think, most of us have not discarded all
of the ‘hang-ups’ of the stereotyped shame culture anyway, even though we tend
to use words like ‘esteem’ now rather than ‘honour’. Do you believe that your
ethos is entirely autonomous, your self-esteem purely self-generated? Does it feel
that way when you have been demoted (i.e. when someone else has told you you
are not good enough), or your colleague promoted over you (i.e. when you have
lost in a competition)?46 The so-called individualism promoted by liberal capital-
ism is anything but: the emphasis might be on the self in the sense of pursuing
self-interest, but insofar as that is self-interest in monetary enrichment, the defin-
ition of the interest is set by ‘the system’ not the individual, and the whole system
is predicated upon competition and consumption, which are other-conscious
through and through.
If esteem and disesteem just do matter, then it is important to get beyond
bandying around prejudicial cases from the ‘shame’ or the ‘guilt’ side of things.
More dispassionate reflection reveals that esteem and disesteem have key struc-
turing roles but do not determine content. In other words, there is no set thing
that ‘shame cultures’ produce shame about.47 They can produce chauvinism but
also great social sensitivity. A further key point is that the binary shame–guilt
43 Williams, Shame and Necessity; Cairns, ‘Honour and Shame’, 23; Geertz, ‘Us/Not-Us’; Eiko
Ikegami, ‘Emotions’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), A Concise Companion to History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 333–53, here 344.
44 Which is roughly Williams’s point in Shame and Necessity, 98–100.
45 Cited in Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 147.
46 Cairns, ‘Honour and Shame’.
47 Cairns, ‘Honour and Shame’, 30; Williams, Shame and Necessity, 92: ‘we, like the Greeks, can be
as mortified or disgraced by a failure in prowess or cunning as by a failure of generosity or loyalty’.
does not work. Just as it would be wrong to think that certain Christian and/or
modern cultures supplanted exteriority entirely, it would be wrong to think that
there is no element of internality in the other systems outlined here. It is just that
in those other models internality is more explicitly a product of internalization
rather than some internal immaculate conception to which one cleaves on pain of
‘inauthenticity’, that buzzword of twentieth-century existentialist philosophy.
Internality as a product of internalization is simply the logic of the individual as
social animal—as an entity that is individuated in the process of socialization. In
each social case subjects try to mould themselves to the demands of external stand-
ards which cannot in the first instance touch on anything like guilt/conscience.
When the message of external standards and their external interpreters is posi-
tive, for the subject they have the structure of something like honour or esteem as
measured by gauging how others see one—more sophisticatedly, one uses one’s
reflective judgement to imagine how others might see one. When negative, they
have the structure of shame. Shame may arise from any comportment which does
not cohere with the self-image that one has developed as a particular person, a
self-image which is based in part on cognizance of how others might in principle
expect such a person to behave. This is the terrain of personal ethos. As to inter-
personal matters, and consideration of the (in)appropriate treatment of others,
consultation of Homer suggests that ‘obligations to behave honourably and to
respect the honour of others can be internalised and generalised . . . Characters
regularly observe that one should not oneself do things that excite one’s own
nemesis [indignation] when others do them.’ In either set of cases, when the
mature individual lets herself down, she feels ashamed under the gaze of her own
internal(ized) guide, which is neither just an objective standard mindlessly
adopted nor a decontextualized conscience welling up from the depths of the
soul.48 If all of this sounds rather alien, just consider the father of liberal econom-
ics, Adam Smith, and his talk of an ideal ‘impartial spectator’ as the imagined
authority whose standards we seek to uphold.49
For, say, the ‘Homeric Greeks’ the function of shame ultimately comes to sub-
sume some of the functions of guilt, rather than standing separately to it as is
supposedly the case in distinctions between shame and guilt cultures. Under
Judaism, ethics and morality are tightly related, if by ethics—in the sense of an
ethos—we understand how one styles or generally comports oneself and by
morality we mean what one owes to others. One difference between either of
48 Cairns, ‘Honour and Shame’, with quote about Homer’s characters at p. 30; Williams, Shame and
Necessity, ch. 4; Ikegami, ‘Emotions’, 344–6; Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral
Revolutions Happen (New York: Norton, 2010), 61–5.
49 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (6th edn, London: Cadell, 1790), 128–9: ‘The man of real
constancy and firmness . . . has never dared to forget for one moment the judgment which the impar-
tial spectator would pass upon his sentiments and conduct. He has never dared to suffer the man
within the breast to be absent one moment from his attention. . . . He does not merely affect the senti-
ments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts them.’
these set-ups and that which supposedly prevails today is that under neither dis-
pensation would it make sense to appeal to what one ‘really’ was inside as having
any priority over, or separation from, what one had actually brought about in the
world.50 Even with the changes in Greek philosophical thought from Plato
onwards, this emphasis on the public dimension of behaviour remained, and it
endured into Hellenized Roman civilization, forming the context in which the
Roman Stoics made their modificatory intervention.51
The latter-day conception of a hermetic, punctal, or self-enclosed self is related
to the ideas of a soul and a ‘personal’ (Christian) god. Naturally, balances between
internal and external desiderata have changed over time in Christianity as this or
that doctrinal strand achieved dominance and as the ecclesia metamorphosed
from a band of believers to a state after its adoption by Rome, and thence to a
civilization. This first essay dwells more on contrasts than commonalities in the
developing ideals of Christian versus non-Christian orders, especially insofar as
Christianity, in distinction to Judaism, claims that ‘law is not what religion is
really about’.52 But let us not forget that Jesus himself was a great exemplar, a doer
as well as a preacher who likely saw himself as renewing Jewish verities rather
than supplanting Judaism—though much hinges on what Jesus is taken to have
meant when he talked of fulfilling the law.53 Thus when he announced two appar-
ently new commandments—to love God and to love others—he was summariz-
ing the precepts of the first and second tablets of the Decalogue respectively.
Parts of the New Testament (e.g. Galatians 3:24, ‘The Law was our teacher unto
Christ’; Matthew 5:17–20 and 7:12) reflected the ‘Jewish’ heritage of a focus on
adherence to ‘the law’. Other parts (e.g. Galatians 2:16, and 3:13 on the ‘curse of
the law’) focused less on the good works that followed from obedience to the law,
and more on the internal disposition of faith, and indeed grace, i.e. undeserved
and unpredictable divine favour (e.g. Romans 5:20, 6:14, 7:5–25; John 3:16). Paul,
the converted Jew who was also a Roman citizen, wrote that cardinal manifesto of
creed-based thinking, ‘man is justified by faith apart from works of the law’
(Romans 3:28), a doctrine that moved the focus to the interior from the outside
world. Rarely, though, did the contending doctrines of law versus faith confront
each other in unadulterated form. ‘Moderate’ proponents of each tradition might
find as much to dislike in ‘extreme’ versions of their own position as in iterations
of the opposite tradition, though after a point in time few Christians anywhere
50 Cf Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History, 26.

51 On Aristotelian philosophy, Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Random
House, 2003), 64–5.
52 Alexander Murray, Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 10.
53 On the Jewishness of the teachings of Jesus, see Alan L. Berger and David Patterson, Jewish–
Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock (St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2008), ch.3.
For attempts to distance Jesus from Jewish tradition, see Augustine, Contra Faustus, bk XIX
§§1–4, in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, v. 326–9.
had much good to say about Jews. ‘Antinomian’ was the name given by the insti-
tutional arbiters of faith’s order to those irritations—from second- and third-
century Gnostics through the twelfth-century Joachim of Fiore to sundry
Nonconformists and Protestants in the early modern period—who developed the
emphasis on the internal-subjective element most extensively at the expense of
the nomos or given law. Elements of both doctrines could be found in the vast lit-
erary corpus of Augustine (354–430 bce). His treatise ‘On the Spirit and the
Letter’ of 412/413 ce, reflected on Paul’s claim that ‘the letter kills, but the spirit
gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6) and insisted that the letter of the law and spirit had
to go together. In the absence of spirit, the letter apparently ‘causes sin to be
known rather than avoided, and therefore to be increased rather than diminished’,
which was why Augustine believed Paul was right ‘to commend the grace which
has come to all nations through Jesus Christ, lest the Jews should extol themselves
at the expense of the other peoples on account of their having received the law’.54
At the same time simple obedience was important, for while Augustine talked of
human hearts being grasped by grace, and imbibing the spirit behind the law, he
was suspicious of giving free rein to a potentially faulty, passion-driven human
moral reasoning.55
Another influential strand of Augustine’s moral theory is eudaemonist in char-
acter, oriented to the moral agent’s happiness.56 The point was pursuing the road
that led to true happiness, not the pseudo-happiness of instant gratification. True
happiness might best be served by working towards an earthly kingdom—civitas
terrena—of love and peace, though the highest and most perfect peace was to be
found in the kingdom of god, or as Augustine called it in the title of his best-
known work, the city of god: Civitas Dei. In this element of Augustinian thought
we detect an influential strand of social theory that would retain currency through
the Middle Ages and beyond, whether or not in its explicitly Christian form. It
was a social theory in that while the agent’s overarching concern in deciding on
action was fear/hope for her soul, those actions were also apt to produce socially
favourable outcomes in the earthly kingdom.
A problem for Augustine was reconciling measures that might be necessary for
the maintenance of the ecclesia on earth when they seemed to go against the
peaceful teaching of Christ and the principles of inner religious sincerity. How
could earthly coercion of schismatics like the Donatists lead to sincere religious
faith—sincerity being a condition of salvation? Only late in life did Augustine
54 Augustine, A Treatise on the Spirit and the letter, chs 8 and 9[vi]; further to the Jews’ ‘boasting’,
see chs 13[viii] and 21[xiii]. (Arabic numerals indicate the version that is split into 66 parts, Roman
numerals the version with 36 parts.) Treatise repr. in Augustine, St Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works,
ed. Philip Schaff (Woodstock, Ont.: Devoted, 2017), 170–201.
55 Mark Ellingson, The Richness of Augustine (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 2005),
135; Michael Bryant, A World History of War Crimes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 52–3.
56 Anthony Kenny and Charles Kenny, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility (Exeter: Imprint
Academic, 2006), 21–4.
conclude that it might be legitimate to force people into the fold. City of God,
meanwhile, was concerned not just with spiritual matters but with responding to
physical, ‘barbarian’ threats manifested in the sack of Rome (410 bce). Relevant
here is Augustine’s theory of the unavoidability of evil in the mundane realm: it is
an ineluctable dilemma of life in the earthly city in the time between the Fall and
the Last Judgement. As applied to the specific situation in hand, Augustine
demanded soldierly obedience in the face of superior orders rather than exercise
of individual and potentially faulty moral discretion. Soldiers had to kill.57 This
doctrine gave impetus to that dualism that has features of a theory of special roles
(see pp. 60–76), but which gained purchase well beyond the bearers of particular
roles. Christ’s words were only to apply to the inner disposition of the warrior, not
to his acts in the external world. Such reasoning was repeated by the great twelfth-
century canon law jurist and theorist of just war, Gratian. In the words of Causa
23 of Gratian’s Decretum, ‘it is not a sin to wage war . . . [Christ’s] precepts of
patience must be observed in the preparation of the heart, not the conduct of the
body’.58 Mind–body dualism was not a precise analogy to Church–State dualism,
but both highlighted the problematic relation not just between the demands of
the earthly and the heavenly city but also between the inner and outer world of
the individual person, between the material realm of physis and the spiritual
realm of pneuma.
Church–State tensions had already been highlighted when Constantine
(r. 306–37) intervened in ecclesiastical affairs. If, to the emperor, interventions
were an expression of the bond between politics and theology, then, with the
advent of any doctrinal dispute in the Church the bond meant that the emperor
had to take sides and risked antagonizing the losers. Especially important was the
Arian controversy that resulted in the Nicene Council and Creed of 325 ce,
which is often seen as marking the terminal point of ‘early Christianity’.
(Arianism, the adopted religion, inter alia, of the Goths who sacked Rome in 410,
was ruled a heresy.) The redivision of the Roman Empire between Constantine’s
sons portended the later and more permanent division of the empire at the close
of the fourth century. There is some truth to the cliché that the eastern part of the
empire, today remembered as Byzantium, retained a greater harmony of Church
and State under ‘Caesaro-papal’ emperors, emblematically Justinian, while in the
West an uneasy dualism persisted. From the fifth-century fragmentation of the
western Roman Empire, the bishopric of Rome remained a religious focal point
and centre of power, albeit often in tension with the patriarchate of Constantinople.
With the expansion of Christian influence in Europe over ensuing centuries,
Rome sought to reassert its spiritual power over the secular forces on which it had
had to rely. The best-known high medieval battles between regnal and sacerdotal
57 Bryant, World History, 52–3; Tooke, The Just War, 7–12.

58 James J. Megivern, The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1997), ch. 2, sect. V pt D; Tooke, The Just War, 13, 29.
institutions would occur precisely where the relationship between pope and
monarch had been closest in previous centuries, in the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. But
this is to jump ahead. First, we need to address how the inhabitants of what came
to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, and other northerly polities, became
Christians, which is a story of further inner–outer tensions.
Conversion was generally a top-down affair, beginning with chieftains, and an
outside-inwards affair, beginning with the adaption of existing festivals, practices,
icons, and places of worship to Christian purposes. Christian propagandists seek-
ing to play on the prestige of Rome were distinctly ambiguous about the Judaic
heritage of their religion, yet it did not escape their notice that convertible warrior
tribes were more impressed with the fighting capacities of the ancient Hebrews,
and the severe god of some of the legal and historical books (though not the
prophecy and poetry) of the Old Testament than with certain New Testament
teachings about humility and forgiveness.59 Correspondingly, the Christ that was
deployed in proselytization was often the martial victor over Satan, not the mar-
tyred apostle of love who came to be emphasized in the second millennium ce:
Christus victor rather than Christus crucifixus, as it were. The hope was that all
this emphasis on externality and worldliness was the first step in the conversion
of inner states, but as the Franks converted from the late fifth century—Anglo-
Saxons followed in the seventh century, and other populations to the north and
east of the Frankish realms through the twelfth century and in some cases even
the fourteenth—they shaped Christianity as much as it shaped them. In trying to
make Christianity appealing, missionaries presented the supposed this-worldly
benefits of Christianity at least as much as the next-worldly connotations. Many
of the prosyletized barely knew what it was that they had signed up to and poured
the old wine of their established belief systems into new skins. Far from produ-
cing Stoic internalism, ‘world-rejecting and soteriological’, as befitted the early
underground, multi-ethnic Christian community, the result was a ‘heroic, folk-
centred’, ‘sociobiological’ ‘interpretation of Christianity’. Owing to the strength of
the Frankish Carolingians and Ottonians, which were the first two dynasties of
the Holy Roman Empire, this syncretism greatly influenced the character of
Christendom. It was precisely the rejection of that sort of ‘compromised’
Christianity—with its accompaniment in what Ruth Benedict would have called a
‘shame culture’—in favour of the ecclesia primitiva and a more internal spiritual-
ity that encouraged the great papal reform projects of the early second millen-
nium ce, and even the Lutheran Reformation.60
59 Charles F. Briggs, The Body Broken: Medieval Europe, 1300–1520 (London: Routledge 2011), 284;
on the testaments, Joseph H. Lynch and Phillip C. Adamo, The Medieval Church (London: Routledge,
2014), 206–7.
60 James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach
to Religious Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), passim but esp. ch. 7 and conclu-
sion, with the quoted passages at pp. 209 and 212.
The growth of a new order of states in the first centuries of the new millennium,
after the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire characterized in Bloch’s dis-
cussion of the ‘first feudal age’ (pp. 19–20), enhanced some of the centralizing
tendencies that had been present in the Carolingian polity and Anglo-Saxon
England. Monarchs of the era shared with the Papacy the agendas of pacifying
militarized societies and hierarchically organizing large earthly realms, even as
royal and ecclesiastical claims to authority sometimes conflicted. From around
the year 1000 the ‘peace of god’ movement sought to constrict privatized violence
within the Christian polities, even if that meant channelling violence outwards
through crusade in a way that actually enhanced a sense of shared Christian civil-
ization in the face of non-Christian others. In the name of the ‘king’s peace’,
Angevin England saw an intensified attempt to establish a royal monopoly on the
legitimate use of force by making private violence a public offence.61 The prin-
ciple of compensation for harm to individuals was increasingly replaced by that of
retribution for harm to the sovereign’s order, though this process, which had
started earlier, was gradual and uneven:62 wergeld lasted in some places through
the Middle Ages and in Ireland its equivalent for homicide (éraic) into the early
seventeenth century. Royal authorities took increasing responsibility for prosecu-
tion of certain sorts of offence, even if many would continue to be dealt with
through manor or city courts and other such enduring features of a more local-
ized power structure.
Another way of putting matters is that the concept of justice as righteousness
was consolidated alongside and sometimes at the expense of the idea of justice as
satisfaction that was associated with the payment of compensation or private
61 On the peace of god, Tomaž Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and
Western Political Order (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); on the king’s
peace, Karl Shoemaker, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 450–1500 (New York: Fordham
62 Eugene J. Chesney, ‘The Concept of Mens Rea in the Criminal Law’, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology 29/5 (1939), 627–44, here 627–8, including the judgement that ‘early English law grew
from a point bordering on absolute liability’. Chesney’s article relies heavily on Francis Bowes Sayre,
‘Mens Rea’, Harvard Law Review 45/6 (1932), 974–1026. On the blend of emendable and unemendable
offences (i.e. the most serious outright murders, meriting capital punishment) in Anglo-Saxon crim-
inal justice that supposedly prevailed up to and even for a century after the Norman Conquest, see
Thomas A. Green, ‘The Jury and the English Law of Homicide, 1200–1600’, Michigan Law Review 74
(1976), 413–99, here 416–17. Conversely, on the ‘marked switch in later Anglo-Saxon law from
amendment to penalty’, and the accompanying change, from the early tenth century, in the meaning of
bót from ‘redress of wrong to an injured kin’ to ‘a fine for damaging society as a whole’, see the more
recent Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West (London: Hambledon, 1999), 60–1.
Wormald observes that ‘most commentators on early medieval law’ contend ‘that its dominant
notion was one of tort as opposed to crime’, then goes on, with respect to the English case, and refer-
ence to the Anglo-Saxon tenth century, to problematize the idea of a caesura at the Norman Conquest
of 1066. Wormald is not, of course, denying the significance of the tort–crime distinction, merely
backdating, with respect to one kingdom, the period of the shift in ‘dominance’ from one concept to
the other.
vengeance.63 The residue of the concept of justice as satisfaction may be detected

in the German word for guilt, Schuld, which is also the word for debt.64 This rise
of the concept of justice as righteousness meant the augmentation of concrete
grievances with the idea of offences against an abstraction that might also go by
the name ‘morality’ or ‘the state’.65 Indeed behaviour might in principle be pros-
ecuted that had not resulted in any reported harm against any person.
This gradual conceptual shift created an increasingly conducive environment
for the pursuit of heretics and the stigmatization of Jews and lepers and indeed
the high medieval State was a more enthusiastic persecutor even than the Church,
as would often be the case in the witch-hunts of the early modern period. The
Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, whose credal tenets defined the conditions of
membership in the western Christian community and stipulated distinctive
clothing for Jews and heretics, was the culmination of many previous ecclesias-
tical and royal decrees in these directions. The quest for uniformity was a bed-
fellow of the demand for submission and was driven with a violent vigour
disproportionate to any threat.66
As to the law for those within the universe of obligation, the bureaucratic
expansion of the central Middle Ages brought great codifications and treatises.
From the mid-twelfth century Gratian became synonymous with canon law, in
the next century Bracton with English common law. The ‘Roman law’ culminat-
ing in the sixth-century code of the Byzantine emperor Justinian became a touch-
stone of the legal revolution in continental Europe after the rediscovery of
Justinian’s Digest in the late eleventh century, though it served more as inspiration
than template over the next few centuries as it influenced the ius commune or
common law of the western and central European states. One overall develop-
ment in western Christendom was an increasing emphasis on the subjective/
internal/mental element of what we would now call crime.67
63 For such a distinction, Bryant, World History, 52.

64 Which is a point of which Nietzsche made much: On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
65 See Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, 61, claiming that from the early tenth
century in England bót generally ‘meant compensation to God, Church, king or community at large’,
thus giving it the more abstract, less interpersonal character that we tend to associate with the public
law, as opposed to the interpersonal character of wergeld and private law.
66 Moore, Formation, 6–10, 158–69; and (which is also relevant to subsequent paragraphs) Manfred
Schneider, ‘Forum Internum–Forum Externum: Insitutionstheoriem des Geständnisses’, in Jo
Reichertz and Manfred Schneider (eds), Sozialgeschichte des Geständnisses: Zum Wandel der
Geständniskultur (Wiesbaden: VS, 2007), 23–42, here 24 ff.
67 Chesney, ‘Concept of Mens Rea’, 629–32; Virpi Mäkinen and Heikki Pihlajamäki, ‘The
Individualization of Crime in Medieval Canon Law’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65/4 (2004), 525–42.
(Note that Gratian’s Decretum was scarcely confined to matters of canon law.) On the other side of the
ledger, on the endurance of elements of absolute liability in the influential Leges Henrici Primi, and
thus the not entirely representative nature of the mens rea clause that appeared in it, see Sayre, ‘Mens
Rea’, 978–83.
We know that interest in the subjective element of action was not original to
Christian civilization, far less second-millennium Christendom. Thus we must
disregard much of the ‘progressivist’ orthodoxy that purports to identify a late
medieval ‘moment of transition from the primitive emphasis upon actus reus or
externalities to the modern focus on internal or subjective culpability’, and the
partially backdated version that gives Justinian all the credit, even as we can allow
that the subjective element did become more pronounced in the first half of the
second millennium than, say, under Frankish law, owing to aforementioned
reasons of sociology, state, and religious reform.68 Subjective disposition—mens
rea—came to be a key criterion in distinguishing crimes/felonies from torts and
delicts, i.e. harmful failures of due care.69 The law of torts and delicts—or the law
of obligations, as it is more suggestively called in some quarters—falls today
under the remit of civil law, as opposed to criminal law.
The argument of legal historian Penny Crofts requires some qualification but
nevertheless captures an important truth. She observes that modern law’s ‘regime
of subjective culpability’ is more individualist and internalist than its more
socially minded predecessors, and as such ‘pushes negligence, strict and absolute
liability offences to the side as awkward exceptions, and constructs [for instance]
categories of constructive homicide as archaic offences that have not as yet caught
up with the regime of subjective culpability’.70 The qualification—and to such mat-
ters the present section will return near its conclusion—is that rather than ana-
chronistic residues of an earlier age, perhaps concepts of negligence, gross
negligence, and recklessness constitute enduring counterbalances to an excessive
emphasis on a particular mental state. Further, mention of absolute liability
offences reminds us that we ought to attend to civil law as a paradigm of broader
culpability and obligation than that presented by criminal law.71 The truth in
Croft’s position lies in the significance that tends to be attached to the criminal–
civil distinction, a distinction marked not least by the differing sorts of penalty
68 For the ‘primitive’ quote, which represents a position with which the author of the quote dis-
agrees, Penny Crofts, Wickedness and Crime: Laws of Homicide and Malice (London: Routledge, 2013),
33, 258. On the salience of the mental element, especially under ecclesiastical jurisdictions, ‘even’ in
the early medieval Latin West (under Charlemagne and his successors), see Murray, Conscience,
10–14. For exaggerations of the innovations of Justinian’s code on the matter of animus (will/inten-
tion), see Adolf Berger (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook
Exchange, 2004), 362. On Cicero’s important views, see Chesney, ‘The Concept of Mens Rea’, 630. On
relevant legal concepts in the classical Roman period: Eric Descheemaeker and Helen Scott (eds),
Iniuria and the Common Law (Oxford: Hart, 2014), chs 5 and 6. Israel Drapkin, Crime and Punishment
in the Ancient World (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 1989), 241, shows that later Roman penal law,
while not as influential subsequently as Roman civil law, clearly distinguished between subjective and
objective elements. Yet further back, see Aristotle, Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thompson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1966). bk V, ch. 6 (pp. 155–6) on state of mind in the sense of motive.
69 In addition to preceding notes on mens rea, on the origins and changing meaning of the word
‘felony’, see Wormald, Legal Culture, 62.
70 Crofts, Wickedness and Crime, 28–33 and passim, quotes from pp. 33 and 258.
71 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 64–5.
that can accrue in each sphere. We might hazard that there is an enduring general
association of crimes, as opposed to torts and other breached obligations, with
sinfulness of a particular order. Certainly the Latin crimen could denote ‘sin’, and
while it has probably never been maintained that all sins are also crimes,72 a great
overlap has long been assumed, and our conception of what is really wrong, and
why, continues to be shaped by religious categories even as the law itself has
adopted more secular terms. (‘Punishment’ shares a root with ‘penance’, and
‘penitentiary’ is the name still used in the USA for ‘prison’.) Furthermore, given
the prioritization in ‘progressivist’ thought of justice as righteousness over justice
as satisfaction between individuals, it is significant that criminal law better fits the
former category and civil law the latter. Perhaps, then, the major critical point
here pertains to broader culture, rather than to the law.
Thinking to cultural ‘common sense’, another indication of the ongoing influ-
ence of the religious heritage pertains to the original sin. That was a sin of what
Augustine called concupiscence, hurtful desire, unbound. In legal parlance, delib-
erate action to achieve a desired goal is known as direct intent. It is distinguished
in morality, ‘common sense’, and to some extent in law from simply allowing
something to happen, but also from bringing something about in a way that was
predictable even if not desired. This implicitly normative distinction helps explain
why we routinely consider genocide, say the intentional massacre of a million
people, as morally worse than creating for other reasons the conditions in which a
million people will predictably starve, and not intervening when they do starve.
The term collateral damage serves to insert a moral distinction between the pur-
suit of the direct ends of, say, military bombing, and the often-predictable side
effects of the same. The famed doctrine of double effect—in many influential
iterations—is based on the idea that we bear less moral responsibility for that
which we indirectly intend than that which we directly intend and it has
influenced just-war theory as much as debates about the distinction between
voluntary-active and voluntary-passive euthanasia.73 The moral hierarchy is not
axiomatic.
72 On crimen, Murray, Conscience, 26. Further on the significant though not total overlap between
crimen and sin, including the relationship of crimen to ‘mortal sin’, see James Gordley, The Jurists: A
Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 73.
73 The law itself does have ways to circumvent some of the potential problems here, which is why I
stress the general cultural aspect. On the legal side, see Jeremy Horder, ‘Intention in the Criminal
Law—A Rejoinder’, Modern Law Review 58/5 (1995), 678–91; specifically on the origins of the concept
of oblique intent and its partial incorporation in British legal thought on intent, see Mohamed Elewa
Badar, The Concept of Mens Rea in International Criminal Law (Oxford: Hart, 2013), 48–9. On over-
statement of the significance of the difference between direct and oblique intention in traditional just-
war theory and international law, especially on the matter of ‘collateral damage’, see Michael A. Newton
and Larry May, Proportionality in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 218; on
the euthanasia issue, A. M. Begley, ‘Acts, Omissions, Intentions and Motives: A Philosophical
Examination of the Moral Distinction between Killing and Letting Die’, Journal of Advanced Nursing
28 (1998), 865–73.
Let us now move more fully to the development of moral theory in and beyond
the Middle Ages, while bearing in mind moral theory’s overlaps with law and
theology. As opposed to acting from fear of hell and hope for heaven, one could
emphasize the honouring of god’s law solely for its sake. This duty-based philoso-
phy, like Kant’s later version, is most clearly associated with the thought of the
late medieval theologian Duns Scotus (1266–1308).74 From the functional perspec-
tive of rulers, this sort of self-policing appears institutionally attractive, ‘conscience
control’ being a more advanced form of social control than preference-shaping by
threat. Yet there were potential costs for Church and State. For the Church, the
problem was that were such thinking taken to one conclusion, morality was
entirely detached from prospects for salvation, which might be to detach it from
faith. Equally if social control was the goal, that was always threatened by the risk,
which Augustine had recognized, that not everyone’s conscience or reason would
take them in the same direction in the interpretation of God’s law. Finally, there is
the question of whether God and State should judge the individual by the same
criteria. Addressing that question requires us to engage with the thought of Peter
Abelard, from whom we shall work forward to the Reformation and its stipula-
tions on the relationship between faith and morality.
The difference between Abelard (1079–1142) and some of his predecessor
philosophers was one of degree. He expanded the equation of sin with mental
acts—mental acts being those things that transformed into sins otherwise ordin-
ary dispositional vices that one might not be able to help, or sensuality that one
could not help but ‘feel’. He made the rightness or wrongness of the external act
contingent on the preceding mental act.75 By extension, works or acts in them-
selves do not merit praise or condemnation of the actor, rather the actor’s mindset
does. This brought the focus not just to intention but to motive. One must, how-
ever, recognize Abelard’s particular distinction between crime and sin. Crime was
punishable by earthly justice whose important exemplary function necessitated
dealing only with externally visible signs of interior motive states, whereas only
God had direct access to the sinful mind. Nor was Abelard a pure subjectivist
who adverted in the last instance to the authenticity of the individual conscience.
His talk of divine natural law suggests it was possible to discern what is intrinsic-
ally good and bad, and indeed the possibility of such discernment is central to the
74 Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 463–5.
75 John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), ch. 14, with discussion of some potential confusions and inconsistencies on Abelard’s attempts
to restrict his own subjectivism at pp. 293–5; Linda Hogan, Confronting the Truth: Conscience in the
Catholic Tradition (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 73–5; Ralph McInerny, A History of Western
Philosophy from St. Augustine to Ockham (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), pt
III, ch. 3; David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (Baltimore: Helican, 1962), 128 ff.;
Michael Bertram Crowe, The Changing Profile of The Natural Law (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 114.
Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Touchstone, 1968), 170–1 on the contexts of
reception of Abelard’s thought.
individual’s striving for purity of heart. It was thus of paramount import, as

Abelard put it, to ‘know thyself ’. One could thereby align the subjective element
with objective, God-given desiderata, in order that subjectivism might not run
riot. (Like Augustine, he believed that the value-determining centre was outside
himself.) Yet it was also possible for those, such as the crucifiers of Christ, not to
know what they were really doing, and thus not to merit blame in the sense of
guilt for a sin. Given such examples, Abelard’s thought was not taken up unre-
servedly in theological circles. However the enhanced subjective element could
no longer be avoided, and this was especially true after the early thirteenth-century
Latin rediscovery of Aristotle’s Ethics.76 It is in the area of moral thought that
Abelard found his major legacy, not least on Gratian.
Abelard, like Gratian after him, was also important in the incubation of the
distinction in canon law between matters of the forum internum and the forum
externum, as they would be called in post-Tridentine Catholicism. In the decades
after Gratian’s Decretum of.1140, the forum internum was called the forum consci-
entiae, or court of conscience, as opposed to the more formalized, ‘external’, com-
pulsory ecclesiastical court, which was concerned solely with ‘manifest and
public’ transgressions of the Church’s law or of the divine law. Where the ecclesi-
astical court could hand down orthodox punishments of a ‘negative’ kind, the
outcome of confession in the court of conscience tended to be penance, i.e. more
‘positive’, compensatory acts to God and/or the community. The court of con-
science was not just concerned with ‘public and manifest’ sins—and confession of
those could not safeguard the penitent from prosecution in a public court—but
also with inner or hidden sins. The external court was based on argument and
external examination, but in the internal court (which, to be clear, involved more
than one person, and was thus not completely internal to the mind of the peni-
tent), while the confessing penitent could be prompted and guided by a trained
confessor, the penitent herself was at once accuser and accused. The confessor
saw himself as caring for the health of the penitent’s soul; the penitent was
encouraged to provide a detailed account of sins by way of encouraging self-
reflection. Confession, that blend of introspection in a dialogic setting, was made
mandatory for laypeople on an annual basis by Lateran IV, by which time too the
legal confession—the baring of the conscience by the only person who could
really testify to it—in criminal ecclesiastical cases had been crowned ‘queen of
proofs’.77
76 Aristotle’s first commentators in the early thirteenth century downplayed the civil and political
dimensions of ethical life in favour of the contemplative side. See Irene Zavattero, ‘Moral and
Intellectual Virtues in the Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics’, in István Pieter
Bejczy (ed.), Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 31–54.
77 On Abelard, sin, crime, forum internum and forum externum, and confession, see Mäkinen and
Pihlajamäki, ‘The Individualization of Crime’, 531 ff., including 537 on ‘queen of proofs’. Further on
forum internum and forum externum: W. Trusen, ‘Zur Bedeutung des geistlichen Forum internum
und externum für die spaitmittelalterlich Gesellschaft’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, Kanonistische
One contribution by Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74) was to develop a distinction

between syneidêsis and conscientia. Prior to the work of Peter Lombard (c.1095–
1160) these things had been considered identical, as in Jerome’s translation of the
Vulgate. Aquinas held syneidêsis, now widely known as synderesis after a twelfth-
century mistranscription, to be the innate, God-given knowledge of the funda-
mental principles by which to distinguish good from evil, whereas conscientia was
a matter of judgement in the application of these general principles to particular
situations. It is easy to get confused here, but note that the concept of conscience
as it was developing at this point comprised both synderesis and conscientia—they
were two elements of conscience. As for Aquinas, whatever the allowances he felt
that one might make for the errant conscientia that still bound its owner, and thus
the lack of blame that should attach to her whose judgement has gone astray in
applying the principles given by synderesis, proper goodness must cohere with
rationality. But he also insisted on a separation between things that were to be
judged by God alone and those judged by man, and by ‘man’ he seemed to include
confessors.78 He rendered the canon law distinction between the forum
conscientiae/forum internum and the forum externum into something more like
an opposition. In his Summa Theologica, the ‘court of conscience’ is reduced to
conscience itself—it is on the way to becoming a purely conceptual forum, com-
pletely internal to the individual’s head or heart. Conscience is a matter for
the ‘relationship’ between the person and God, without the mediation of any
agent of the Church. The internal forum was for Aquinas akin to an untouchable
inner sphere.79
These musings were more important for the high doctrinal conflicts that would
later lead to schism in the western Church than for social history in the three
centuries from Lateran IV. After all, by 1500, confession ‘had become so efficient,
so well-fortified with literature and theology, and so nearly universal that, far
from being scandalously inadequate, it threatened to exceed the other way and
become a tyranny’.80 But perhaps the most important crack Aquinas created in
theological orthodoxy was his contention that while God was immediately
Abteilung 7/6 (1990), 254–85; P. Petkoff, ‘Forum Internum and Forum Externum in Canon Law and
Public International Law with a Particular Reference to the Jurisprudence of the European Court of
Human Rights’, Religion and Human Rights 7 (2012), 183–214, here 201–2; Schneider, ‘Forum
Internum–Forum Externum: Insitutionstheoriem des Geständnisses’, 24 ff.; and most important for
the above analysis, Joseph Goering, ‘The Internal Forum and the Literature of Penance and Confession’,
Traditio 59 (2004), 175–227, with ‘manifest and public’ at 183 and Gratian’s influence at 211–12.
78 Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, 457–60; Hogan, Confronting the Truth, 76–8;
Tobias Hoffmann, ‘Conscience and Synderesis’, in Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 255–64. On the mistranscription,
Schinkel, Conscience, 172, and 174–5 on conscientia and synderesis as part of conscience and on the
theological and historical context (including the Abelardian background and the prescriptions of
Lateran IV) that conduced to this shift in the understanding of conscientia.
79 Petkoff, ‘Forum Internum and Forum Externum’, 208–9. 80 Murray, Conscience, 53.
certain for himself, he was not immediately certain to humans.81 In compound

with the legacies of Abelard and others, such contentions provided an important
starting point for the ‘nominalist’ challenge of the later Middle Ages.
Nominalism brought epistemological, metaphysical, and moral questions
together. In an answer to questions that had some echoes of one of Plato’s
dialogues—(1) do the gods will what is just/reasonable/good or (2) is the just/
reasonable/good what the gods happen to will?—the metaphysical ‘realists’ like
Duns Scotus banked on the certainties of (1), meaning that the earthly doer of
duty could follow reason, morality, and God simultaneously. In reconciling
Christian doctrine with Aristotle Aquinas also rendered god’s reason anterior to
‘his’ will. William of Ockham (1288–1347) reversed the order of priority, on the
principle that only if will were supreme could God’s power be truly unlimited,
truly free.82 Nominalists also dissented from the related theologically ‘realist’
claim that one could know the natural and historical world objectively as the
manifestation of a divine, hierarchical order. For nominalists, the human mind
was left with articulating its own systems on the fragmentary evidence of experi-
ence or reason. Logic of thought and grammatical logic of written and spoken
language were the only reliable tools for comprehending the world at human dis-
posal, but they were uncoupled from metaphysics, i.e. from entities of the sort
that Plato had called eternal ‘forms’—entities that for prior theologians had
vouchsafed the interlinked order of the natural world, that ‘book of God’. The
emphasis on the inner states and human tools of comprehension also suggested
that religious hierarchs were in no better position to determine the higher mean-
ing behind the literal word of the Scriptures than any other literate person profi-
cient in the use of reason. Everything else was at God’s unknowable disposition,
leaving the human with faith alone, and while William provided some reasons as
to why God would not suddenly change the rules of the world that he had contin-
gently chosen to create, certainty about there being things that were right in
themselves received a significant blow. Save at those moments at which God
might choose to intervene in the world, concrete, mundane individuals existed on
their own, albeit in virtue of God’s omnipotence and in some way in his image,
certain only of their own situation as creatures free to will.83 One result was a sort
of moral intuitionism that by no means did away with the idea of conscience but
81 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (London: Nisbet, 1955), 71.

82 Jörg Dierken, Selbstbewusstsein individueller Freiheit: Religionstheoretische Erkundungen in prot-
estantischer Perspektive (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 203 ff.; Lauri Haikola, Gesetz und Evangelium
bei Matthias Flacius Illyricus: Eine Untersuchung zur Lutherischen Theologie vor der Konkordienformel
(Lund: Gleerup, 1952), 32 ff.; Schinkel, Conscience, 179, 430.
83 Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 530–6 and passim; Gordon Leff, William of Ockham:
The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 54–5.
still left it as a rather formal category, bereft of the substantial contents of certain,
objective right, that a ‘realist’ metaphysics claimed to be able to identify.84
The Reformation owes to nominalism the doctrine of divine voluntarism and
the challenge to institutional interpretative authority. The Lutheran belief that
salvation comes not from the commission of good works on earth but from the
meeting of human faith and God’s grace, stems additionally from elements of
Pauline thought and aforementioned developments in moral theory, in which
good deeds were at most just uncertain evidence of inner dispositions. In his
commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, Luther described ‘papists’ as ‘our
Jews’; ‘Papists’ had perverted the sacraments and fallen into what Paul had
dubbed ‘works righteousness’.85
While Luther added ‘papists’ to the list of those traduced for lacking the rele-
vant philosophy of internality, the trend towards subjectivism and reliance on
inner faculties may be detected across new confessional boundaries and in many
areas of inquiry. A Catholic was the author of the most famous subjectivist motto
of them all, cogito ergo sum. Where Augustine had reasoned ‘I doubt, therefore I
am’, Descartes’s (1596–1650) update, ‘I think, therefore I am’, moved the focus
from truth as a property of the objective world to certainty as a product of the
inquiring mind.86 This mind, as a ‘thinking’ thing, was categorically separate from
the body that housed it and was capable of forming ‘clear and distinct ideas’ as the
basis for systems of philosophical knowledge. The body was characterized by
‘extension’ rather than thought and was part of the natural order just as much as
was any non-human animal. Such mind–body separation recast the familiar two
spheres model of physis and pneuma (p. 144). The doctrine also complemented
dualisms in other areas of social and religious thought. In fact in principle it dug a
broad ditch between the inner existential certainty of the thinker and everything
else, other minds included.
Luther’s understanding of the importance of faith alone and its supposed
complement, original sin, was based on a reading of Paul that Luther wrongly
assumed was the sole basis for Augustine’s doctrine.87 Luther underpinned a spe-
cifically spiritual doctrine, as separate from a theory of social justice or revolu-
tion in earthly kingdoms. His insistence on God’s pure transcendence, God’s
existence in another realm, was the warrant for secular governance and hierarchy
84 Schinckel, Conscience, 179, 430.

85 Martin Luther, Commentary on Pauls’ Epistle to the Galatians (Lafayette, IN: Sovereign Grace,
2001), 206; Mark U. Edwards, Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics 1531–1546 (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2004), 116, 129.
86 On Descartes and the nominalist inheritance, and the way in which interior self-certainty of
thought becomes the ‘measure’ of method, see Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical
Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 23–4.
87 John M. Rist, Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 174, 184–7 and ch. 7 more generally.
in the earthly sphere, even as Luther rejected earlier ‘sociobiological’, this-worldly

systems of faith. The Church, meaning the institutions of the Church, was of
the external world just as much as was the State, and in that world the State
must stand supreme, contrary to certain papal ambitions.88 That is the common
wisdom about Luther’s thought and with a contested degree of qualification it
stands.89
Luther’s not-always-consistent distinction between spiritual and mundane
spheres became categorical in horrified response to the ‘peasant’ rebels, who in
the war of 1524–5 followed what they saw as the logic of his attacks on immoral
Church and misuses of power. Luther’s settled view marked him off radically
from those medieval antinomians like Joachim of Fiore and the Brethren and
Sisters of the Free Spirit. These people believed in God’s immanence as well as
transcendence, and so in the possibility of a genuine union with God on this
earth—a union that came to be called indwelling. By this union, matters of good
and evil were transcended, and earthly hierarchies rejected alongside the idea of
private property. Early modern successors of the Brethren were to be found in
Calvin’s Geneva under the name ‘spirituals’, and in Civil War and Commonwealth
England under the attribution ‘Ranters’. All three groups were subject to intense
vilification, as in Calvin’s Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins qui
se nomment Spirituelz (1545). The propaganda makes it difficult to establish how
coherent and numerous they were, let alone what they actually did. The violence
of the reaction against them, as against the insurgents of 1524–5, tells us a great
deal about the phobias of the prevailing orders about the diffusion into the mun-
dane world of too much of the spirit of some people’s interpretation of the
Reformation.90
88 While Luther’s two kingdoms model clearly draws on Augustine’s two cities model, differences
between them are elucidated in Rist, Augustine Deformed, 176 ff. The mention of ‘sociobiological’
belief systems is to make the contrast with the vision of Christianity elucidated on p. 145.
89 One qualification is that as the institutions of the Church lost direct authority in Protestant
states, there was a further infusion of religious precepts into the secular sphere of law and order. The
decline in ecclesiastical courts was matched by secular courts (thus the State) expanding their remit
and in the process becoming more explicitly ‘moralized’ in their concerns. Public ordinances
addressed matters of family law, antisocial behaviour and moral torts, school curricula, and so forth.
See Elizabeth Zoller, Introduction to Public Law: A Comparative Perspective (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff,
2008), 67–8; Edgar J. McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993), 3. However, for a debate as to how ‘Lutheran’ was the major legal develop-
ment of the Germanic 1532 Carolina penal code, see Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, the
Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 28–9,
196 and Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western
Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003),144 ff., as opposed to Heikki Pihlajamäki,
‘Executor divinarum et suarum legum: Criminal Law and the Lutheran Reformation’, in Virpi Mäkinen
(ed.) Lutheran Reformation and the Law (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 171–204, here 177, who finds traces of
Protestantism difficult to find in the Carolina.
90 Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, viii (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 494–500.
On Ranters and related matters: Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London:
Penguin, 1991).
Luther’s social thinking was still shaped by those organic philosophies of society
where each part of the earthly universitas had its place, higher or lower, in a
coherent whole. Individual uniqueness went together with acceptance of one’s
allotted social role, as also in Calvin’s teaching about being true to one’s ‘calling’.
Were St Paul correct that master, slave, and the ‘earthly prince’ were equal in the
eyes of God, their unequal standings for a while on earth mattered little. Besides,
in Luther’s outlook, as in Augustine’s, real Christians were thin on the ground,
and the anarchy that would ensue from secular instability would provide even
more fertile terrain for the Devil. Luther relied heavily on Paul’s Letter to the
Romans (particularly Romans 13) in distinguishing between heavenly and earthly
laws, though one wonders how the thought of Paul, who died between 64 and 68
ce, would have been modified had he written after the onset of Nero’s persecu-
tion of Christians in 64 ce. Luther, himself having enjoyed the Elector of Saxony’s
protection much as the nominalist William of Ockham had earlier enjoyed
Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria’s protection from the Church, interpreted the fifth
command of the Decalogue as an injunction to obey one’s political father.
Luther was obviously concerned with good and evil and was obviously not try-
ing to encourage immorality; yet the route to divine forgiveness was ultimately
through faith, rather than reparational acts, and even, if we are to be cynical about
it, rather than much consideration of any earthly victim. In truth, the institution
of confession had already encouraged the latter tendency, by providing a hermen-
eutic for the sinner with no parallel hermeneutic for the victim of sin.91 (A his-
toriographical expression of the same principle is The Constitutional History of
England by the historian and later Anglican bishop William Stubbs, which closes
in tribute to ‘that highest justice which is found in the deepest sympathy with
erring and straying men’.92) Furthermore, scriptural justification existed for the
focus on sinner and forgiveness in Luke 15:7: ‘there will be more rejoicing in
heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who
do not need to repent’.
What Luther achieved was undermining the central tenets of sacramental con-
fession in the process of separating ‘private conscience and the institutional
church’.93 Out went the priest’s power of absolution, and his concomitant power
to prescribe penitential works. In came the belief in the individual’s essential
powerlessness, and the conviction that faith was the only hope. All were sinners,
unable to fulfil the demands of biblical law, but belief in forgiveness of sins
through the grace of God was inextricably associated with the prospect of such
forgiveness. (Contrast this stance with Jewish confession wherein God’s
91 For which point I thank Jürgen Manemann, in conversation.

92 William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, iii (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1890), 639.
93 Murray, Conscience and Authority, 87.
forgiveness is sought for sins against God, but forgiveness for sins against other
humans must be sought from them.) The ‘peaceful conscience, which is a product
of the firm belief that one is forgiven, is a prerequisite of forgiveness. One of
Luther’s favorite ways of dramatizing this paradox was to insist that if we do not
believe we are forgiven—if we do not find peace in the promise of forgiveness—
we make God a liar.’ Good works ensue from the state of believing oneself justi-
fied, though those works are not themselves relevant for salvation. Equally, no
human is perfect, or godlike, and as the faithful Christian cannot but continue to
sin, it is rather important that, as Luther wrote in 1520, no amount of sinning will
lead the Christian to ‘forfeit his salvation . . . unless he decides not to believe’.94
On another occasion he declared that ‘it is solely by impiety and incredulity of
heart that a man becomes guilty, and a slave of sin, deserving condemnation; not
by any outward sin or work’.95
The lawyer and Seneca scholar Calvin was not prepared to subordinate the
Church to the State, nonetheless he endorsed a ‘two kingdoms’ dualism of his
own. Increasing social authority in his Geneva was vested in the Consistory, which
was founded in 1541–2 but effectively gained theocratic power in 1555. It did not
distinguish between religious and moral precept and provided the institutional
discipline that in Calvin’s view fickle conscience could not be trusted to bring to
bear on the earthly comportment of bodies. Bodies was a keyword here, as it had
been for Augustine and Gratian, since bodies, like active works, were phenomena
of the temporal, political world, rather than the world to which faith pertained.
Calvin wrote of twofold government, the ‘spiritual and temporal jurisdiction’. ‘The
former has its seat within the soul, the latter only regulates the external conduct.’96
The ‘visible Church’, i.e. all the institutions of religion, is, like the State, confined to
the temporal realm, and does not mediate between the two worlds as it had earlier
via the institution of confession. For Calvin, the mistake of the antinomian spirituels
was to conflate the two realms. They had confused the genuine freedom of the
soul, in the realm in which earthly morality was as little relevant as any other
94 Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015), 349 ff., with quote about Luther at 355—the point made by that quote is at the
centre of Paul Hacker, The Ego in Faith: Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religion
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970), wherein Luther’s quote on forfeiting salvation is at 136;
Schinkel, Conscience, 198; Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London: Bodley
Head, 2016), 167–8, and 208 on Luther’s stress on faith alone. It is worth reiterating that Luther was at
least as much a polemicist as a systematic theologian, so his writings are by no means consistent. For
relevant resistance to some of the connotations of his own proclamations, see e.g. Harry Loewen,
Luther and the Radicals (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), ch. 6.
95 Philip Hughes, History of the Church, iii (London: Sheed and Ward, 1947), 518.
96 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Woodstock, ON: Devoted, 2016), 371 (Institutes
bk III, ch. 19, §15).
earthly concern, with a world in which the body and the moral conscience were
heteronomous, subject to external authority civil and religious.97
Calvin’s doctrine, like Luther’s, effectively involved a subdivision of the purely
internal version of the forum internum between a forum of conscience about right
and wrong as worldly concerns and a forum of pure belief and individual spiritu-
ality pertaining to a soul that was entirely separate from the temporal world.
Luther sharpened the distinction, there in principle in Duns Scotus, between
conscience-as-faith and conscience-as-morality. Faith was conceptually separated
from morality, and in the sense that heaven was more important than earth, the
soul more important than the body, faith was promoted above morality in a way
alien to Judaism, which has relatively little to say about the next world because of
its preoccupation with the sacredness of this one, and its belief that the relation-
ship to God works through relations with other people.
The cultural influence of this sort of thinking should not be understated, and as
with all cultural diffusion Calvin’s and Luther’s distinctions could be adapted. The
division of the soul from the worldly moral conscience, and accompanying doc-
trines of solefideism (by-faith-alone-ism) and Calvinist double predestination,
must be the origin of that peculiar all-or-nothing, saved or damned, outlook
whereby instead of considering whether actor X’s act was wrong, one addresses
what actor X ‘was’.98 As to the emphasis on the internality of the actor, rather than
the world outside, consider the nineteenth-century Lutheran and existential phil-
osopher Søren Kierkegaard. He wrote: ‘it is true of the religious man who goes
astray by reason of his pristine passion that this puts him in a kindly light’.
Concerning other sorts of people he also wrote: ‘By reason of the infiltration of
the State and social groups and the congregation and society, God can no longer
get a hold on the individual.’ Then, polemically: ‘So let us rather sin, sin out and
out, seduce maidens, murder men, commit highway robbery—after all, that can
be repented of, and such a criminal God can still get a hold on.’99 Kierkegaard’s
rumination was far from the first indication of the social ramifications of doc-
trines whose primary concern was the state of one’s own soul rather than, say, the
mutilated body of another soul-bearer. Indeed one assumes that Kierkegaard had
in mind Luther’s extremizing assertion to Philip Melanchthon in 1521 that ‘sin
97 Torrance Kirby, ‘A Reformed Culture of Persuasion: John Calvin’s “Two Kingdoms” and the
Theological Origins of the Public Sphere’, in Richard R. Topping and John A. Vissers (eds),
Calvin@500: Theology, History and Practice (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 52–66; cf.
Matthew J. Tuninga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two
Kingdom’s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 184, stressing that ‘for Calvin the funda-
mental difference between the two kingdoms is not that one is inwards and the other is outward, but
that one is spiritual and eternal, and the other is temporal and political’.
98 For an element of this, Schinkel, Conscience, 196–7.
99 Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson
and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 484–5.
will not tear us away’ from God, ‘even if thousands and thousands of times a day
we fornicate or murder’.100
Wherever Luther wished to set the forum boundaries at various points, his
words contributed to this-worldly conflict, and the rest of this section charts
enduring dualistic tensions. The religious, military, and political strife of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries were amongst other things battles over the
nature of conscience, faith, and god, in which rulers tried to co-opt subjects and
subjects sometimes rebelled. Faith was politicized more than ever. Combat settled
little concerning the relationship between conscience and morality or that between
the prerogatives of the individual and the needs of society and political order.
Few contemporaries are on record as having agreed with the philosopher
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) that conscience was as trivial as mere opinion and
that conscientia only had real meaning as public and shared, even if there was
clear logic to his conviction about the ‘repugnan[ce] to civil society’ of the doc-
trine whereby ‘whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin’.101 Even if
one was not a solefidian, the cat was out of the bag as far as a heightened self-
consciously subjective orientation was concerned. At the same time, the very
reinforcement of different State religions in successive sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century peace treaties encouraged scepticism as to claims on the one true way,
and thus the potential to foster doctrines of tolerance of different beliefs. Some
thinkers sought a set of minimal principles to which any Christian could sub-
scribe. The legacy of Calvin’s intransigence found a counterpart in the legacy of
the tolerant Erasmian Sebastian Castellio (1515–63).102 Moral reason
rebelled against the inequity of arbitrary salvation, the idea of the will’s bondage,
and the accompanying doctrine of original sin. Against Luther’s ‘lopsided
Augustinianism’103 it was recalled that Augustine had had quite a lot to say about
love as well as faith. The argument that God’s goodness governed ‘his’ will rather
than being mere expression of it had a long ‘realist’—as opposed to nominalist—
history that was easily recovered.
Then there were tensions between different levels of individual in the mundane
sphere. On one hand, at the highest political level, the drive to accommodate the
confessions and remove some of the causes of violence within Christendom rein-
forced the power of ‘Caesaro-papist’ princes as against the international forces of
the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Ending the Thirty Years War, the
Westphalian treaties of 1648 built on and amended the 1555 Peace of Augsburg,
which had established, with exceptions, the principle that each state’s religion cor-
respond to that of its ruler: where Augsburg recognized Lutheranism as a religion
100 Hughes, History of the Church, iii. 518.

101 Schinkel, Conscience, 209–10; Strohm, Conscience, 90–1.
102 On Castellio’s importance, Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), ch. 4.
103 Rist, Augustine Deformed, ch. 7.
of state alongside Catholicism, Westphalia added Calvinism. On the other hand,

significant concessions were made to the consciences of subjects too. The signa-
tory rulers committed themselves to permitting religious minorities in their states
to practise their faith under certain restrictions. Furthermore, under both the
Augsburg and the Wesphalian dispensation, subjects who did not wish to live in a
state of a different confession were granted freedom to emigrate—in other words
they were granted some choice over their sovereign.
If the State was increasingly a private individual from the perspective of the
international system, how were individual people to conceptualize themselves
qua individuals in relation to the state in other spheres than the religious one?
Descartes’s contemporary Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) turned on its head the doc-
trine of the theorist of absolutism Jean Bodin (1530–96), while concurring with
Bodin on the need for religious tolerance. Where Bodin had made state sover-
eignty the source of law, Grotius determined that ‘just as every right of the magis-
trate comes to him from the state, so has the same right come to the state from
private individuals’. He saw that ‘the right of chastisement was held by private
persons before it was held by the state’. In principle the individual had sovereign
attributes: hence the emphasis on subjective right as the primary fount of legal
order.104 Private law was the mechanism for asserting subjective rights, rights
whose salient conceptualization can, by the way, be traced to canon law debates of
the twelfth century. The rough allocation of remits between public and private law
that endures today dates from the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries.105
There was more than a grain of contract theory in Grotius’ The Law of War and
Peace (1625), and while fuller versions of contract theory had been devised
earlier,106 Grotius differed from them in hinting at the sort of more individually
initiated contract that was influentially propounded by Hobbes and Locke (1632–
1704). Locke’s contemporary Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) and Locke’s personal
experiment in education, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), were con-
cerned in turn to bring the social dimensions of morality into harmony with indi-
vidual subjectivity. For Pufendorf, individuals combine through socialitas,
sociability, by enacting their God-given capacity for knowledge of the good, in
order to further the common interests of a God-given humanity. Like Grotius, he
saw humans as having tendencies towards both selflessness and selfishness. The
104 Ruben Alvarado, Common Law and Natural Rights (Aalten: Wordbridge, 2009), 30–2 for the
principle and the limits on it, as well as the Grotius quotes.
105 Zoller, Introduction to Public Law on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Note that the
public–private distinction was prefigured in Roman law, but the basis and character of the distinction
was different. On that matter and on twelfth-century canonists and subjective rights: Berman, Law
and Revolution II, 298, 426.
106 Lee Ward, The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 55–6; James Brown Scott, Law, the State, and the International Community
(Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2003), 460; A. John Simmons, ‘Locke on the Social Contract’, in
Matthew Stuart (ed.), A Companion to Locke (Oxford: Blackwell, 2016), 413–32, here 417.
point of institutions was to encourage the sociable tendency.107 Shaftesbury

shared ground with Pufendorf in seeing affections as providing a counterbalance
to appetites. A Neoplatonist, he based his ‘rational religion’ on something like a
theory of intelligent design, proposed a close affinity between moral and aesthetic
judgement, and tried to ground both in objective features of the world. Natural
order and beauty were givens, as was the nascent human capacity to appreciate
them; what society and reflection provided was the education in taste to cultivate
the faculty. And since God had created the whole, the moral sense, based on
affective reactions to the world, must appropriately work towards what is best for
the whole, i.e. one’s society, then the whole of humanity. Needed is the cultivation
of this basic moral sense from its embryonic nature in particular affections
towards particular people to the point of recognition that it is ‘the private interest
and good of everyone, to work towards the general good, which, if a creature
ceases to promote, he is actually so far wanting to himself and ceases to promote
his own happiness and welfare’. The affinity is clear with what came to be called
utilitarianism, as it is in Leibniz, and in Shaftesbury’s admirer and Adam Smith’s
teacher, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who felt that the problem of all contract
theories was the grounding assumption that individuality precedes sociality.108
The enduring strength of such philosophies must be borne in mind as we turn the
wheel again to consider doctrines that emerged in competition with them.
As nominalism-Protestantism had eroded the theological basis of medieval
social theory, in turn post-Reformation social theories like Pufendorf ’s and
Shaftesbury’s met philosophical challenge in the form of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–78) and the German early Romantics. Harmonious conceptions of the uni-
verse and accompanying views of a benevolent god had found a conducive political
environment in the relatively peaceful decades of the early eighteenth century.
From around 1740, when the eight-year-long War of Austrian Succession began,
and especially with the Seven Years War of 1756–63—in some ways another con-
flict of Protestant versus Catholic powers, with the former, a rising Prussia included,
prevailing109—and the disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, greater pessimism
107 Kari Saastamoinen, ‘Pufendorf on Natural Equality, Human Dignity, and Self-Esteem’, Journal
of the History of Ideas 71/1 (2010), 39–62.
108 On Leibniz and Hutcheson, Joachim Hruschka, Kant und der Rechtsstaat: Und andere Essays zu
Kants Rechtslehre und Ethik (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2015), 41. On Hutcheson, Gordon Graham, ‘Francis
Hutcheson and Adam Ferguson on Sociability’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 31/4 (2014), 317–29.
For the Shaftesbury quote on private interest and general good, Shaftesbury, ‘An Inquiry Concerning
Virtue and Merit’, in Laurence E. Klein (ed.), Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 163–230, here 230. On Shaftesbury’s philoso-
phy and relations between Leibniz and Shaftesbury in the (Neo)Platonic connection, E. E. Kleist,
Judging Appearances: A Phenomenological Study of the Kantian sensus communis (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2012), 100. More fully on Shaftesbury: Michael B. Gill, ‘Lord Shaftesbury’, in Edward N. Zalta
(ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 edn), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2016/entries/shaftesbury/.
109 On interpretations of 1763 as a ‘final’ victory of Protestantism over Catholicism, David Levin,
History as Romantic Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 84.
infused the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and stirred reactions to it. At the
same time the new scepticism rather fitted with nominalist and Protestant suspi-
cion of the capacities of human reason. The Sturm und Drang movement stressed
subjectivity, emotion, and turbulence in contrast to the ‘objective rationality’ of
French neoclassical art and theatre. And even if one still accepted the harmonious
conception, was that not itself a threat to the individual? What if the Enlightenment’s
supposed replacement of tradition with reason introduced new determinisms to
replace old religious ones? A person in harmony with society might really be a per-
son trapped in society, as the interests of the all were promoted above those of the
each, or the interests of one class promoted over those of others.110
The Genevan Rousseau was a hugely influential critic of key prevailing pre-
sumptions in the French Enlightenment, but how he was read depended very
much on how much of him was read and thus when his various works emerged.
This periodic Calvinist, who converted to Catholicism but ran into doctrinal prob-
lems with the Gallican Church, saw society itself as the problem, not original sin
or anything else in human nature. Perhaps not all societies were flawed in principle,
but certainly the society in which he lived was, and he prescribed root and branch
reform given its hierarchies and superficiality. Rousseau’s critique implicated those
philosophes who, for all of their philosophical innovation, found agreeable at least
some of the social arrangements that had produced their advantageous positions.
Such arrangements bred a particularly intense and virulent form of competive
egotism, amour propre, in the way in which they legitimated gross inequalities of
wealth, and ultimately private ownership of the means of production by which
man owned man. This amour propre of the ‘civilized man’, l’homme artificiel, was
different to the purely self-referential, almost amoral sort of self-love, amour de
soi, which was needed to keep l’homme naturel alive in the state of nature but
which was indifferent to others rather than (as Hobbes claimed) predatory on
them. When he was berating ‘social man’ for living ‘constantly outside himself ’
(p. 136), Rousseau’s point of contrast was ‘the savage [who] lives within himself ’,
thus effectively reversing the grand narrative whereby civilization had progressed
inwards from a primitive state of externality, whilst nonetheless holding fast to an
ideal of interiority that we might well see as a secularized Calvinism. Rousseau’s
prescription was not an eradication of all but amour de soi, but its augmentation,
as the drive for purely individual self-preservation, was supplanted by the develop-
ment of structures of human interdependence. At the level of social and political
theory, he felt that the very recognition of human interdependence, i.e. the human
recognition of themselves as having become social beings, was also the precondi-
tion for developing what he saw as a proper moral system. It was the responsibility
110 Norman Hampson’s interpretation of the 1740s as turning point in the French Enlightenment
has been influential on me, as have other claims of his: Hampson, The Enlightenment (London:
Penguin, 1990).
of humans on earth, not in the next world, to create such a system, one in which
some instinctive concern for others (pitié, or compassion) was developed by
reason into a genuine concern for the commonwealth. In this context a healthy
self-esteem would emerge. The minimum requirement of such an order was that it
would be more materially equal, and that the State would not be a mere servant of
one class interest but the guarantor of laws that each individual had come to rec-
ognize as valid because they bind inwardly rather than by external coercion. The
famed ‘general will’, whose underspecified nature has led to much divergent specu-
lation as to its divination, was at any rate not an arbitrary monarchical one, nor the
partisan will of others. It was a higher thing than governance by the passions.
Realizing it, was the condition for realizing proper individuality.111
Rousseau achieved more immediate popularity in the Germanic lands than in
France, though the adoption was partial. The Frühromantiker of the Sturm und
Drang period placed great emphasis on individual character, as in Goethe’s
Bildungsroman, The Passions of Young Werther (1774). They were taken by
Rousseau’s moral psychology, his engagement with emotion, and his rejection of
the illusions of society, first flagged in his 1750 essay ‘Whether the Restoration of
the Arts and Sciences Has Contributed to the Refinement of Morals’. They were
more influenced by the self-centred homme naturel of the state of nature in
Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754) than the later law of the Social Contract
(1762) and the education in citizenship of Émile (1762). Accordingly, they did not
have to grapple with the potentially authoritarian implications of the ‘general will’,
and they do not seem to have been overly troubled by the issues of inequality
raised in early Rousseau. As with the nineteenth-century Romantics, and unlike
the emergent strands of liberal egalitarianism around the same time, there is a
certain aristocratic, if also anarchic, element to their thinking about individual
uniqueness and self-justification: see for example Schiller’s Robbers (1781). Violent
theatricality and the political conditions east of the Rhine from the 1750s to the
Napoleonic Wars help explain why, contrary to twentieth-century stereotypes,
Germany was a byword for individualism early in the nineteenth century.112
Rousseau’s internalism was at least as influential on the thought of Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) as were the British philosophical trends that bulked large
around Kant’s home of Königsberg. Where Ockham had predicated human
dignity on liberty, consciousness of which was gained through experience of
111 Quotes from Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses, 116. Relevant scholarship:
Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015); Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009), 153–8; 260–5; Christopher Bertram, ‘Jean Jacques Rousseau’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 edn),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/rousseau/.
112 On individualism, Swaart, ‘ “Individualism” ’, 82–3, 86–8; on the partial readings of Rousseau,
Cassirer, Philosophy, 261 ff., which also considers the authoritarian connotations of the general will.
For that and alternative readings, see Bertram, ‘Jean Jacques Rousseau’.
causally effective choice, for Kant dignity was based on the free capacity for rea-
son and the attempt to realize reason’s dictates, whatever the success. Indeed so
unpredictable were the consequences of action in a world of multiple agendas and
intransigent contexts that Kant wrote in the Groundwork to the Metaphysic of
Morals that the only purely good thing in the world was a good will—by which he
meant a will that had submitted to the dictates of reason.
Arguably the most important modern philosopher in the Western tradition,
Kant sought to elaborate the structure of moral reason in order to provide the
social glue and legitimacy that religion had once provided—though as we shall
see he had scarcely divested himself of all Lutheran or Augustinian tendencies.
In replacing the concept of a God-given objective moral sphere he wrote in the
Groundwork that ‘man’ was ‘subject to his own, yet universal, legislation’. To act
morally was to evince the maturity of self-authorization—appropriate in an era
which saw the invention of the modern political constitution. All agents of suffi-
cient rationality could come to locate moral rules for themselves, by virtue of
reasoning that they themselves were prepared only to live by norms that they
would be prepared to legislate for all rational beings. His theory was aimed at the
likes of Shaftesbury and David Hume, with their emphasis on group sentiment,
bonds of obligation, and acculturated affective disposition. For Kant, this moral-
ity of sensibility was no morality at all, for it subjected the individual to causes
outside herself. It kept people in the realm of heteronomy as opposed to auton-
omy, which explains why Kant had little good to say about Judaism, which
embraces heteronomy.
There is much to pick over in Kant’s thought. Key elements in the oeuvres of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Hegel (1770–1831), and before them
Kant’s erstwhile student Herder (1744–1803), questioned the identity of the pecu-
liar person who can shed his socialization in order to re-engage society anew.
While Kant provided inspiration for those utopians prepared to build an earthly
‘Kingdom of Ends’ from the ground up, his philosophy was part of the problem. If
to be an agent, on Kant’s reckoning, requires that someone gives themselves the
moral law (autonomy), then it is a mystery how someone could give themselves
the law without first being an agent.113
Reflecting on that ‘Kantian paradox’ brings us to the question of formalism.
Remember that since Ockham a spectre arising from the absence of certain or
innate moral knowledge had been that of a formal rather than a substantive
conscience. Kant’s categorical imperatives were more like principles for deciding
on moral rules than rules themselves. As in the post-Lombard–Thomist distinction
between synderesis and conscientia, they carried no guarantee as to correct appli-
cation of the rules in complex dilemmas and, more importantly, it is not clear that
113 Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 59–60, 227.
even a ‘proper’ application would present only one correct answer in each such
dilemma. Hegel went further, charging Kant with ‘empty formalism’, pursuant to
his, Hegel’s, wider historicizing argument that in order to give the moral law prac-
tical purchase Kant had actually had to smuggle in culturally contingent substan-
tive assumptions that undermined his universal aspirations.114
When we place Kant’s thought in a longer historical perspective, it is as if elem-
ents of the nominalist–realist debate are played out not as regards the nature of
God but the relation of different human faculties. If reason just does govern the
will, there is no real freedom of the will to begin with and as such will cannot be
called good in the sense that Kant means it. If, conversely the will was not subor-
dinate to reason, why should it accept reason’s dictates, as opposed to the dictates
of ‘irrational’ passion or egotistical self-interest?115 Fichte (see p. 188) would sug-
gest that the imperative came from concrete human relationships. In the Kantian
vision, though, what is important for the agent is disciplining or resisting desire
for its own sake. The source of the imperative to do so is either mysterious or
shows the enduring influence of ‘irrational’ religious concepts, notably the fear of
the tendencies that supposedly led to the original sin.
Questions about the relations of the faculties dovetail with questions about for-
malism when we probe the fact that Kantian moral theory only led necessarily to
respect for an ideal-rational process of lawmaking. This led to an existential cri-
tique: was freedom really freedom if it meant being bound to reason? Kant’s iden-
tification of autonomy and rationality begged the question. What if, between
Emerson, Darwin, and Freud, one saw humans primarily as emotional, creative,
impulse-driven creatures?
Exploring the primacy of the will, as opposed to reason, characterized the
philosophy of both Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Nietzsche (1844–1900).
Schopenhauer dismissively associated Kant’s idea of the moral law within us
with the perpetuation of the forum internum–forum externum divide.116 It is
unclear which iteration of that divide Schopenhauer had in mind, but the point
is well taken; whatever Schopenhauer’s own concerns, might not all the Kantian
talk of ideal structures of reason actually result in an aspiration to demit from
the earthly world to a world of perfect forms and intentions, a retreat to one’s
interior in order, Stoic-like, to preserve one’s integrity—the sort of thing that the
Marxist Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) called an ‘oppositional individual ethics of
114 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 89–90. For an elabora-
tion, Sally Sedgwick, ‘Hegel on the Empty Formalism of Kant’s Categorical Imperative’, in Stephen
Houlgate and Michael Baur (eds), A Companion to Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 265–80.
115 For problems relating to the origin and nature of reason, and exactly how it legislates, see Susan
Meld Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009);
Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 60–72.
116 Gerhard Zecha and Paul Weingartner (eds), Conscience: An Interdisciplinary View (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1987), p. vii. For some of Kant’s own reflections on the fora, Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter
Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 88–9.
intention’?117 Alternatively, might the veneration of the ‘good will’ tend to moral
egotism, a determination to do the internally calculated ‘right thing’ with no
mind to the consequences that were in any case beyond the actor’s control?
Weber gestured at this option when he described the ethic of conviction,
Gesinnungsethik, in religious terms: ‘the Christian does rightly and leaves the
results with the Lord’.118 Either course is indeed a possibility. Either would fit
with the concept of the pneumatikos of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians
(1 Corinthians 2:15), the one who could judge but be judged by no other since
he was filled with the spirit, or pneuma.
As to more than purely interpersonal conduct, sometimes Kant was as happy
as Luther to render unto Caesar that which was his, distinguishing between the
realm of morality and those of law/justice and political science. His famous essay
‘What Is Enlightenment?’ distinguished between the commitments of office-
holders to their official duties—see the discussion of special roles in Part 1—and
their separate roles as members of the public, free to express their views. There is
an overlap here with the sort of distinctions Weber made later on when he juxta-
posed an ethic of conviction to an ethic of responsibility and value rationality to
instrumental rationality. If the Kantian ideal was to subject the will to reason’s
control alone, as opposed to desire’s control, then for the office-holder with differ-
ent professional priorities, disciplining oneself to do something—however
awful—that purportedly did not conform to one’s desire was still a moral achieve-
ment of sorts. The outer conformity would, however, be no different than that
produced by the Hobbesian subject who acted in accordance with the ‘artificial
soul’ of the sovereign. Perhaps this is the first link of that chain of reasoning
whereby Eichmann could invoke the Kant ‘for the household use of the little man’
in a way that would have horrified Kant.119 One’s inner forum, or at least half of it,
remained untouched. Conscience (or at least part of it) on one hand and worldly
laws and orders on the other hand might retain their own integrity even when
they seemed to point in different directions. Such had been true under obedience
to those princes to whom Luther deferred in worldly matters, but the distinction
can be traced through Gratian to Augustine and then Paul.
Suffice it to say that an oeuvre as broad and brilliant as Kant’s was not without
its own internal tensions, and lent itself to selective uptake. One could work
through the tensions, as Fichte and Hegel tried to. Alternatively, one could focus
on the elements most in tune with conerns of the time, like the basic emphasis on
sovereign interiority, which helps explain the reception of Kant’s Critique of the
117 Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 299. Note
that Bloch was actually talking about Christian Thomasius, but the same considerations apply. See
also Berlin, Four Essays, 138–40.
118 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128, here 120.
119 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136.
Power of Judgement (1790). Though it actually elaborates key aspects of Kant’s

theory of ‘reflective’ judgement, and as such answers some of the criticisms of his
earlier work on moral reason, this volume, which was at least as important to
nineteenth-century thought as his other Critiques, was largely taken as a work on
aesthetics alone. Kant’s salience for nineteenth-century romanticism lay in his
theorizing of the artistic sublime as a feature not of the artwork itself but of the
viewer’s or listener’s experience of the work. The sublime, as in that which exceeds
cognition/understanding, had structural affinities with the unknowable god of
the nominalists and with the Lutheran religious conscience that was beyond any
institutional determination. Intuition and emotion returned to the picture, along
with a certain elitism of sensibility to go alongside the elitism of character in, say,
Romantic accounts of the French or American revolutions.120 Romantics also
share responsibility for the slanted reception of the work of Fichte, the first great
post-Kantian idealist, who was often seen as an extreme egotist, attributing vast
authorial powers to subjective consciousness.121
On the other side of the Atlantic, the lapsed Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson
blended romanticism, Neoplatonism, and Protestantism. In December 1834,
Emerson, later dubbed the prophet of the American religion, wrote in his journal,
‘Blessed is the day when the youth discovers that Within and Above are syn-
onyms.’ The unity of ‘within and above’, the idea of the instantiation of God in the
individual soul, and thus the import of religious understanding attained through
the self rather than the institutions of religion, was a key theme of his famous
Harvard Divinity School address of 1838. In that ‘Self-Reliance’ lecture, with its
Jeffersonian overtones, Emerson declared that ‘Society everywhere is in a con-
spiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.’ ‘Nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your own mind . . . What have I to do with the sacred-
ness of traditions if I live wholly from within? . . . No law can be sacred to me but
that of my nature.’ Many decades later, Martin Buber’s I and Thou outlined a more
characteristically Jewish standpoint to the effect that the real synonyms are not
120 On Romantic historiography and the great man, Levin, History as Romantic Art, 50–1.
121 On this reception among Romantics, see Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of
Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 8. One can see how this view of Fichte
developed. While Kant had posited objects as somehow conditioning our judgements on them, Fichte
argued that the subject–object distinction itself was subjectively established. The ‘I’ was primary epis-
temologically. (Under some of the sorts of aforementioned interpretations of him, interpretations that
Fichte rejected, the I was even primary ontologically, in the sense that it somehow created the world
beyond the mind.) Ostensibly external checks on the free play of perception (that wall that we have
just run into) only become checks in the relevant sense through some activity of the self that processes
them or permits them to be accepted as such. We must posit such checks as evidence of a world inde-
pendent of us, but it is still us doing the positing, not the world. So far so clear and so subject-centred.
But much more intersubjective, i.e. social, was Fichte’s account of the original, self-authorizing recog-
nition of the self (i.e. the advent of self-consciousness) which underlay all specific consciousness of
what we take to be external objects. To that I shall return in my History II section. The account of that
element of Fichte’s work, as of the elements just described, is based on Pinkard, German Philosophy
1760–1860, 105–30.
‘within and above’ but ‘between’ and ‘above’. As opposed to the first line of John’s
Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the word’, i.e. , logos, meaning also reason or
spirit, Buber wrote ‘In the beginning is relation’. ‘Spirit’ was to be found not ‘in the
I, but between I and Thou’.122
Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance was not identical to that of the ‘bible of
mid-Victorian liberalism’, Samuel Smiles’s 1859 volume Self-Help; with Illustrations
of Character and Conduct. Emerson would surely have endorsed Smiles’s
Shakespearean epigraph ‘This above all,—To thine own self be true’, but Smiles
was a little too oriented towards the worldly, not to say material, contributions of
the individual. It is important to make this distinction in order not to confuse
‘spiritual individualism’ with economic individualism. Equally, though, different
sorts of individualism could coalesce, as in ‘the Jeffersonian conception of the
individual as separate, unique, and autonomous—romantic, utilitarian, focusing
on will, rights, and personal traits’. In such a conception ‘equality’ was merely
juxtaposed with European class hierarchies, rather than denoting the equal value
of all people irrespective of ‘character’.123
Romantic and existentialist individualisms reacted against the social aspects of
commercial and industrial civilization. Where Marx sought to change the outer
world, the same social and economic developments against which he schemed
prompted some Romantic artists and poets to turn away from the outer world, or
at least the social part of it, in search of the solace that lay beyond the philistine
mass. Where Shaftesbury had talked of a disinterested admiration of beauty for its
own sake, ‘art for art’s sake’ (Théophile Gautier) was now invoked over against the
instrumental calculi of capitalism. The other characteristic responses of romanti-
cism to cultural modernity are the emphasis on continuity amid change, the re-
embrace of the medieval, recognition of the solid—the cultural-historical—as
opposed to the abstract, of the particular as opposed to the universal society, and
of the heroic man of action as opposed to the man of reflection. This produced
some questionable, essentialist, sometimes teleological medieval history at the
overlap of, say, British Whig history, the historianship of the mid-nineteenth-
century Prussian school, and the work of the ‘New England’ historians portrayed
by David Levin.124 But it also produced appreciation of the medieval period as, in
122 I thank David Patterson for drawing my attention to the ‘within and above’ quote from
Emerson, and for the contrast with Buber. That Emerson quote (and the importance of ‘In the begin-
ning was the word’) is contextualized in Irena Makarushka, Religious Imagination and Language in
Emerson and Nietzsche (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 1–3. The quotes from ‘Self-Reliance’ are from
Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), 29–30. For the
Jeffersonian background, including some of the more unpleasant manifestations of an ideology of self-
reliance, see Thomas Powell, The Persistence of Racism in America (Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams,
1993), 60–3. Buber quotes from I and Thou (Mansfield, CT: Martino, 2010), 18, 39.
123 The quote and the summary of Jeffersonian world-view in Powell, The Persistence of Racism in
America, 60, 62.
124 On the latter, see Levin, History as Romantic Art, specifically ch. 4 on the medieval element. On
art for art’s sake, Swaart, ‘ “Individualism” ’, 83–4.
Ranke’s terms, an epoch that like any other was immanent unto God and had to
be taken on its own terms rather than Voltaire’s.
Romanticism’s influence on nineteenth-century historianship and nationalism
is beyond doubt, but more open to question is the efficacy of the Romantic artistic
form of inner emigration in the face of socio-economic change. Later in the nine-
teenth century, and much more so in the twentieth, the artistic sphere would find
itself coopted by capitalism through advertising, design, and consumption.
Where once consumption had denoted distinctions of class, it came more and
more to mark distinctions between ‘individuals’, though we may also be able to
detect the presence here of the ‘individualism’ that in Balzac’s (1799–1850) view
had hastened the death of genuine individuality, a trait common among those
objects of Flaubert’s (1821–88) parodies who fancied themselves as entirely self-
determining individuals.125
Even if one rejected the theory of capitalism’s relationship to the ‘Protestant ethic’,
which one need not as long as Protestantism is seen as reinforcing rather than
inventing capitalist tendencies,126 capitalism has shown itself capable of co-opting a
great many things. It fused with existentialism, whose heritage includes romanti-
cism, in the thought of Ayn Rand. She celebrated the ‘rational egoism’ of the ‘trader’,
as opposed to either the altruist who lives to serve others and the ‘Nietzschean’ ego-
ist concerned with the satisfaction of ‘irrational’ desire.127 In individualistic vein, in
1934 Rand posed what to her were rhetorical questions: ‘Is ethics necessarily and
basically a social conception? . . . Supposing men were born social (and even that is
a question)—does it mean that they have to remain so?’ She went on:
‘Social life,’ said [the anarcho-communist Pyotr] Kropotkin, ‘that is we, not I, is
the normal form of life (in man). It is life itself.’ Good god Almighty!!! This is
125 John Xiros Cooper, ‘Modernism in the Age of Mass Culture and Consumption’, in Peter Brooker
et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 300–14,
here 306–9, 311–14; Swaart, ‘ “Individualism” ’, 84; Pippin, Modernism, 32 ff. Nietzsche wrote in the
early 1870s that ‘While there has never been such sonorous talk of the “free personality” one does not
even see personalities, not to speak of free ones, rather nothing but timidly disguised universal men’:
Nietzsche, Advantage and Disadvantage, 29.
126 If under Protestantism, industry and enterprise were a way of honouring God, and just possibly
oneself at the same time, then it was increasingly difficult to distinguish between self-enrichment as a
means and as an end or higher purpose, which was rather Weber’s point about the growing domi-
nance of instrumental behaviour in a secularizing world. With the slippage from self-enrichment as
means to self-enrichment as the end, so we also witness a slippage towards egotistical justification.
Such a slippage was even present in utilitarianism since one of its earliest modern enunciations, in
Shaftesbury, for whom (borrowing Alexander Pope’s words) ‘true self-love and social are the same’
(Pope, ‘An Essay on Man’, epistle IV); see e.g. Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 70. Under this rubric, does one act appropriately to the social
system because that is ultimately to one’s benefit, i.e., does one ultimately act egotistically, or is one’s
own benefit merely a happy by-product of action that is justified in the name of others and/or the
social whole? John Stuart Mill’s cold-eyed assessment of capitalism came down for the former
interpretation.
127 Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964).
exactly what I’m going to fight. For the exact opposite is true. If man started as a
social animal—isn’t all progress and civilization directed towards making him
an individual? Isn’t that the only possible progress?128
Once some set of ideas had ‘erased the moral disability with which unlimited
capitalist appropriation had hitherto been handicapped’,129 then ‘the economy’
was free to become another paradigm of justice. It had to become one in order to
legitimate the inequalities it produced. It came packaged with concepts of virtue,
vice, discipline, laxity, reward, and punishment, and high priests in the form of
economists. But whatever the belief of the new social scientists that they were
merely describing laws, in their very enunciation of what was rational they influ-
enced the behaviour they purported to describe—for who would rationally
choose to act irrationally?
The result was a paradox whereby the freedom of the realm of the economic
was just a freedom to obey the laws of that realm, just as Kantian freedom was
merely freedom to obey the moral law. Whither freedom of the most expansively
antinomian sort, the sort that Nietzsche sometimes felt was the only freedom
worthy of the name? Creating a structured economic realm of freedom from cer-
tain social precepts was one thing. Equally, a growing freedom of conscience
might be permitted providing that this was kept internal, between a person and
her god. Abandoning social governance and the property order to the dictates of
individual interiority was another matter entirely, as the reaction to Anabaptists
in the sixteenth century and Ranters, Levellers, Diggers, and other radicals in the
seventeenth century reminds us.
When Levellers and other sects of what E. P. Thompson calls ‘the poor man’s
Puritanism’ were done down in the Commonwealth, they sundered their spiritual
from their worldly aspirations. In the words of the Digger Gerrard Winstanley,
they retreated from the ‘kingdom without’ to the ‘kingdom within’.130 This was a
species of ‘inner emigration’. Yet Winstanley’s retreat was not absolute; a worldly
re-engagement was possible at some unspecified future point. In other words, and
this brings us to the conclusion of this section, his was not an absolute dualism.
How many people have lived consistently by such dualisms? Certainly not
those subscribing to Westermarck’s ‘beautiful modern sophism which admits
every man’s conscience to be an infallible guide’, since presumably the people
Westermarck had in mind take that guide to pertain to worldly comportment,
128 All emphases in original: Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. Leonard Peikoff (Penguin,
1999).
129 Richard A. Hughes, Pro-Justice Ethics (New York: Lang, 2009), 156, quoting C. B. Macpherson
on John Locke’s role in moving the definition of freedom towards possession (of property) and inde-
pendence from others.
130 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1968),
32–3.
amongst other things. The twentieth-century phenomologist philosopher Max

Scheler was equally scathing. When ‘anyone can . . . appeal to his “conscience”
and demand absolute recognition of what he says from others’, the result is ‘moral
anarchy’. One can understand Scheler’s fears, which are not far from Hobbes’s,
because the historian of conscience Paul Strohm is surely right about the ‘now-
regnant view that conscience has a close connection with singularity or excep-
tion’, and that means exception within a human group, not outside it in another
a-human realm.131
In its most banal form this pseudo-existentialist ‘individualism’ leads to the
parroting of ‘I was just being myself ’ or ‘I was just saying what I think’, which may
short-circuit reflection on what sort of self one would like to be and on the very
conditions and ramifications of identity choices. Moralism is a close relation of
such subjectivism, even though it sounds like almost the opposite, because, as
with the fiction of equal chances in a free market, both stances tend to disregard
the social contexts that mediate and for which individual action has ramifica-
tions. Take Ariel Levy’s discussion of ‘female chauvinist pigs’ and Natasha Walter’s
of ‘living dolls’—i.e. girls and women who do patriarchy’s work for it—in which,
say, generally very young women who strip for magazine photoshoots, or lap
dance, often genuinely feel that they have made an empowering, liberating choice.
Reinforced thereby are the tendencies of objectification and exploitation that
affect not just them but other women too.132 These women are playing by some-
one else’s rules whilst being encouraged by the rhetoric of individualistic freedom
to believe they are not.
Thinking beyond such rhetoric, we have multiple paradigms of rule-bound
behaviour available, each with their permissions and prohibitions. The list of
paradigms includes those set by custom, economic doctrine, criminal law, civil
law, and whatever might be our religion, if we have one. It is not given that these
paradigms should be separate, and anyway the terms of one might radiate out-
wards to influence the others, as religious precepts did to secular law at various
points in medieval Europe, and as the mores of the wealthy did to criminal law in
eighteenth-century England, where even quite minor crimes against property
brought death sentences. In virtue of their rule-boundedness these paradigms
each share something with what is often called morality. Some people might feel
that one or other paradigm is coterminous with morality; others might pick and
mix elements. The truly exceptional may even devise their own code that owes
nothing to any of the others. In the limited sense of invention or blending it is
possible for individuals to have their own unique moral codes, and some might
even have the consistency to live by theirs. Naturally this will not save them from
131 Strohm, Conscience, 32, 57.

132 Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs (New York: Free Press, 2006); Natasha Walter, Living Dolls
(London: Virago, 2010).
problems when their unique code clashes with another’s unique code or one of
the established codes, any more than if someone came up with a private language
of their own and then tried to communicate in it. Some of the established codes
might also clash with each other, and that tension may ultimately be enough to
destroy a community, but the split will not leave atomized individuals each with
their own codes. However permissive some codes may be in some directions,
however rich in the rhetoric of freedom and individualism, all come with many of
their rules always already in place at any one time, and these rules are rarely
changed wholesale. With rules come consequences for transgression and adher-
ence. Such has presumably been the case since people first coordinated their
activities, and it does not matter much whether we can pinpoint one such code of
rules and call it a morality. Easier to say almost tautologically that any code that
pertains to relations between people may have some moral element within it
alongside other elements as may be present.
It is tautological to say that no social system has ever survived without due
attention to deeds and their impact, irrespective, after a point, of any allowances
made for the internal drivers of action. Utilitarianism as an administrative doc-
trine is but one of the most recent theories to underline the point that inhered in
the medieval concept of ‘common good’, or the ancient Greek concept of the
miasma, the pollution brought by bloodshed that drives Aeschylus’ Orestes
mad.133 The social role of law, or law’s functional equivalents, means that across
the occidental millennia it could never lose its concern for the external or object-
ive element of behaviour, denoted by the actus reus, or ‘guilty act’, whatever
important variations there were across time and type of law in the relationship of
objective to subjective, mental element. Some law systems may be individualistic
and context-myopic in accounting for the causes of crime, as we shall see in the
History II section (pp. 206–7), but they are not equally so in contemplating the
fact of crime. By threat of its coercive capacity law can hope to shape human
choice, but in virtue of the very fact that a coercive threat is always there, law-
givers can never know—nor, therefore, legislate on—whether transgression is
discouraged by something called conscience or by fear of consequences.
The vestiges of pure objectivism in law are necessary to maintain the order that
gives the law its role in the first place. Hence the dictum, enunciated inter alia by
Justinian, that ignorance of the law is no defence. Then objective elements of out-
come, as opposed to intention, inform the framing of different crimes, say
attempted murder as opposed to murder. It is a matter of (moral) luck as to
whether dangerous driving results in fatalities, but that result may influence the
penalty for the driving and even whether the driving is brought to court at all. In
most American states one dollar can make the difference between an act of
133 Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991).
pilfering being characterized as grand theft as opposed to theft. Lucky the thief
who accidentally dropped that dollar on the premises before being apprehended.
The most obvious objective element is that it is not the actor but some higher
authority that decides what is and is not illegal. At the level of individual negli-
gence, recklessness, and so forth we have already touched on the judiciable,
objective harm that is caused by an actor’s behaviour but not willed by that actor.
At the level of the systems that decree laws, consider legislation to increase the
freeway speed limit: this is likely to increase road-deaths, but at the same time
expedite travel, with attendant, especially economic, benefits. There is a systemically-
governed trade-off, as there is with laws governing pollution, food standards,
employment conditions, or commercial treatment of animals.
As important as the limits on the subjective factor’s relevance is what part of
the subjective factor is deemed most relevant. On the whole the emphasis in
criminal law remains on intent, in the sense of consciously enacting something
that one knows, or should know, to be against the law. Note this is not to say ‘that
one knows to be wrong’ because the issue of the rightness or otherwise of an out-
lawed act is one that the legal system tries to keep beyond discussion, even as it
plays on the ongoing association of sin with crime for those whose behaviour is
shaped by conscience rather than fear of consequences. When the subjective
element of the crime (mens rea) is restricted to intent, then it becomes a matter of
cognition and will: of knowing what one wants to do and doing it. Subsidiary
points include basic mental fitness to know and responsibly to will. The evaluative
question around motive, i.e. the reason for willing the act, plays a secondary role,
and in many cases none. To be sure, this is not a clear distinction, not least as
regards that old chestnut of desire, where you wish something ‘for itself ’ as
opposed to instrumentally. Nonetheless, the contrast reminds us that legal sys-
tems develop with interaction between humans as a focus, not only with individ-
uals qua individuals. (An extreme example: one does not consider legally salient
the terrorist’s belief that he was justified in blowing up a building.)134 The same
goes for moral systems.
When pinpointing tensions between a certain subjectivist ‘ideal’ and social
reality, the basic question is what ‘conscience’ pertains to, and thus in what senses,
and to what extent, it can be respected in its freedom. Obviously not all societies
have permitted freedom of religious conscience, with its close associations with
faith, and some of the most intolerant such societies have been in the Occident.
But even when freedom of religious conscience was established in the face of
authority, somewhere on the road from Luther to Locke, acting on that con-
science in the world (where the world was relevant) was restricted in principle,
thus not just by the fact of established authority. The Reformer William Tyndale
134 e.g. Alan Norrie, Crime, Reason and History: A Critical Introduction to Criminal Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chs 2 and 3.
pointed out in Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), you may be obliged ‘first
because of thyn own conscience’ but you are also obliged ‘for thy neighbour’s
conscience’,135 which is a Christian version of Aristotle’s concept of justice,
uniquely among the virtues, as concerning the good of another rather than the
self.136 It is also a precursor of Fichte’s principle: ‘limit your freedom so that others
around you can also be free’.137 Then, from Locke to Mill as it were, the principles
of freedom expanded from religious conscience to ‘political conscience’, e.g.
opinion, speech, publication, as against not just Church but also State and demo-
graphic majority, and ultimately to matters of ‘lifestyle’. This second cluster of
freedoms concerns what one may do, thus what it is illegitimate for some other
agent to prevent. Implicit in what one may do is what one may not do, i.e. ought
not do, and Mill’s freedoms went up to the point at which the freedoms of others
were infringed, which reminds us that whatever else political liberalism is, how-
ever much of an emphasis on the individual it has, it is still a political-cum-social
theory and as such cannot ignore externals in the way that Romantic individual-
ism or the Lutheran religious conscience can.
Externally derived moral injunctions may be accompanied by threat of formal
sanction, but sanction may also be informal and social rather than penal, or it
may be purely internal, in the fact of a guilty moral conscience. In the last case it
is an utterly subjective matter whether or not the sanction materializes, i.e. whether
guilt is felt. Do we really think, though, that a moral conscience untroubled on
purely subjective grounds is ‘free’ in any of the normatively positive senses in
which many of us talk of freedom of conscience? This is doubtful. We think of it
as mistaken, egotistical, self-serving. We think that the person in question ought
to feel guilty and should be assessed as guilty irrespective of how they feel—here
we are reliant on the double play of ‘guilt’ as an internal feeling and/or an external
pronouncement. In other words, in the last resort external judgement alone is
called for. Thinking of ‘guilt’ versus ‘shame’, one way in which this external judge-
ment might be expressed is through some sort of shaming, which is nothing other
than reminding that party that they are a part of an external world whether they
like it or not.
Anything that is solely internal and/or other-worldly in its ramifications and
reference is no code at all, save in the purely theoretical sense of the private
135 Quoted in Strohm, Conscience, 89.

136 Aristotle, Ethics, 142 (bk V, ch. I).
137 This is because ‘freedom’ is the capacity to be the cause of effects in the world, rather than one-
self being an effect of other people’s causal behaviour: Pinkard, German Philosophy, 123. Note the
similarity to Kant’s configuration of the categorical imperative such that one should always treat
others as ends rather than means, but note also the difference that Fichte is prepared, like the utilitar-
ians, to talk about the necessity to limit freedom morally speaking, as opposed to the Kantian view
whereby someone is somehow freest when following the moral dictates of practical reason. Fichte’s
view here is consonant with his theory, explored in the History II section, about the normative rela-
tionship between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’.
language, and when we get to worldly dealings only the powerful can act as if in a
genuinely antinomian sense, or—functionally the same thing—as if guided by
their own unique code. But their capacity to act with impunity—their ability to
exempt themselves from punishment in any external forum—does not mean that
we should not assess their actions as if they had been brought to such a forum.
Seneca and earlier Stoics, just like Abelard later, recognized that external judge-
ments and public punishment on earth could be justifiable irrespective of the
condition of the individual’s conscience.
Stoic autarkeia, remember, did not involve making up one’s own laws, or dis-
carding worldly laws, so much as not bothering about what others thought of one.
One should be prepared to put up with ill-repute, mala fama, punishment, even
death, provided one has obeyed the dictates of one’s conscience.138 The Stoic point
has a corollary, and it is as follows. While, say, Butterfield was right to warn his-
torians not to play God in their judgements, it does not follow that we should act
as if each person were her own god. Let us say for the sake of argument that God
exists. Leaving ‘him’ to judge on the state of souls is the best way of taking on
their own terms people who orient their behaviour to that understanding of him.
Such worldly evaluative conclusions as follow from their behaviour in this world
may be of sublime indifference to such people, as to those Stoics who genuinely
lived up to the ideal of autarkeia. So be it: their integrity is intact, no doubt; but
how their deeds ought to be remembered in the world that the deeds affected
cannot be dictated by how they think those deeds ought to be remembered.
History II: God Is With Us
This History moves away from anticlerical sacro egoismo—the belief that the indi-
vidual is the final locus of religious interpretation. It moves towards the national-
ist sacro egoismo propounded by Italian prime minister Antonio Salandra in
1914.139 It is concerned with the ascription to collective entities of characteristics
similar to those attributed to the ‘punctal’, hermetic individual who is ultimately
answerable only to what Emerson called his within/above. That ascription is
implicit in the words of the Irish nationalist leader Éamon de Valera, speaking in
1922: ‘whenever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, I had only to
examine my own heart’.140 The ‘heart’ was a collective one.
This History sets itself against the assumptions of the historian Jacob
Burckhardt as he warned against evaluating collectivities. He suggested leaving
‘those who find pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole nations to do so
138 Roller, Constructing Autocracy, 83; Schinkel, Conscience, 162.

139 William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 100.
140 Michael Mays, The Cultures of Irish Nationalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 97.
as they like’, because a ‘great nation . . . lives on with or without the approval of
theorists’.141 Note that he did not reject the idea of the essence of collectivities,
only that he considered himself incompetent to evaluate those essences. Thus:
It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of difference among

different nations, but to strike the balance of the whole is not given to human
insight. The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience and the
guilt of a people remains for ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects
have another side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues.142
This talk of ‘peoples’ and their character from the scholar who claimed of
Renaissance Italy that it was the birthplace of individualism! Or perhaps the
birthtime—after all, Burckhardt’s name is associated like no other with the con-
cept of the Zeitgeist, even if he is talking more about a Volksgeist here.
Even as Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) entrenched
the appeal of a certain sort of individualism, it shows what is clear from many of
the other major thinkers around his time: they saw no tension between talking
about persons and about collective spirits and minds. One just needed to con-
sider the person and the collective as instantiations of uniqueness at different
levels of analysis, almost as concentric circles of particularity, albeit that the con-
cern with aesthetics and emotions at the level of individuals tended to morph into
analysis of language and culture at the group level. Hegel discussed Geist and the
world-historical individual. Herder, Goethe, and other German Romantics were
as interested in national cultural differences as in qualitative differences between
particular human beings. Hitler could talk of races and of exemplary individuals
within races.
Mention of thinkers like Goethe, Burckhardt, Herder, and Hegel alongside
Hitler shows the depth and breadth of the cultural-intellectual tradition under
consideration. Against Hitler, the tradition was originally the offspring of the
wish for peace and tolerance between collectives, just as liberalism aspired to the
peaceful coexistence of literal individuals. Against the idea that the tradition was
uniquely German, let us reflect on that Emerson aficionado Gandhi. Beginning at
the level of the individual person, he disavowed consistency with his own prior
statements in favour of ‘truth as it may present itself to me at any given moment’.
‘It is not necessary for me to prove the rightness of what I said then. It is essential
only to know what I feel today.’ He had his own ‘inner voice’ to guide him.
As ‘I am called “Great Soul” ’, he mused, ‘I might as well endorse Emerson’s
saying that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” ’. Then, moving
outwards to a wider circle, with some inspiration from Emerson’s meditation
141 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin, 2004), 271.
142 Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 271.
‘Self-Reliance’ Gandhi linked the inner personal concept of ‘self-rule’ with collect-
ive Indian self-rule, Swaraj. The primary Indian collective he had in mind was the
Hindus and, in the words of one historian, for Gandhi ‘Hinduism bound all who
adhered to it into a single interwoven community, in which each was allotted
their appointed station.’143
Some of the major influences on concentric-circular thought can be located in
the conflicts that reached a head in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
though one needs to note the deeper foundations. Rome’s ascent in the central
Middle Ages had been marked by great violence against ‘infidels’ but also against
‘heretics’ who as dissidents are but unsuccessful reformers—and let us not forget
that the Roman Church was shaped by earlier schism with ‘eastern Christianity’.
Western Christendom’s unity had been endangered from within by tugs of war
between Papacy and Empire, which led to popes encouraging kings as opposed to
successive Holy Roman Emperors. Kings could in turn present themselves as
emperors within their kingdoms in order to reduce the power of feudal lords,
which further strengthened monarchical power vis-à-vis the Papacy.144 From the
high Middle Ages the notion of a special ecclesia Anglorum, matching a supposed
gens Anglorum, became a reference point of the later Church of England and of
English distinctness, many centuries after both concepts had been invented by
Pope Gregory I.145 The consecration of the Gallican Church in 1682, which
enshrined the French monarch’s authority over matters temporal and civil, was
the conclusion of about four centuries of drift in that direction too. The scale of
destruction was extreme in the ‘Wars of Religion’, however, notably in the Thirty
Years War. Conflict was open, very widespread, and between more evenly bal-
anced though shifting parties. Instead of unconditional victory or obliteration,
accommodation, as in the form of the Westphalian treaties of 1648, had to be
reached between states and confessions. In the History I section we also saw that
the theological and power-political developments of the time were accompanied
by an efflourescence of legal and contractual theorizing, much of which enhanced
the concept of subjective right as attached to individual people.
It is not paradoxical that public governance took on new dimensions as a result
of this conceptualization of subjective right. One first needs to distinguish
between the things to which one supposedly has rights (life, property, etc.) and
the subjective right that is the power to assert the claim to those things. Both of
these matters stand against the absolute ruler, but only the former limits
143 ‘Inner voice’: from Ramin Jahanbegloo, Gadflies in the Public Space: A Socratic Legacy of
Philosophical Dissent (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), 20. All other quotes by or about Gandhi from
Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (London: Verso, 2013), 30–2. On Gandhi, ‘Self-Reliance’, and
Swaraj, see Alan Hodder, ‘Asia in Emerson and Emerson in Asia’, in Jean McClure Mudge (ed.), Mr
Emerson’s Revolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 373–405, here 394–6.
144 Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France (London: Macmillan, 1960), ch. 5.
145 Georges Tugene, L’Image de la nation anglaise dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique de Bède le Vénérable
(Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001).
government as such. The latter, the power of assertion, which stands logically
prior to the rights that the power is used to assert, may actually expand the
remit of governance in the measure that its exercise expands the legitimacy of
governance. ‘Sovereign’ individuals are drawn into the process of governance and
lawmaking.146 Governance and the State could thus acquire new moral attributes
insofar as each monadic level—the individual and the State—reinforced the other.
What Pufendorf called the persona moralis composita, ie. the sorts of social form
of which the State was an especially important example, could be invoked against
the monarch as the repository and executor of the will of not just an aggregation
(as Hobbes had seen it) but also a more selfconscious if numerically limited and
probably wealthy assembly/association of individuals. Here we see the link
between Pufendorf ’s theory of the State and his concept of socialitas (p. 160).
Novel elaboration of private law was accompanied by a newly articulated
public law. Describing a version of the public interest through law, as opposed to
protecting the king’s peace, became an important standard of legitimacy. Before
being republican or liberal the concept of the public interest was above all pur-
portedly unitary.147 The concept of unity, with its associations of harmony, is the
cue to move to the thought of Leibniz (1646–1716), which merits sustained atten-
tion given the importance of its legacy in this Part of the book.
Leibniz established a metaphysics on the basis of which individual humans,
and human societies, could be envisaged in coexistence with other humans and
societies. His Monadology was published in 1714, and his related Theodicy in
1710, but conceived in the 1670s–80s, when memories of the Wars of Religion
were fresh and Louis XIV was breaking the peace abroad and ending religious
toleration at home. Leibniz had tried to effect reconciliation between Protestants
and Catholics and then between Protestants.148 His works provided a different
vision of coexistence to the contract theories with their emphases variously on
self-interested toleration of others, sovereign power, or subjective rights and sov-
ereign accountability. His account should also be set against Newton’s competing
view of the workings of the universe, and Pierre Bayle’s denial of the compatibility
of faith and reason in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695–7).
Leibniz was a rationalist of sorts but was influenced by the Neoplatonic theory
of emanationism, in which all things issue and descend—with decreasing perfec-
tion and increased concreteness—from one perfect/divine source, which is
146 Alvarado, Common Law and Natural Rights, 31–2.

147 Zoller, Public Law, 70. See also on Pufendorf ’s conception of sovereignty as connoting the unity
of the State’s political will, Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.) Republicanism, i.
Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 232.
148 On some of the context, Nicholas Rescher, G.W.Leibniz’s Monadology (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 5, 8, and C. A. van Peursen, Leibniz (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 9. On
Protestant and Catholic Relations and Theology, see Irena Backus, Leibniz: Protestant Theologian
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
sometimes called a monad to illustrate its unity. For Leibniz, the ultimate order
was one of basic diversity that was only reconciled in God, there being no single
correct perspective accessible to all humans. His account modifies the classical
theory of monadology, as well as the Renaissance version of Giordano Bruno,
who had been influenced by the Neoplatonist Nicholas Cusanus (p. 131). In fact
Leibniz’s work was to his time what Cusanus’ had been to the crises of the fif-
teenth century: the latter phases of the ‘Great Western Schism’, the Hussite wars,
and the Christian loss of Constantinople. Cusanus’ thought had connotations,
within limits, of unity-in-diversity, diversity as a descent from an initial unity in
‘the one’.149 His On the Peace of Faith (1453), written at the time of the fall of
Constantinople, was an imagined dialogue between different Christian confes-
sions, representatives of Islam, Judaism, and even of religions that would have
been conceived as ‘pagan’. While prejudiced in favour of Christianity, and some-
times dismissive of the beliefs of Jews, it sought to remove grounds for antagon-
ism by casting religious disagreements as misconceived on the basis that behind
their different ‘rites’ each religion tacitly shared the same assumptions and thus
paved the way to the higher truth. Within constraints, Cusanus accepted and
even welcomed ‘diversity’.150
For Leibniz, abstract, universalizable reason alone detracted from the reality of
different spiritual entities. Meanwhile a Neoplatonic blurring of the sharp
Lutheran distinction between heavenly and earthly realms was necessary pre-
cisely in virtue of the fact that the earth—or in this case Europe—was divided
between states, populations, and intellectuals on matters such as that distinction.
Leibniz conceived of innumerable monads, of which there were different sorts
and levels, as the building blocks of the world. For Leibniz, all monads were cre-
ated by God, who was ‘the primitive unity’ (Monadology151) and all monads had
the quality of a sort of soul, or ‘entelechy’. Monads could enter into composites
with other monads even as they retained their individuality (§51, 65, 67, 70). In
recognition of change in the world, Leibniz felt that each monad was moved by an
‘internal principle’ (§§10–13, 22). There was some form of synchronization or
harmonization of all these developing monads, pre-established by God (§§51, 78).
149 Jasper Hopkins, A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 4, and passim; Marica Costigliolo, ‘Organic Metaphors in “De
concordantia catholica” of Nicholas of Cusa’, Viator 44/2 (2013), 311–21, here 312, 314. See also (for
some suggestive oppositions between Cusanus and the humanists on one hand and nominalism on
the other) pts 10–11 of the ‘Sequence on Political Ontology’ of John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order:
the Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013).
150 Translated text of De Pace Fidei, in Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei and
Cribratio Alkorani: Translation and Analysis (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1994), 633–70:
see esp. pt XVIII, §66 and pt XIX, §§67–8 of De Pace Fidei at pp. 68–70. On Cusanus’ ‘pluralism’, see
Markus Riedenauer, Pluralität und Rationalität: Die Herausforderung der Vernunft durch religiöse und
kulturelle Vielfalt nach Nikolaus Cusanus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007).
151 Leibniz, ‘Monadology’, in Steven M. Cahn (ed.), Classics of Western Philosophy (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1990), 604–13 (§§47–8). Further references to section numbers will be given in the text.
This harmonization, or ‘accommodation of all created things to each other, and

each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that
express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual,
living mirror of the universe’ (§56). While each monad itself comprised smaller
monads, some types of monad were more fundamental in their power and sig-
nificance than others (§§65, 67)—‘each living body has a dominant entelechy [ie.
soul]’ (§70), and some elect ‘souls are elevated to the rank of reason and to the
prerogative of minds’ (§82). There was little if any direct causal relationship
between monads (they were windowless: §§7, 51), but those in closer proximity—
be that within a physical body somehow subordinate to a ‘mind’, or embodied
‘minds’ within a culture—reflected more intensely on each other, and thus shared
more in common, than those further removed, though all monads of whatever
sort have in common that each has something of the universal in it.152 Unlike
ordinary monads with their ordinary entelechies, ‘minds’ are not just mirrors of
the universe, but ‘also images of the divinity itself, capable of knowing the system
of the universe, and imitating some of it through their schematic representations’.
Together they form the city of god under the divine prince (§§83–5).
When Leibniz wrote that ‘Wise and virtuous persons’ will ‘work for all that
appears to be in conformity with the presumptive or antecedent divine will’ (§90),
description of the universal order became prescription for those instructed in its
ways. If perfections are derived from God’s influence, and God’s perfection is
‘absolutely infinite’, then minds will best emulate God if they can multiply their
perspectives rather than trying to impose one. As ‘the same city viewed from dif-
ferent directions appears entirely different’ there are ‘as many different universes,
which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one’ (§§41–2, 57). Or, as he
put it in ‘Principles of nature and grace based on reason’, ‘chaque monade est un
miroir vivant, . . . représentatif de l'Univers, suivant son point de vue’.153 Baroque
painters like Andrea Pozzo were at the time committing points de vue to canvas
by deploying new perspectival techniques of shading-off and chiaroscuro;154
Leibniz the ethnographer travelled and read widely to encourage a ‘commerce of
light’ and expand his conception of reason by learning from the unique insights
of different cultures.155 Such thinking legitimated different social orders and con-
fessions and individual minds in relation to each other, as parts and refractions of
152 For an elaboration of the difficult matter of relations and reflections, and the relationship
between minds and cultures, see Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62–5.
153 Leibniz, ‘Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondé en raison’, repr. in Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, Œuvres de Leibniz, ed. M. A. Jacques (Paris: Charpentier, 1846), 479–87, here 480. Emphasis
added.
154 Egon Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age, ii. Baroque, Rococo and Enlightenment
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 132.
155 Perkins, Leibniz and China, which is devoted in significant part to showing how Leibniz’s inter-
est in cultural exchange is consistent with his monadological thinking.
the divine. A vitiating or combustible opposition of State to divine authority was

also avoided, as might be expected from a thinker who spent much of his life in
the service of a middling German principality set amongst other principalities, all
under an emperor.
Leibniz’s linguistic theory chimed with his metaphysics. As opposed to the
conception of language as a more or less reliable vessel for expressing concepts
and referring to external things, for Leibniz, words and other signs played a con-
stitutive role in thought. One of Locke’s concerns about language was its potential
to mislead, as with translation problems, but for Leibniz those differences
reflected different ways of seeing the world. ‘I really believe that languages are the
best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of
words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the
understanding.’156 Understanding the essences of different languages was a key to
contemplating the collective social mind of the users of that language. How pre-
cisely languages, cultures, and religions or confessions were related to each other
is unclear. What matters for the following narrative is the enduring influence of
monadological thought about the way that the world was divided, how it should
be understood, and how it should be, simpliciter. As with most tales of intellectual
influence, elements of Leibniz’s original conception are sometimes watered down,
and at other times simplified, exaggerated, and analogized.157 The idea of cultures
and then nation states as ‘monads’ is in any case an especially important focus of
subsequent thought.
Leibniz’s irenic perspectivalism is detectable in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
play Nathan the Wise of 1779, with its three-sided interfaith dialogue set during
the Crusades.158 Leibniz’s cosmopolitanism is manifest in Goethe’s conviction
that ‘poetry is cosmopolitan, and the more interesting the more it shows its
nationality’.159 His metaphysics is evident in the father of ‘liberal’ Protestant the-
ology, the hermeneut Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), for whom—as
indeed for Clifford Geertz who in one of his voices talked of ‘seeing heaven in a
156 John Leavitt, Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought (Cambridge
157 I have noted elsewhere—Donald Bloxham, Why History? A History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2020), 152—the seeds of dialectical thinking in Leibniz’s reflections on change within a monad
stemming from an ‘internal principle’ of variation, such that ‘the present is pregnant with the future’
(Monadology, §§10–13, 22). This element was more conducive to Marxists than the conservatives who
most wholeheartedly embraced monadic thought.
158 Hugh Barr Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 512, 580, 610 on Leibniz’s influence, as against others who tend to see more of
Spinoza’s influence on Lessing—though Nisbet recognizes Spinoza’s influence too. See also
Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment (New York: SUNY, 2018), ch. 4.
159 ‘Poetry’ quote and further context from Longxi Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature
(Albany, NY: SUNY, 2015), 170.
grain of sand’160—the infinite should be sought in the finite.161 Such thinking

gathered strength in the German reaction from the mid-eighteenth century
onwards against enlightened French universalism but also against Kantian dis-
tinctions between sensibility and the understanding, the world of human affect
and experience on one hand and the world of reason on the other. In that connec-
tion the thought of the deeply religious Lutheran Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88)
was, despite itself, an important way station on the road to a secularized under-
standing of human group diversity based on language patterns and historical
development.
Hamann’s linguistic and aesthetic theory was suffused with his own faith,
which was set against Enlightenment-compatible ‘rational religion’. Applying
Paul’s concepts in 2 Corinthians, and consistent with Luther’s view on consub-
stantiation, in which Christ’s body and blood and bread and wine were all present
in the Eucharist, Hamann disavowed any opposition between the spirit and the
letter in the interpretation of language. The same went for the interpretation of
the world of nature and the flesh as ‘texts’ more broadly defined—Hamann had
something akin to a ‘realist’ medieval view of the world as a divine text. Language
had a symbolic quality as well as referential and straightforwardly communicative
capacities; it was embedded in everyday life as well as having formal properties;
and the spiritual and cognitive elements were irreducibly interwined.162 Hamann
disliked the philosophical language that sought to abstract and universalize,
juxtaposing it with the evocative, aesthetic qualities of poetry in which the spirit
was in action to animate the meaning of words in ways that exceeded the defin-
itions of those words. (Here there is in fact some confluence with Kant’s work on
aesthetics, as with Fichte’s 1795 work On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy.)163
Before the fall Adam and Eve had direct access to divine or ‘angelic language’.
Afterwards humans were forever engaged in a form of interpretative translation
‘out of angel-speech into human language, that is, thoughts into words,—things
into names,—forms into signs’. This was not, however, interpretation ab initio.
Regarding the material world, the imagination and cognition worked on the
160 Geertz sought to show that ‘seeing heaven in a grain of sand is a trick that not only poets can
accomplish’. ‘It is in understanding [human] variousness . . . that we shall come to construct a concept
of human nature that, more than a statistical shadow and less than a primitivist dream, has both sub-
stance and truth.’ Geertz, The Interpretation, 44, 53, 52.
161 Vladimir Latinovic, Gerrard Mannion, and Jason Welle (eds), Catholicism Engaging Other
Faiths (Cham: Springer, 2018), 142; on Schleiermacher and the matter of each believer’s experiencing
religion through their individual ‘Anschauung des Universums’ and then each collective religion having
its ‘fundamental intuition’/‘Grundanschauung’, see John H. Smith, ‘Leibniz Reception around 1800’, in
Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson (eds), Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of
Goethe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 209–43, here 235.
162 Kenneth Haynes, Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), pp. xiii–xviii; Robert Alan Sparling, Johann Georg Hamann and the
Enlightenment Project (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 93.
163 Clayton Koelb, The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy and the Theory of Life in Europe’s
Romantic Age (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), 14–16.
experience of the senses. Authorial intent of, say, scripture, meanwhile, might be
inferred and argued over, while the letter remained as a guide. When Hamann
wrote that ‘man’ must ‘take his external sense as a help, must be attentive to the
given letter as the only vehicle of the Spirit which can be grasped’ we can see the
Neoplatonic element of his thought by which the divine and the human sphere
are not entirely separate even while humans can never be certain of their inter-
pretative ground. While language distances the user from original, divine mean-
ing it still somehow constitutes a trace of the same, providing an oblique,
mediated insight, like ‘a solar eclipse which is looked at through a glass of
water’.164 Any attempt to subjugate language in the name of complete human
autonomy and control was akin to the hubristic attempt to build the Tower of
Babel. Reason presupposed a language in which it could be expressed, and lan-
guage was inevitably interpretative, making the reader or speaker into a partici-
pant in the construction of meaning as they operated from contexts that were
irreducibly social and historical as well as sensuous.165 ‘In the language of every
people we find the history of the same . . . The invisible being of our souls is
revealed through words.’166
Events in the Garden of Eden and in ‘Babel’ are linked in Hamann and they are
linked in the book of Genesis. In Genesis, Adam and Eve’s rebellion, then the
attempt to build a tower as a monument apart from god, each resulted in disper-
sal and alienation, firstly of people from God, then of peoples from each other.167
Hamann’s disciple Herder (1744–1803) saw the Babel story as a cause of a linguistic-
cultural diversity that was ultimately to be celebrated, with any future conceptual-
ization of human unity having first to take account of diversity.168 The religious
references were, however, more by the way of adornments than architecture in the
work of this erstwhile clergyman. Herder produced an almost entirely secular
theory of language, replacing Hamann’s historical-theological admixture with an
account of historical-social evolution in which environmental factors and human
reflection on sense-data also played a role, and differing religions were the prod-
ucts of those different circumstances.169 He retained Hamann’s interest in para-
164 Sparling, Johann Georg Hamann, 48–9, 81, 93; quotes from W. M. Alexander, Johann Georg
Hamann, Philosophy and Faith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 84.
165 Gwen Griffith Dickson, Johann Georg Hamman’s Relational Metacriticism (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1995), 170. Hamann, like Herder, in the words of one scholar, asserts ‘that language, not God, is the
being we experience as mediating its own immediacy’: Katie Terezakis, The Immanent Word: the Turn
to Language in German Philosophy, 1759–1801 (London: Routledge, 2007), 150, and see further
150–5.
166 Quote in Alexander, Johann Georg Hamann, 85.
167 James Austin, The Tower of Babel in Genesis (Bloomington, IN: Westbow, 2012).
168 Michael Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1989), 34–6, 62, 65–6.
169 Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought, 34–6; John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-
Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), ch. 6; Wolfgang Proß, ‘Die Begründung
der Geschichte aus der Natur—Herders Konzept von “Gesetzen” in der Geschichte’, in Hans Erich
Bödeker, Peter Hanns Reill, and Jürgen Schlum (eds), Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750–1900
digmatic symbolic forms in language and saw poets as vital in the painting of
linguistic pictures in which language-users would perceive their commonality.
Historians, too, would be the handmaidens of national consciousness as they
depicted the Volk through history. We can detect Leibniz’s imprint on Herder’s
ethnography, not so much in the religious sense of emanation from a unity as in
Herder’s description of cultures as monads, each with its own ‘spirit’, the Geist des
Volkes, as its developmental driving force (Kraft).170 As to his own cultural group,
Herder felt Protestants and Catholics would ideally be bound together by their
Germanness.
Thus was entrenched a series of linked assumptions about national essences or
‘spirits’—drawing on one of the related meanings of Geist or pneuma—and lan-
guages and cultures. Pushing forward into the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767–1835) wrote, in the general introduction to his study of the
Kawi language of Java, that ‘Language is, as it were, the outer appearance of the
spirit of a people; the language is their spirit and the spirit their language . . . the
structure of languages differs among mankind, because and insofar as the mental
individuality of nations is itself different’ and ‘there resides in every language a
characteristic world-view [Weltansicht]’. But Herder had also intimated that the
spiritual/ideal side of a people needed an objective manifestation in the political
sphere, promising gratitude to he who would ‘promote the unity of the territories
of Germany through writings, manufactures, and institutions’.171 Hegel developed
the concept of a fusion of the subjective and objective in his own way, but the idea
is also present in the most influential strands of nineteenth-century historiography
in Germany and many other places in Europe. Leopold von Ranke is an example.
Ranke’s historicism aligned roughly with Leibniz’s metaphysics, just as Ranke’s
panentheism, the belief that the universe is contained within God or is an eman-
ation of God, derives from Neoplatonism.172 Cultural diversity, as embodied in
and safeguarded by the State, was an instantiation of the divine. In terms redolent
of Leibniz’s ‘mirrors of the universe’, Ranke wrote: ‘instead of the fleeting con-
glomerations that the [social] contract theories invoke as if they were cloud
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 187–225; on mental reflection (Besonnenheit), see
Helmut Gipper and Peter Schmitter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der
Romantik (Tübingen: Narr, 1979), 72–3, 151.
170 On the links between Herder and Leibniz’s monadological thought, including some peculiar
appropriations thereof, see Ulrich Eisel, ‘Individualität als Einheit in der konkreten Natur: Das
Kulturkonzept der Geographie’, in Parto Teherani-Krönner (ed.), Humanökologie und Kulturökologie:
Grundlagen · Ansätze · Praxis (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992), 107–52, here 118 ff.; Hugh Barr
Nisbet, Herder and Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970),
passim; Fleischacker, Integrity and Moral Relativism, 217.
171 Paul Bertagnolli, Prometheus in Music: Representations of Myth in the Romantic Era (London:
Routledge, 2007), 146.
172 On the relationship between panentheism and Neoplatonism, see John W. Cooper,
Panentheism—The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), 18–19 and passim.
formations, I perceive spiritual essences, original creations of the human

spirit—thoughts of God as one might say’. Like windowless monads, states were
‘individualities, analogous to but essentially independent of each other’.173
How such principles of thought related to other strands of thought, how they
were instrumentalized, and how they evolved in the world of peoples, states, and
even economies are the central questions for the rest of this section. Accordingly,
we will move away from the purely intellectual History of the last several pages to
incorporate high thought into a more general historical account. The following
tour is not ruthlessly governed by chronology, and no thematic survey can be.
Broadly, however, it works forward from the middle of the seventeenth century to
the era of the world wars, as nationalist-monadology revealed its ugliest aspect.
Like Leibniz’s thought, the Westphalian treaties of 1648 bore the imprint of the
Christian preoccupation with internality now applied to the level of state rather
than the individual soul. The Westphalian dispensation saved the monad of
Christendom by attributing something like monadic status to Christian states—
and though Herderians would point out that theses states generally did not map
cleanly onto cultures, they did map onto religions-of-state. The Westphalian
enhancement of state sovereignty, which really meant a recognition of more and
stronger poles of sovereignty as against would-be hegemonic France, the Emperor,
and the Papacy, had as its corollary non-intervention by one state into the internal
affairs of another. That corollary gave each state an in-principle untouchable
‘internal forum’ of its own as long as each respected the internal forum of other
states and the further internal forum of its own religious minorities, those lower,
substate monads, who in turn had to keep to their own collectively private forum
internum of religious conscience.174 Those states might learn from each other but
under normal circumstances they must be allowed to preserve their own charac-
ter and develop according to their own internal tendencies.
For its main players, the international system after the Wars of Religion rested
‘on international law and the balance of power’: law and power operated ‘between
rather than above states’.175 The obvious contrast here is with the ecclesiological
framework created within medieval western Christendom by the Papacy (how-
ever limited the power of that framework often was in practice for medieval mon-
archs). The explicit shift away from the medieval framework aided movement
towards a proliferation of more purely secular ecclesiae. All the same, there
remained for many centuries, and still to some degree to the present, a sense of
incorporation within a higher monad, whether that be called Christendom, the
West, or ‘the civilized world’. Legal theorists could blend reference to national
173 Ranke, ‘Politisches Gespräch’, Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, ed. Leopold Ranke, ii (1833–6),
775–807, here 794.
174 Laurent Waelkens, Amne adverso: Roman Legal Heritage in European Culture (Leuven: Leuven
University Press, 2015), 119 ff.
175 Leo Gross, cited in Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2010), 44.
customs and eternal, universal principles. Puritans in seventeenth-century New

England maintained certain rights felt suitable for Old Englishmen while believ-
ing in a continuity of religious ‘natural’ law to positive state law, and availing
themselves of the opportunity to forge this chain anew.176
Even as terms of collective identity changed over the following centuries, some
of the principles of monadic subdivision remained the same. Thus the Augsburg
and Westphalian option of emigration for those unprepared to live under the
ruler’s religious dispensation was replicated after the First World War when the
‘option provisions’ of the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919–20 provided for emigration
along the lines of ethnonational division rather than confession. Likewise, the
Paris peace treaties included Westphalian-analogous clauses for the protection of
national and religious minorities. Overall, well into the twentieth century it
remained the case that whatever the role of religious thought per se at any
moment, many states and would-be states claimed something of the divine qual-
ity that Leibniz ascribed to his higher monads. The ‘Enlightenment’ certainly did
little to militate against that conceit even when it militated against religion more
generally, which was not always the case.
The German Enlightenment proved accommodating to some established
Christianities,177 but this was less true of its French equivalent. In the spirit of
Bayle and under British empiricist influence too, Montesquieu’s On the Spirit of
the Laws of 1748 was a significant theoretical step in the direction of founding
moral codes purely within human societies and their self-generated ‘characters’
rather than as an emanation of the divine, though it did not go as far as Herder
towards cultural relativism. The Revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen reflected secular natural-law principles more than did the
Jeffersonian principles of the American Revolution, though both evinced Locke’s
influence.
If the agenda of the French Revolutionaries at the outset accorded with reli-
gious thought, it did so with the doctrine of the deists who emphasized the
responsibility of human reason for creating the conditions for human flourishing
on earth. The vessel for this flourishing was an appropriately rationalized state.
The prerogatives of the Gallican Church were shattered as priests had to vow
fidelity to that novel import, a constitution, and the revolutionary ‘cult of reason’
threatened a far more extensive de-Christianization before it was replaced by
Robespierre’s deistic cult of the Supreme Being. The monarchy’s abolition in 1792
was also the decapitation of the Church. The easing of anticlerical repression after
the Thermidorean reaction, and Napoleon’s Concordat with the Papacy in 1801,
176 McManus, Law and Liberty, 3–4.

177 On elements of its relationship to Judaism: Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: The
Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003).
nevertheless left the balance of Church–State relations more tilted to the secular
ruler than on the eve of the Revolution.
In key respects the Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath continued the
centralizing agenda of the Bourbons, which reminds us that however much the
Revolution came to be associated with the ‘nation in arms’, ‘rationalization’ and
‘democratization’ were not synonyms any more than the ‘middle-class’ lawyers
over-represented in the leadership of the third estate were synonymous with the
capitalists of Marx’s ‘bourgeoisie’. Revolutionary laws were to be the expression
of the ‘general will’, elaborated no more unambiguously than in the work of the
term’s inventor. What was confirmed, though, was that the will was not ascer-
tained by numeric calculation. This was convenient for the Revolutionary law-
yers who aspired to having more in common with the nobility than with the
urban and rural poor comprising the bulk of their shared ‘third estate’. The mon-
arch was as aware as these third estate leaders of the need for reform of the
socio-economic order, but neither he nor they desired the end of seigneurialism.
The introduction of measures to that effect in 1789–90, like the Declaration, was
a concession to feared demotic forces. The same dynamics help explain the
establishment of universal manhood suffrage by the Jacobins in 1792 for the
election of deputies to the National Convention (that suffrage was ended by the
Constitution of 1795), which only a few of them had advocated from the outset.
Wariness of the masses increasingly coexisted with the desire to instrumentalize
them to protect the Revolutionary state against external enemies. With the
grand expansions of recruitment in 1793, an unprecedently large proportion of
‘the nation’ did indeed appear in arms, though not always desperately
enthusiastically.
Revolutionary France expanded and then contracted, but after 1815 Napoleon’s
erstwhile dominions could not easily throw off all his legacies, and, like
Restoration France, they did not always wish to. In many places the impact
endured of attacks on clerical prerogatives, and of reforms of civil and economic
institutions and even borders—consider the ‘rationalization’ of the principalities
of the Holy Roman Empire that was inadvertently a step towards later German
unification. Then there was the effect of Napoleonic constitutions. When we come
to the German philosophical reaction to Revolutionary expansion, the legacy is
just as ambivalent.
Like Kant, Fichte and Hegel had originally embraced the French Revolution,
even if not particular deeds of the Revolutionaries. For not a few onlookers, the
Revolution’s attack on absolutism and tradition made it a sociopolitical embodi-
ment of the emancipation Protestantism had supposedly brought at the spiritual
level. Fichte’s enthusiasm may sound odd given that his famous Addresses to the
German Nation (1807) were shaped in reaction to the behaviour of the Napoleonic
state. But his criticism of France was for its betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution
as it opted for imperialism—leadership by domination rather than leadership by
example. Since France was no longer the exemplar, Germany would have to be,
and in order to fulfil that role (and after the defeats of 1806, to resist occupation)
it would have to awaken itself as a subject of history. Or, rather, be awoken. A
reader of Rousseau, Fichte would have known of his analogous efforts in trying to
whip up Polish national consciousness around the time of the partition of 1772 as
a way of resisting Russian, not to mention Prussian and Austrian, imperialism.
Rousseau had thought it vital to shape Poles’ ‘minds and hearts in a national pat-
tern that will set them apart from other peoples, that will keep them from being
absorbed by other peoples and ensure that they remain patriotic’.178 While Fichte
differed from Herder given his own emphasis on ‘constitutional engineering’, he
shared with Herder the belief that national linguistic-cultural differences amongst
Europeans were ‘natural’ (whereas the distinction between Prussia and Germany
was artificial), and that anti-imperial national-cultural self-expression would
conduce to international harmony. If we can but put aside the ethnocentric lead-
ership role in the world that Fichte arrogated to Germany, on the presumption
that only Germany could act in a truly universalistic sense on behalf of all peoples,
we can see the monadological logic of his pronouncement in Patriotism and its
Opposite (1806). ‘Cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of
humanity be really achieved. Patriotism is the will that that purpose be first ful-
filled in that nation to which we ourselves belong’, and so ‘Cosmopolitanism must
necessarily become patriotism’.179
In the 1790s, Fichte developed a view of individual identity as a product of
intersubjectivity, i.e. social relations, and he fused this sound insight with his
‘patriotic’ agenda. The History I section mentioned a nineteenth-century recep-
tion of Fichte that focused on the egotism of the ‘I’ somehow ‘positing’ the world
(p. 167). It also mentioned his point about the intentionality of consciousness, i.e.
that consciousness is always consciousness of something in particular. The end of
that section noted Fichte’s concept of self-limiting freedom, which differed from
Kant’s account of self-legislating autonomy (pp. 173–4). How do we get from the
first of these points to the last? Prior to there being an I at all, as in a self-conscious
entity, there must be appreciation of others different to Me, but with similar
capacities and rights, that have drawn my attention to my own capacities and
rights. Fichte’s position is anticipated by Plato’s Alcibiades, in which the pupils of
the not-I become the mirror of the I. I appreciate myself as a subject in light of the
178 Cited in Mads Qvortrup, The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2014), 78.
179 For further elaboration of the supposed connections between individual, nations, and mankind,
see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society,
1840–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), ch. 7, esp. 243–4. Note that Patriotism
and its Opposite was written before the German defeat at Jena later in 1806, and thereafter Fichte’s tone
becomes more stridently nationalistic. On that, and on Fichte’s coming vision of a German future
including a ‘national church’ and national education in patriotism, see Helmut Walser Smith, The
Continuities of German History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 63 ff.
fact that I perceive the not-I perceiving me as an object of her similar perception.
Where Descartes’s appreciation of his own imperfection presupposed the idea
already inserted within him of God’s notion of perfection,180 for Fichte the idea of
one’s freedom to posit or to affect other things presupposed the generalized idea
of freedom that was accessible to others. Equally the idea of acting freely presup-
posed the idea of willingly limiting one’s scope of action for the sake of others
in the way that they must in order that I can be free. The keyword here is
Anerkennung, i.e. recognition, which connotes a moral quality in the sense of
acceptance/respect while also having the more purely cognitive sense of the
word.181 Fichte realized that relations between individuals are not unmediated
but occur within contexts—and the context that he, like Herder, was most inter-
ested in was the linguistic-cultural one, which scarcely distinguishes him from
some multiculturalists and conservatives today. But in address to his fellow
Germans he also made a prescriptive claim based on his descriptive assumption
that cultural-linguistic collectives were natural-cum-spiritual kinds.182 It was dis-
tinctly monadological to say ‘only when each people, left to itself, develops and
forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in each
people each individual develops himself in accordance with that quality, as well as
in accordance with his own peculiar quality, then, and only then, does the mani-
festation of divinity appear’.183
Karl Marx’s theories were also embedded in a theory of intersubjective rela-
tions, but in their economic, political, and philosophical connotations they could
scarcely have stood more at odds with Fichte’s. Marx (1818–83) gave theoretical
expression to the growing and very material discontents of the age, replacing the
concept of a unifying sociocultural Geist with that of a dominant ideology spuri-
ously legitimating the interests of one class at the expense of those of another.
Urbanization, industrialization, and mass literacy started to make as much of an
impact as had the Revolutionary armies produced by the levée en masse and the
insurrections stimulated by Napoleon, and as had the ‘egotistic’ individualist self-
assertiveness attributed to the Revolution. Accordingly the challenge for elites
across the Continent, as it would be for postcolonial nationalists after the Second
World War, was to keep established social orders maximally stable and unitary
while harnessing, in the name of the people, the martial and productive forces
unleashed by the French and English revolutions.
180 Steven Crowell, ‘Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context’,
European Journal of Philosophy 23/3 (2015), 564–88, here 566.
181 Pinkard, German Philosophy, 121; Eric D. Weitz, ‘Self-Determination: How a German
Enlightenment Idea Became the Slogan of National Liberation and a Human Right’, American
Historical Review 120/2 (2015), 462–96, here 474–6.
182 Neither the pantheist nor the Neoplatonist—both traditions influenced Fichte—need distin-
guish sharply between the natural and the spiritual.
183 Quote from Weitz, ‘Self-Determination’, 478–9.
The category ‘English revolution’ is meant to include political events between

1640 and 1688, but, in keeping with this materialist element of the discussion, my
main concern is with the way in which those events channelled economic forces
of revolutionary power. The absolutist agenda of Charles I that gave rise to polit-
ical strife from 1640 had been born in a desire to emulate France and Spain and
was given urgency by war with Scotland. The Crown’s attempt to strengthen the
central state and its war machine by harnessing the relatively dynamic agrarian
economy through increased tax revenues was interpreted by the landed gentry as
an attack on their economic prerogatives. The political ‘revolution’ of that moment
was more an attempt to restore the status quo ante, though by 1649 it brought
significant constitutional change in the identification of sovereignty in the nation,
through its parliamentary representatives. Ultimately, what emerged from the
early eighteenth century as the vaunted ‘fiscal-military state’ was the product of
seventeenth-century compromises between the monarchy and the landowners in

the political and economic spheres, if also of the importation of Dutch financial
expertise after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The State proved itself repeatedly
in warfare against the erstwhile Continental hegemon, France, whose resulting
convulsions produced the French Revolution.
England’s agrarian capitalism had long since created and supplied with basic
necessities a growing landless, increasingly urban population in Europe’s first
fully integrated internal economy. The urban population, plus the established
philosophy of intensive production and enhanced labour productivity, were pre-
conditions for the Industrial Revolution that was given a major boost by the
Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon’s defeat not only weakened France again, it also pre-
cipitated a globalization of British surplus capital and capital goods, hungry for
new investment and sales opportunities and availing themselves of the frequently
unpacific Pax Britannica. Under these specific, hegemonic conditions, Britain
repudiated earlier mercantilist doctrines and followed the lead of Adam Smith.
Mercantilism had been a rather appropriate doctrine for the Westphalian era,
given the synergy between state-building and national economy-building. A pre-
occupation with balances of trade and retention of precious metals inhibited
some international commerce while binding producers and merchants alike to
the state in ways that could be mutually beneficial. Merchant banks and wealthy
individuals could lend to states to build the latters’ capacity, while
Partly through commands to state bureaucracies and partly through incentives

to private enterprise, the rulers of France and of the United Kingdom internal-
ized within their domains as many of the growing number of activities that,
directly or indirectly, entered as inputs in war-making and state-making as was
feasible. In this way, they managed to turn into tax revenues a much larger share
of protection costs than [earlier economic pathbreaking polities like] the Italian
city-states, or for that matter the United Provinces, ever did or could have done.
By spending these enhanced tax revenues within their domestic economies, they
created new incentives and opportunities to establish ever new linkages between
activities and thus make wars pay for themselves more and more.184
Conversely, the unimpeded commerce propounded by Britain and increasingly

France from the second quarter of the nineteenth century changed the relation-
ship between state and economy, in a way that shaped the trajectories of the dis-
ciplines of political science (and IR), sociology, and economics. By mid-Victorian
times Gladstone echoed the popular aspiration ‘that “government” and “econ-
omy” should be treated as separate entities in order to maintain fiscal rectitude
and economic order’.185 Such a separation—never complete—accelerated the
internationalization of capital.
As ‘the economy’ was freed from some territorial constraints, it was attributed
a transcendent quality far from unfamiliar in a Christian civilization.186 Given the
manifest power of the ‘invisible hand’, disbelief was scarcely an option, but its
power did not always translate into legitimacy. Exegesis in the form of the theory
of marginal economics was a key influence on the rational actor theory underpin-
ning one conception of the modern human, homo economicus. But in the think-
ing of Friedrich List (1789–1846) and his successors in the German historical
school of economics, there was no one economic theory, but rather a range, cor-
related for List with level of development and for the historical school with
national history and culture and the ‘universal union’ that existed between each
state and its people.
The argument in which different economic schools were engaged was in one
way a disagreement about basic contexts of human behaviour. With the argument
over primary context came the argument over primary discipline, or primary sort
of discipline: deductive Ricardian economics was set against empirical economics
firmly embedded in historical-cultural study of the sort that the German histori-
cist tradition excelled in.187 But while there was a battle for primacy between ‘eco-
nomic’ and ‘cultural’ paradigms, which mapped on to the battle of a certain
universalism against a certain particularism, different participants on the same
‘side’ by no means agreed with each other about the stakes. For some German
observers, left and right, British laissez-faire economism, dubbed ‘Manchesterism’,
indicated a despiritualized commercial civilization. For others, it indicated frag-
mentation, the exploitation of masses, and even of the State, by a minority class of
184 Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 51.

185 Paul Johnson, Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16.
186 Jonathan Hearn, ‘The Strength of Weak Legitimacy: A Cultural Analysis of Legitimacy in
Capitalist, Liberal, Democratic Nation-States’, Journal of Political Power 4/2 (2011), 199–216, here 205.
187 Note that more organicist and social-collectivist accounts of the economy were never absent in
the mid-Victorian period, whether among high Tories or working-class radicals and socialists. Early
in the twentieth century such accounts gained greater influence.
individuals acting in its own interests.188 Both views, as it happens, could combine
in the stigmatization of Jews as parasites on ‘authentic’ cultures, acting above
the State in mysterious ways, when the globalizing economic system experienced
major shocks from 1873 to 1896 and again in the great interwar depression.
It is tribute to the remarkable adaptability of Britain’s landed elite that it not
only managed to maintain much of its ascendancy by the character of its relations
to capitalism but also helped persuade the world that Germany constituted some
special, distorted case of national development. One not-unsubstantiated allega-
tion concerned the enduring political power of the Junker landowner class in
Prussian-German politics, but it is the sharpness of the contrast that amuses. A
more marked socio-economic contrast here is not of Germany with Britain but of
Germany with an ideal(ized?) model in which ‘national bourgeoisies’ drove mod-
ernizing nationalist agendas against agrarian and external commercial interests.
Some of the undoubted differences between Britain and all other states may
reflect nothing more than that as the first capitalist state Britain could develop at a
pace and in a fashion unavailable to any other state. Every state that subsequently
entered the capitalist system did so under different circumstances, and with cor-
respondingly different pressures and imperatives. Since only one state could be
first in, though, every other state shared the quality of relative ‘lateness’, which is
why certain elements of Germany’s experience were more representative of trends
elsewhere on the Continent and beyond. Thus List’s teaching shaped the policy of
Russia under Witte, Imperial Japan, and, under the name milli iktisat, the late
Ottoman Empire, and strongly resembled the influential doctrines of the
Hamiltonian ‘American school’ associated with Henry Clay. For all of the other
actual and would-be states seeking to develop in the interests of sovereign inde-
pendence, some form of étatisme was not at all unusual. The currently dominant
state, Britain, had itself explored a range of protectionisms and interventions at
earlier stages of its ascent, by no means all of which had been decried by Adam
Smith (who applauded the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts), and some of
which survived well into the nineteenth century within Britain and in Britain’s
administration of its formal empire.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the link became increasingly clear
between economic-industrial power and the capacity to retain sovereign inde-
pendence or deny it to others—the capacity, in extremis, to wage war. Japan under
the Meiji restoration is a prime example of a state that pursued forced-paced,
dirigiste economic development as a route to avoid the neo-colonial fate of nearby
China, which had surrendered so much to Britain in particular. In other words,
while socialists and Marxists had attacked the liberal belief in an identity of inter-
ests between the individual and her society—Engels wrote of London that ‘the
188 Detlev Mares, ‘Not Entirely a Manchester Man’, in Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan (eds),
Rethinking Nineteenth Century Liberalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 141–60, here 154–5.
dissolution of mankind in monads, of which each has a separate principle of life

and a separate goal, the world of atoms, is here carried to its utmost extremes’189—
the Left could find some agreement with the nationalist Right on how little Adam
Smith’s philosophy of irenic, mutually-complementary interstate commercial
relations was mirrored in reality. The expanded adoption of the gold standard
from the early 1870s, while removing states’ capacities to regulate the value of
their currencies and aiding the acceleration of international trade, found a
‘nationalist’ counterpart in the coming years and decades. During the repeated
depressions of the last quarter of the century, the statist element in economic and
social life was enhanced in the form of customs tariffs and social legislation that
sought to minimize the domestic impact of adjustments to international com-
merce and international economic rhythms.190 The misadaption of Darwinism to
the life of peoples contributed to the increasingly fraught competitiveness of the
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international environment, but it
also mirrored that environment. It is because of the similarity of pressures on and
agendas of a range of states within that international environment that the pre-
sent survey focuses more on commonalities than differences between various
nationalisms.
There are other reasons for emphasizing similarity too. An influential approach
in the scholarship on nationalism describes French ‘Revolutionary’ nationalism,
like American nationalism, as a civic or constitutional nationalism, and juxta-
poses this with the implicitly less healthy integral/organic/ethnic nationalisms
that cropped up in Germany and in eastern and south-eastern Europe.191 In prin-
ciple the difference is clear—it is that between community defined by shared pos-
session of a set of elective values versus a set of innate characteristics—but many
qualifications are required, both of the distinction and the implied superiority of
one sort of nationalism over the other.
It is more accurate to conceive of these categories of nationalism as ideal types,
with reality much messier. Think of how US civic nationalism has often been fla-
voured by nativist racism, emphasis on America’s Christian heritage, and espe-
cially more and less formal discrimination against blacks. Furthermore, granted a
real or notional moment of self-constitution of the civic nation, the great majority
of its citizens in subsequent generations are citizens merely in virtue of blood and
soil, ie. their parentage and place of birth, while candidate citizens have, in that
telling expression, to ‘naturalize’. As well as changes over time and context, con-
cepts like ‘spirit’ and Kraft blur the distinction between values (civic nationalism)
and characteristics (ethnic nationalism). Spirit, Geist, ésprit, was ubiquitous. The
189 Engels cited in Swaart, ‘ “Individualism” ’, 81.

190 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 207–24.
191 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (London: Vintage, 1994), 3–6; Qvortrup, The
Political Philosophy, 84.
Frenchman Ernst Renan called the nation ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’, while the
Danish Bishop Grundtvig described peoples as possessing a collective ‘active life-
force’. Bluntschli in Switzerland and Mazzini in Italy expressed just the same sort
of sentiment.192 In some of its definitions and explanatory functions ‘culture’
plays much the same blurring role as ‘spirit’. It is nothing if not shared, and it is
the plural-but-singular element, ‘the people’ (consider: ‘we the people’), compris-
ing the community in whose name the State purports to act that is the source of
legitimacy.193
Since in each ‘national’ case the task was of making something new from exist-
ing raw materials, it is scarcely surprising that architects seized upon those mater-
ials that seemed already hewn for the task: established ties of language or custom
that lent themselves to metaphors of kinship. This approach was especially ‘neces-
sary’ when the State did not already exist to provide some legal-administrative
unity to the ‘people’ in question. Herderian thought about gathering together a
politically-fragmented but (supposedly) culturally-distinct Germandom found
many imitators amongst other peoples that were as yet without their own state.
Rousseau’s late-life work on the governance of Poland shows the increasing influ-
ence of Montesquieu on his thought in its drift away from the purest contractual-
ism as Rousseau stressed the significance of continuity, concepts of national
character, and the need for education in the Polish language rather than the lan-
guage of ‘foreigners’. History was important in the education process in construct-
ing a collective memory of past greatness by way of enhancing collective Polish
self-esteem.194 We are not far from the ethos underpinning nineteenth-century
German historicist thought—‘informing’ peoples about their collective character
by revealing their past and helping individual people to orient themselves in the
present in the context of larger movements that subsume them.
Let us return for a moment, then, to the influential German historical profes-
sion to assess how it reconciled its monadological-metaphysical underpinning
with a political world of incipient and actual conflict. Ranke’s voice comes
through in an imagined dialogue of 1836—his famous Politisches Gespräch—
when ‘Friedrich’ pronounces that the ‘degree of independence achieved by a state
dictates its standing in the world. It is accordingly obliged to marshal all its
internal arrangements towards the end of asserting itself. That is its supreme law.’
192 All four cited in Fleishacker, Integrity and Moral Relativism, 217.
193 An example of how ‘culture’ can blur distinctions: Qvortrup, The Political Philosophy, 84, writes
that ‘Rousseau supported . . . a civic nationalism—not an ethnic nationalism . . . Nationalism can be an
evil if it degenerates into ethnic strife—yet it can also be a force for good if it is used as a mechanism
for creating cultural homogeneity.’ Absent is elaboration of the relationship between this sort of
homogenous order and liberalism (or multiculturalism), an account of what elements of coercion
(‘strife’) are deemed acceptable in the creation of homogeneity, and an explanation of the relationship
or apparent non-relationship of culture to ethnicity.
194 Jean Terrier, Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–1950 (Leiden:
Brill, 2011), 54–6; Qvortrup, The Political Philosophy, 78–9.
This is the ‘primacy of foreign policy’ doctrine with which Ranke and Bismarck
would become synonymous.195 As, supposedly, in Revolutionary France, the State
was the guarantor of the liberty and expression of the individuality of the nation
on the stage of world history. As such, not only was it owed loyalty, it was itself a
moral entity, as Pufendorf, Hegel, and later historicist historians like Gustav
Droysen also maintained. Since the State was a moral entity, its prerogatives were
not easily limited by recourse to the concept of external wills and moralities; its
duty was at once to protect the people and express what Ranke called its ‘moral
energy’. Ranke evinced some awareness of the consequences of this sort of think-
ing, and the need for ‘detachment’ as prerequisite for any authentic empirically-
informed intuition. Thus ‘Karl’ admonishes ‘Friedrich’: ‘You look upon war’s
bloody handywork as a competition of moral energies. Take care that you do not
become too sublime!’196 Clearly, then, Ranke did not feel the State could do no
wrong: indeed, in keeping with Neoplatonic thought, the purest entities were the
highest up the chain of being, the least coloured by the mundane and the phys-
ical, while states and their leaders had to act in an imperfect world. But by the
same token it would be wrong either to expect perfection of states and statesmen
or to denigrate them for their imperfection, any more than Augustine could
ignore the hard choices and necessary evils of life in the earthly realm. Later in
life, Ranke wrote that it would ‘be infinitely wrong to seek only the effects of bru-
tal forces in the struggles of historical powers . . . no state has ever existed without
a spiritual basis and a spiritual content. A spiritual essence appears in power itself,
an original genius with its own particular life.’197
Over time the space for reservations only dwindled. The historian Treitschke
(1834–96), who we have already encountered as a theorist of political morality
(p. 70) reconciled nationalistic social Darwinism with an idealist Lutheran
Christianity, for if the ideal was to become real through the German state, ‘good’
needed to arrogate power to itself by means of which no monkish armchair mor-
alist would approve. Arguably the last major historicist in the tradition of the
Prussian school, Meinecke (1862–1954), once wrote that ‘morality has not only a
universal but also an individual side to it and the seeming immorality of the
State’s egoism for power can be morally justified from this perspective. For noth-
ing can be immoral which comes from the innermost, individual character of a
being’.198 In other words, what Scheler and Westermarck problematized at the
level of personal morality was actively supported at the level of the State.
195 Ranke, ‘Politisches Gespräch’, 793–4.

196 Ranke, ‘Politisches Gespräch’, 793–4.
197 Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, ed. Alfred Dove and Georg Winter, vol. ix, pt II (Leipzig:
Duncker and Humblot, 1888), p. xi.
198 George Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2012), 9.
One of the more intringuing intellectual engagements with the interiority

question is that of the Romantic pro-Revolutionary historian of France, Jules
Michelet (1798–1874). He admired Leibniz and his description of France as
‘a soul and as a person’ has distinctly monadological overtones. This personaliza-
tion of the national is the key to reconciling, on one hand, Michelet’s veneration
of Christian inwardness and the realm of the spirit over the world of the letter and
nature and, on the other hand, his celebration of the 1789 Revolution as ‘the
advent of the Law, the resurrection of Right, and the reaction of Justice’. According
to Michelet’s own historical philosophy civilization advanced across time from
east to west, and the story was of ascending liberty and consciousness as it grad-
ually emancipated itself from an ‘oriental’ identification of the divine with the
natural, to a focus on the realm of pure mind and spirit. Christianity was the apo-
gee of the process. At the same time, this focus on the spiritual became distorted
in the history of Christian civilization to bear overwhelmingly on the matter of
grace. Michelet associated arbitrary divine favour with injustice and felt that such
injustice was incarnated in the unequal society of the ancien régime. The
Revolution marked the return of justice, which, as an essential element of love
and the original Christian ideal, also restored grace by breaking its association
with repression. Equally, the return of justice in a reformed national community
would serve as an antidote to the individualism encouraged as Christian doc-
trines became more internalistic and the social structures of medieval Christian
civilization collapsed. With its balance of grace and justice, revolutionary nation-
alism supposedly embodied the ideal attributes of religion.199
Beyond Michelet’s personal vision, and the visions of sundry deists and panen-
theists who effectively contributed to the veneration of the nation(-state) as god
became ever less anthropomorphic and interventionist, more orthodox-looking
religious forms were adaptable too. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of
the ‘national churches’ that Fichte promoted in the German case and that George
Bernard Shaw was to associate with ‘heresy nationalism’.200 In his Essay On the
Constitution of Church and State (1829) the Romantic Anglican and opponent of
Catholic emancipation Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt Henry VIII had not gone far
enough in creating a properly national Church.201 ‘Even’ in Roman Catholic
countries, which one might at first blush associate with a supranational Church,
199 Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet,
Michelet (London: Routledge, 1993), 193–204; Tom Conner, ‘Writing History: Michelet’s History of the
French Revolution’, in Gail M. Schwab and John R. Jeanneny (eds), The French Revolution of 1789 and
Its Impact (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 13–22.
200 The expression is from his Saint Joan. There it refers to Joan of Arc’s French nationalism, and
nationalism is also set alongside some version of Protestantism. Joan’s heresy is to divide Christ’s king-
dom into nations, which is to ‘dethrone Christ’. Of course the leaders and members of the national
churches did not see themselves as dethroning Christ at all.
201 Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (1829; Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1976).
religion might be as important a marker of nationality as language. Consider

Poland, whose epithet ‘Christ among the nations’ was invoked by nineteenth-
century Romantics in light of the partitions of 1772–95 and then the 1830 upris-
ing against Russia. In the 1930s Spain’s Republican regime with its socialist and
atheistic elements was damned by right-wing pro-clerical insurgents as the ‘anti-
Spain’ or, like Jews, as the ‘anti-nation’—either way, read: ‘Antichrist’. Eastern
Catholicism and various Orthodoxies were similarly adapted.
Of special relevance to the narrative of this Part of the book is how far the idea
of national churches and Volk-spirits sustained the sort of ‘heroic, folk-centred’
and ‘sociobiological’ outlook that sundry ‘Reformations’ from the high Middle
Ages onwards had sought to replace with a more inward spiritualism (see p. 145).
Perhaps this was inevitable when the collective interior was analogized to the
individual interior according to the concentric circles model of monadological
thought: when talking of the interior of a nation(-state) one was perforce also
talking about a worldly community of individuals within the bounds of that col-
lective interior. Precisely this sort of logic was anathema to the existentialist
Kierkegaard, who held fast to one strand of the ‘Lutheran’ inheritance while
rejecting another. He argued that there could be no complementarity or synergy
of religious and political institutions, since that would ultimately tend to the
domestication of the eternal element. His abhorrence was a ‘Christian state’ com-
prising ‘people’s church’, ‘nationality’, and ‘popular sovereignty’ in a collusive syn-
thesis of ‘official piety and socio-political convenience’.202 Related criticisms from
a slightly different perspective were expressed in Franz Overbeck’s essay Über die
Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie (1873), literally ‘On the Christian
Character of Our Contemporary Theology’, but effectively more like ‘How
Christian Really is Our Contemporary Theology?’, and Overbeck’s posthumously-
published Christentum und Kultur (1919).
For those with an eye on politics and society, navigating the relationship
between the secular and the transcendent realm might lead to one of two famil-
iar paths being taken. One could advert to a hermetic seal between the political
world and the forum internum of faith. This was the nature of the ‘emancipation
contract’ offered to Jews on the terms of French ‘civic nationalism’ and was
effectively the meaning of Jewish emancipation in Germany too: relegate your
religion to the private sphere in order to participate on the same terms as every-
one else in the public sphere. Or, more commonly for those in power and in
majority, one could act as if the transcendent and and the political were in har-
mony. ‘I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and
perfect, the service of my love; . . . The love that never falters, the love that pays
the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice’; dulce et decorum est
202 Bruce H. Kirmmse, ‘Kierkegaard and 1848’, History of European Ideas 20/l–3 (1995), 167–75,
esp. 167, 173.
pro patria mori; and so forth. ‘Gott mit uns’ was etched on the belt buckles of
German soldiers during the First World War, the ‘war for righteousness’, as well
as in the 1939–45 conflict.203 Far enough down that road, one did not need to
acknowledge the divine at all, merely grateful indenture to the forces fortifying
one’s higher-monad: Meine Ehre heisst Treue, in the SS motto—my honour is
loyalty.
Even internationally minded socialists remained importantly wedded to con-
cepts of the nation. Sometimes the concept was of cultural nations enjoying
autonomy within a wider, decentralized multinational state, as in the turn-of-the-
century thought of some left-wing Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire or
‘Austro-Marxists’ like Otto Bauer. This sort of thinking would go on to shape
Stalin’s 1913 work Marxism and the National Question, and by extension Soviet
nationalities policy in the 1920s and 1930s. Bauer described the nation as a
Schicksalgemeinschaft, or community of fate/destiny with shared characteristics—
a Charaktergemeinschaft. Stalin defined a nation as ‘a historically constituted,
stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, terri-
tory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture’.
What ties these particular strands of socialism to more orthodox Marxist think-
ing about classes is the element of collective self-determination, the social basis of
consciousness and action, as opposed to the individualism of Manchesterthum, and
as opposed to imperial forms based on the exploitation of one people by another.
Marxists were well used to thinking in terms of collective subjects like the prole-
tariat. Like many observers of events in the age from the American revolutions to
1848, Marx was impressed by separatist and nationalist movements as agents of
historical change, and the Haitian Revolution of 1791–4 had combined anti-
colonialism with a successful challenge to the economic and social order of slav-
ery. Looking forward, leftist-approved forms of national self-determination were
always assumed to be intrinsically democratic, tending towards harmony between
peoples and conducing to class self-expression within and across these national
boundaries. The Second International stipulated ‘self-determination for all peo-
ples’ in its 1896 programme, and the Russian Revolutionaries of February and
October 1917 enshrined the principle of self-determination, prompting Woodrow
Wilson’s attempt to wrest discursive control of it.204
It is perhaps unnecessary to stress how little the rise of the nation state cohered
with Bauer’s or Herder’s visions. First, whatever the ‘type’ of nationalism, states
extant and emergent were, and remain, territorially bounded, encompassing only
203 A translation of Immanuel, ‘God is with us’, Gott mit uns was used as a battle cry by the
Christianized Roman Empire before being adopted by various Christian sects and polities. As to
‘I vow to thee, my country’, that was the title given to a hymn in 1921 but the words came from a poem
composed before the First World War by Cecil Spring Rice. The poem was entitled Urbs Dei/The Two
Father Lands (1908–12) and referred to the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms.
204 Almost all of the interpretation in this paragraph, and all of the quotes, are taken from Weitz,
‘Self-Determination’, 480–5.
a part of the global human population, while projecting shared sentiments on

that part. With the civic/ethnic nationalism distinction in mind, it is just as easy
to feel superior to others who hold different values as to those with different skin
colours, and both sentiments can spawn imperialism. Indeed imperial powers
could alternate between the two sets of beliefs in self-justification if we but recall
the importance ascribed by ‘rational’ and self-consciously white imperialists to
particular, value-laden interpretations of concepts like civilization and progress.
Even if one did not feel superior to Others as such, one might nonetheless
find them outside one’s primary universe of obligation, which brings us back to
the man with right to be considered the father of civic nationalism, Rousseau.
One commentator writes that if for Rousseau all society was bad that was out-
side the ideal state based on the contract, then ‘once the ideal state is realized,
society dissolves entirely into the state’. It is not actually true that Rousseau
imagined the dissolution of all bonds beneath the level of the State, because
more ‘natural’ affections were supposedly the basis for adherence to the laws of
the contractual State, that entity that embodied the ‘general will’ and in which a
man faced no contradiction between ‘his wishes and his duties’.205 It is true,
however, that ‘natural’ bonds were supposed to be considered less important
than the bond of the general will. Rousseau allows for no limits on the sovereign
power of the State vis-à-vis persons or peoples once its rule has been appropri-
ately constituted. It is further true that interstate relations are characterized as
distinctly unaffectionate in Rousseau’s scheme, and he plotted no route by which
the situation might be changed:
Every patriot hates foreigners; they are only men, and nothing to him. [Footnote
in the original: Thus the wars of republics are more cruel than those of monarch-
ies. But if the wars of kings are less cruel, their peace is terrible; better be their
foe than their subject.] This defect is inevitable, but of little importance. The
great thing is to be kind to our neighbours. Among strangers the Spartan was
selfish, grasping, and unjust, but unselfishness, justice, and harmony ruled his
home life. Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their
books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such philosophers will love the Tartars
to avoid loving their neighbour.206
Self-conscious, solidaristic internal identity was necessary for state self-preservation

as well as for the ‘emancipation’ of all contractees.
205 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘The Social Contract or the Mirage of the General Will’, in Christie McDonald
and Stanley Hoffmann (eds), Rousseau and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
113–41, here 134–5, cf. Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 24–5. Quote on wishes and duties from Rousseau, Emile (1762; Mineola, NY:
Dover, 2013), 8.
206 Rousseau, Emile, 7.
To the forging of such identity, then, as in the last pages of this section we
consider the means, success, limitations, and costs of the internal homogenization
process. What is true of universalisms is also true of particularisms like national-
ism: each begins as a concept in some specific place or mind and has to make
itself be known to be true in a wider space and in other minds. The process may
involve coercion as well as persuasion, and the potential for violence is not obvi-
ously less in those nationalist cases that tend to be placed more in the ‘civic’ than
the ‘ethnic’ basket—which is grounds enough for bringing Michelet’s vision of
revolutionary ‘justice’ under the scrutiny of scepticism. Internal ‘civilizing mis-
sions’ of the ‘turning peasants into Frenchmen’ and ‘we have made Italy, now we
have to make Italians’ sort were as common as external ‘civilizing missions’.207
Sometimes actions against internal opponents of the new order were as violent,
as with the perhaps 200,000 killed in the Revolutionary state’s campaign against
the inhabitants of the Vendée from 1793 or the tens of thousands of deaths
inflicted by the Italian state acting against the so-called Great Brigandage in the
Mezzogiorno in the early 1860s.208 Like Treitschke’s earlier support of Prussian
Germanization of Poles, in the twentieth century the new, interwar Polish state’s
‘Polonization’ campaigns, or the massacre, dispersal, and forced assimilation of
Kurds (‘mountain Turks’ in the Kemalist lexicon) in eastern Turkey around the
same time, were all exercises in making the nation out of heterogeneous social
elements while claiming that the nation provided warrant for the exercise.
Hence the prominent rhetoric of ‘(re-)awakening’ and ‘renaissance’ to paper
over the tension.
Elsewhere, the establishment of some law-bound ‘civilizations’ required the
eradication of potential competitors as a prerequisite of the construction project,
a sort of clearing of the decks, as in the white settlement of America and Australia.
In such cases civic nationalisms were constructed on the scorched earth of ethno-
racial destruction, which tells us something about the limits of their inclusivity.
Genocide, strages gentium in an earlier tongue, could be seen either as an expres-
sion of monadic unity or a way of trying to make monadology true. The latter
explanation would certainly explain why some genocidaires move from target
group to target group, winnowing out ever more ‘enemies’ (allegations of disloy-
alty and impurity intertwined) in some attempt to create the desired community
of common purpose. It would also explain why so many génocidaires have per-
ceived connections between outer enemies and inner enemies or fifth columns—
there actually being no metaphysical line separating one community from
another and guaranteeing the internal consistency of that which it encircles.
207 Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). The ‘Italians’ quote—‘Fatta I’ltalia, bisogna fare gli
Italiani’—has been attributed both to Massimo D’Azeglio and Ferdinando Martini.
208 On the Italian case, including discussion of the death toll, see e.g. Roberto Martucci’s pointedly
titled L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, 1855–1864 (Florence: Sansoni, 1999).
Minorities were generally imperilled and cross-border and diasporic minor-

ities more than most. Diasporas, especially the Jewish one, presented a particular
problem for Herder who liked his cultural differences to map neatly onto differ-
ent territories. Since he was primarily concerned with Europe, he gave little atten-
tion to Armenians who he saw as but transient sojourners from the Orient. He
reserved particular contempt for ‘Indian’ ‘Gypsies’ (Zigeuner) and for ‘Turks’ who
derived from ‘Turkestan’ and colonized the Balkans through the Ottoman
Empire.209 Were one to map the history of ethnic cleansing and genocide in
Eurasia in the century and a half after Herder’s death, one would note that ‘Turks’
from the Balkans and elsewhere comprised one of the major victim groups up to
the beginning of the First World War, as new nation states established themselves
and Russia expanded itself at Ottoman expense. Then, in Anatolia in the dwin-
dling Ottoman Empire the Armenians would be subjected to exterminatory vio-
lence during the First World War. Then Europe’s Romanies were the victims of
genocide in the Second World War, and not just at the hands of Nazis; like the
Shoah, the Porrajmos was conducted by a genocidal alliance of several ethnona-
tional states whose leaders enthusiastically murdered their diasporic minorities
or surrendered them for murder. As to the Jews, in the longer perspective it does
not look at all accidental that they should have been subjected to the most exten-
sive and intensive of genocidal campaigns. In monadic Christian Europe, Jews
comprised the ultimate ontological anomaly. Not only were they diasporans with
no homeland to be pushed back to, they lacked Spirit. They lacked it by the stand-
ard Christian reading, which Hamann shared, whereby they were literalists and
materialists, people of the law only.210 By extension in this misreading, they were
incapable of the internal spiritual togetherness characterizing a proper nation.
They were really an anti-nation.211
209 Karol Sauerland, ‘ “Die fremden Völker in Europa”: Herder’s unpolitische Metaphern und Bilder
zu den höchst politischen Begriffen Volk und Nation’, in Gesa von Essen and Horst Turk (eds),
Unerledigte Geschichten: Der literarische Umgang mit Nationalität und Internationalität (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2000), 57–71; Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened
Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 242–7.
210 Henri Veldhuis, Ein versiegeltes Buch: Der Naturbegriff in der Theologie J. G. Hamanns (1730–
1788) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 289 ff.
211 As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (Manheim translation, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943),
‘the Jewish “State”—which should be the living organism for preserving and increasing a race—is
completely unlimited as to territory. For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always pre-
supposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state-race’ (p. 302). Further: ‘the Jew cannot possess a
religious institution’ because ‘he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is abso-
lutely foreign to him’. Since ‘a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the convic-
tion of survival after death in some form’, it was telling that ‘the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man
for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world’ (p. 306). ‘[The Jew’s life] is
only of this world and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand
years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine’ (p. 307). The supposedly Jewish invention
of Marxism then helps to undermine authentic civilizations by stirring up class discord and, under
cover of fighting capitalism, weakening national economies (pp. 318–22). The ‘power’ supposedly
responsible for the defeats of 1918 made preparations ‘over many decades robbing our people of the
political and moral instincts and forces which alone make nations capable and hence worthy of
Hamann’s thought merits special attention, since it sowed the seeds of

Herderian linguistic-cultural relativism but in religious terms it was not at all rela-
tivist or ‘even’ pluralist. He could only get to his position on the constitutive
importance of language in group life given his assumptions about the spiritual
element of language, and those assumptions stood in contrast to what Hamann
held as simply erroneous Jewish (as well as ‘Greek’) ways of thinking and believ-
ing. As with all monadological thinking, thought about folk-spirits and ideal
inner unity stemmed from presuppositions rooted in a particular strand of
Christian thought. Any cultural doctrine that ensues from this tradition of
thought, including particular sorts of cultural relativism, only works in the
shadow of a certain metaphysics. The tradition is faulty.
Even when physical borders and institutions are well established, identities
need not be, and for all the stress on ‘positive’ integration around some ‘idea’, it is
impossible to distinguish positive from ‘negative’ integration against internal or
external otherness. Rousseau looked this fact in the face; Herder did not, con-
tending instead that ‘Each nation has its centre of happiness in itself, like every
sphere its centre of gravity.’212 Even if one distinguishes more supposedly organic
or at least ‘bottom-up’ nationalisms from those that are more obviously spon-
sored or instrumentalized from the ‘top-down’, it remains the fact that no peace-
ful coexistence between such self-constituting collectives is guaranteed because,
putting things aside like battles over scarce resource, collective standards are not
just matrices of things valued but things disvalued, scorned, anathematized.
Unless each collective has the same values, which begs the question whether they
really are different, divergent judgements of value may form the justification for
conflict (even if the conflict is ‘really’ about resource). British national identity
was forged in opposition to ‘others’: Spanish and French Catholic or Russian
Orthodox.213 When a British Navy League pamphlet of 1895 urged readers to
submerge ‘party feelings for a day; be neither Conservatives nor Liberals, but
something greater and better, be ENGLISHMEN’, no external party was men-
tioned, but it will not be ignored that the only purpose of a navy is external
engagement.214 Around the same time, the first secretary of the German Navy
League said that its purpose was to ‘emancipate large sections of the community
existence’ (p. 327). Reversing ‘racial’ erosion was the purpose of the Nazi movement. Confronting the
‘inner enemy’ went alongside the formation of a proper ‘Germanic State of a German nation’, a
‘national organism’ (p. 329).
212 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 297—emphases in original.
213 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
214 Anne Summers, ‘The Character of Edwardian Nationalism: Three Popular Leagues’, in Paul
Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (eds), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany
Before 1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), 70–87, here 77. This and the next reference I owe to an
undergraduate dissertation whose author is unknown to me because of anonymity rules.
from the spell of the political parties by arousing their enthusiasm for this one
great national issue’.215 In the First World War the unity that had previously been
sought was now proclaimed.
Had it not been for German militarism, German civilization would have been
extinguished long ago. Militarism emerged for that civilization’s protection in a
land that, like no other, had been afflicted for centuries by bands of raiders. The
German Army and the German people are one. Today this consciousness binds
in fraternity 70,000,000 Germans irrespective of education, status or party.216
Such was the view of the ninety-three German intellectuals who proclaimed
unqualified support for the Kaiserreich in a public ‘manifesto’ of 4 October 1914,
at much the same time as Salandra espoused Italian national sacro egoismo. One
of the signatories was the theologian Adolf Harnack. His former student, the
Swiss theologian Karl Barth, followed Kierkegaard’s and Overbeck’s path, rebel-
ling against the synergy of German ‘Liberal Protestantism’ with German national-
ism and arguing against any attempt to co-opt Christianity for any set of cultural
traditions. His major First World War theological statement, published in
December 1918, was Der Römerbrief, a commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans, the book Luther had described as the most important in the New
Testament. Later on, where other potential dissidents found a Protestant solution
to a Protestant problem by ‘internal emigration’, separating their inner life from
the world in which their body lived, Barth acted, becoming a founding member
of the anti-Nazi German Confessing Church.217
It is impossible to assess the precise balance of interest and identity in explain-
ing the rise of the nation-state system, though we may say with safety that the
monadological model that would depict all as shared Weltansicht and the
Hobbesian contractual model that would depict all as bare interest are both
incorrect. ‘Right or wrong, our country!’ actually hints at the ambivalence,
because it is not ‘our country cannot be wrong’. For elements of the populace
within the mainstream ‘we’ of ‘the people’ at any one moment, citizenship might
be enough, as juxtaposed with previous subject-status. In principle there was
more to be gained through citizenship than subjecthood, since governance was
still in the name of the all even if not the each, and this might be a sufficient quid
pro quo for the promotion of national loyalty above all else. Equally, and here we
move more towards the preoccupations of certain established elites, and
215 Holger Herwig, The German Naval Officer Corps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 7.
216 Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf ‘An die
Kulturwelt!’ (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996), 158.
217 Note, though, the limits of the Confessing Church’s and Barth’s position in regard of the perse-
cution and suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany: Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the
Christian Imagination (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 64–8.
particular constituencies, democracy might alter the composition of the collective’s

principles and threaten its security through the introduction of difference/schism
by, say, the articulation of class grievances or the proportional representation of
those ethnic minorities that no ‘nation state’ was without.218 One more reason,
then, that ‘national liberation’—from, say, the apparently anachronistic and, pace
Herder, unnatural Ottoman, Romanov, and Habsburg empires—and national
self-determination might ultimately be pressed much harder than the self-
determination of the individuals or subgroups within those states.
Though in nationalisms civic and ethnic the collective ‘we’ was clear in prin-
ciple with reference to values or ethnicity, this said little to the question of who in
either sort of case were the prime political constituents of the nation in practice.
The French Revolution had followed Rousseau in distinguishing between active
and passive citizens. Women were invariably in the latter category. When male
suffrage was reduced in 1795 non-taxpaying men were returned to passive status,
whence Revolutionaries of 1789 like the Abbé Sieyès had never wanted them to
graduate. Fichte reproduced the active–passive distinction, with women appro-
priately assigned.219 Revolutionary lexicon aside, the property and sex nexus
remained important across the Continent. Locke had given theoretical imprima-
tur to the facts on the ground when he identified the constituents of the political
nation in his England—and in eighteenth-century England the circle of the
enfranchised actually fell as a proportion of the total population. Alongside the
Puritan influence, Locke’s conception of propertied and thus responsible man
coloured the framing of the US constitution. So we already have some of the
explanation in place as to why nationalism, even constitutional nationalism, even
republican constitutional nationalism, had an uncertain relationship with the
individual ‘self-determination’ implied by classical political liberalism let alone
high modern democracy. Claiming to speak in the name of the people need not
be justified by greatly expanded suffrage—far less by economic democracy, given
the significance of landed, commercial, industrial, and military interests in the
‘rationalizations’ that went hand in hand with nation-state building—if the popu-
lar ‘will’ was purportedly monolithic or vested in a particular class of prime his-
torical movers.
If and when the franchise was extended, that need not mean radical change in
institutional arrangements in any country, given that workers could be conserva-
tive politically as well as socially. At the same time one could tinker a little with
the social contract, as indeed had happened during the developments in social
legislation from the late nineteenth century. Symbolic incentives (like jingoism)
218 On such questions, see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
219 Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 377.
for the maintenance of extant hierarchies were complemented by material

incentives up to rudimentary social-security arrangements. Urbanization and
industrialization necessitated expanded education, sanitation works, public
health measures, and, more generally, an enhanced role for the State in arbitrat-
ing the public interest. Franklin Roosevelt noted later on that it is rather a false
dichotomy to think of such measures as abandoning individualism for collectiv-
ism: ‘true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and
independence’.220 It is an open question as whether granting someone a new
right is acknowledging their value or appealing to their interest, or whether pro-
viding some material incentive is tantamount to bribery or a hard manifestation
of moral support. Equally, it is unclear whether showing loyalty in exchange for
protection (the very most basic contract) is instrumental calculation or a sign of
genuine solidarity.
Obviously loyalty is not peculiar to modernity or nation states, but pace Weber,
one characteristic of most modern states was the monopoly of organized violence,
which was a powerful obstacle to the pursuit of agendas that contradicted the
nationalist one—international socialism, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, had
as few divisions as famously did the pope. Again, though, the State was capable of
securing not just notional rights, but also the things to which those rights per-
tained. Trades unions and feminists found themselves beholden to states for
much these reasons, and with the advent of the First World War generally cleaved
to their respective countries. Thus the State’s legitimacy was expanded internally,
and its power consolidated. That ‘cosmopolitan’ and rather pantheistic nationalist
Mazzini appraised matters correctly. ‘Without a country you have no name, no
identity, no voice, no rights, no membership in the brotherhood of nations—you
remain just the bastards of humanity. Soldiers without a flag, Jews in a world of
Gentiles, you will win neither trust nor protection.’221
War itself can create a ‘concertina effect’, with social divisions reduced and con-
ventional distinctions blurred in furtherance of a united cause, as was the case in
Germany in 1914–15. But, as in Germany from 1916, and Russia in 1917, under
pressure of war societies can also fragment, to be put back together, if at all, by
methods that may involve extreme coercion or negative integration in the form of
scapegoating. Most societies most of the time lie between the extremes of unity
220 Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963),

181–2; Harold Perkin, ‘Individualism versus Collectivism in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A False
Antithesis’, Journal of British Studies 17/1 (1977), 105–18.
221 Quote and some contextualization from Donovan E. Smucker, Origins of Walter Rauschenbuch’s
Social Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 115–16. See also Stefano Recchia and
Nadia Urbinati (eds), A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy,
Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); a signifi-
cance of the ‘cosmopolitan’ designation is to tie it back to Kant’s universal cosmopolitanism, with the
national state the intermediary in its ability to enforce the notional rights of the individual as against
empires.
and disunity. Of modern state forms, paradoxically the strongest can be those
held together by ‘weak ties’ only, admitting a plurality of individual goals, com-
munal ends and organizations, with the ensuing gains in consent reducing the
need for coercion.222 Still, pluralism cannot shade into an infinite tolerance of
practices (tolerance of beliefs is a different thing), and no liberal theorist ever sug-
gested it could. If we take our lead from Freud and Marx as much as Leibniz or
Burckhardt, we should pay as much attention to the way that some societies hang
together despite not just differences but dissonances and do so not (only) because
of tolerance but repression. Sometimes this repression is overt and physical,
sometimes it comes in the form of carrying on as if dissonances do not exist.
The law plays an important role in carrying on despite dissonances, ‘even’ in
liberal societies where it has the uncomfortable role of dispensing justice evenly
within a social order of some degree of substantive inequality. Addressing the
grey zones of informal, reproduced privilege and discrimination is not easy
given the liberal conception of rights with its greater emphasis on formal legal,
civil, and political equality than social and economic rights. The tension between
formal equality and substantive inequality may also characterize the police’s
role, which contributes to the renowned difficulty in prosecuting police officers
for apparent breaches of the law, and the perception by parts of the community
that the police are really the servants of another part of the community. (The
police clearly have a special role; the question is on whose behalf they are held
to enact that role, and therefore what sorts of actions are held to contravene
the underlying rules of the role.) Liberal systems can be as effective at conceal-
ing asymmetric power beneath the surface of formal equality as a vulgar
Foucauldian conception of power is at removing the responsibilities of relatively
powerful people.
Consistent with formal equality considerations, in criminal courts it tends to
be the case that only ‘physicalist’ considerations like self-defence or diminished
responsibility militate against prosecution or conviction. Consistent with the
lesser regard for substantive equality, matters like significant material deprivation
and pursuant desperation cannot have the same legal salience because they bring
into question the very social system that, say, protects private property so assidu-
ously while allowing and perhaps even promoting inequality. It was Anatole
France who wrote of the ‘majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme
au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts’, the law whose sublime equality prohibits
rich and poor alike from overnighting under the bridge. One outcome of formal
equality before law in an unequal state: a vast disproportion in the numbers of
African Americans in US prisons. Great racial disparity exists not just in prosecu-
tion but also in sentencing, though neither outcome is enshrined in statute.
222 Mark S. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, American Journal of Sociology 78/6 (1973),
1360–80.
Socio-economic discrepancies might even influence unawares the interpret-

ation given to legally salient short-range factors. ‘Stand your ground’ laws and
other allowances for self-defence perforce bring into play subjective consider-
ations for the defendant (‘I ‘felt threatened’), but they themselves may relate to
objective social contexts. The perception of young black men as inherently threat-
ening, partly because of aforementioned disparities in incarceration, which in
turn reflect imbalances in social opportunity, makes it easier to get away with
claiming that one felt threatened by a black teenager and ‘had’ to shoot him for
one’s own safety. An ostensibly short-range ‘physicalist’ factor (fear) is after all
inseparable from long-range structural-cum-cultural factors, but courts have no
remit to address the latter.
The legal focus is understandable for functional and psychological reasons,
since a fully ‘contextualized’ conception of a ‘criminal’ mindset taken to its
extreme would make a nonsense not just of any meaningful penal policy but any
attribution of responsibility for humans as decision-makers. Kant’s retributive
principle of punishment respects this agency; punishment is a way of doing just-
ice in both salient senses to the capacity for responsible decision-making. Once
every aspect of character and thought had been attributed to some suprapersonal
context, there might be nothing left of the individual on which to do justice. One
would have to find some way of indicting discourses or capillaries of relational
power instead of torturers, CEOs, and police chiefs. In that case justice would not
be done to the ‘as-if ’ assumption we all share about our own moral discretion,
whether we are CEOs or assistant under-gardeners.
In order to obviate this particular problem, while continuing to do justice to
the sense of sovereign responsibility we individually feel for our behaviour, we
might, paradoxical as it might sound, do well to focus in public policy purely on
sociological explanation for transgression. Sociological explanation has as its
focus not moral exculpation of the actor but study of the social arrangements that
mean certain sectors of society produce disproportionate numbers of transgres-
sors, or—perhaps differently—of those convicted of transgression. A goal might
be to prompt policymakers into reform of those arrangements to ensure max-
imally equal distribution of the moral luck that obtains before the transgressive
act, in order that transgressors have nothing, morally speaking, to hide behind,
and in order to ensure that the polity lives up to its rhetoric of equality in a more
substantive fashion.223 The alternative is to continue tolerating the grave social
risk to, say, African Americans, which reminds us that each community is always
a certain version of a community, based on exclusions as well as inclusions, and
gradations of what is included. That is the perhaps obvious point with which this
section reaches its terminus.
223 This complements the point made about social policy and moral luck on p. 82, n. 131.
Since histories of conflict, repression, etc., have long since shown that groups
are neither windowless nor internally homogeneous, which are the two criteria of
a monad if the idea of a monad is to retain any distinct meaning, monadology
should have been laid to rest long ago. Since monadology’s description is not cor-
rect, then one might reasonably think that prescriptions for conduct based on the
description cannot be correct either, however attractive the Leibnizian desire for
harmony which those prescriptions might express. Perhaps my position is too
absolutist, and I should think more ‘realistically’ on the principle that in the mun-
dane sphere perfection is unattainable and what is to be sought instead is ‘the best
of all possible worlds’, as Voltaire’s ungenerous parody of Leibniz put it.224 Hegel
was a realist in this sense when he claimed that a certain sort of state was a condi-
tion of freedom but that there was nonetheless a price to be paid for the arrange-
ment. If we put aside the idiosyncracies of Hegel’s own vision and focus,
‘realistically’, on the idea of a trade-off in any social dispensation, then we might
nonetheless allow that the price should not be forgotten, nor that some people
and peoples have paid more of it than others.
You may think monadic thinking has shuffled off this coil. Hardly anyone uses
the word ‘monad’ certainly. Nonetheless, as we shall see in the final historical
account, History III, hand-me-down versions of monadic thought remain vital in
conceptualizing—and sometimes even structuring—our world at different levels.
A self-certifying ‘individualism’ has tightened its grip at the level of the person,
whilst collective internality remains important in terms of international relations
and some of the strongest traditions in the humanities and social sciences.
Meanwhile—and here the thread is continued into the fourth and fifth sections of
this Part of the book—even when an overarching divine unification of differing
monadic perspectives is denied in the name of an ostensibly secular cultural rela-
tivism, strong traces of the religious doctrine can remain, in negative form (eg.
pp. 239–40, 246–7).
Some of the developments in monadological thought addressed hereafter
speak to political or economic strategies. They are prescriptions rather than
descriptions. Not a few of the dispensing physicians have axes as well as medic-
aments to grind.
History III: To the Present
From the end of the Second World War new institutional arrangements emerged
with ramifications for relations between individual people, between individuals
and collectives, and between collectives. This section outlines these arrangements
224 The parody is in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759).

and addresses influential scholarly theories that share some of their connotations.
Again, the critical focus is on species of ‘individualism’, whether personal or col-
lective, and on the relationship of those individuals to more than just their ‘above’
and ‘within’ (Emerson).
The post-war globalization of the nation-state system consolidated one par-
ticularly influential ‘monadic’ level as the imperial order in Africa and Asia broke
down under the force of anti-colonial resistance and European weakness. For
some anti-colonialists, control of the State and the ideology of nationalism were
means of liberation and equality rather than nation-statehood being an end in
itself. Equally, some perceived innate problems in the concept of the nation state.
The nation-state model nonetheless entrenched itself.225 At the same time the
smallest salient monad, the individual human, was also attended to via human
rights declarations. Unsurprisingly, harmonization across the monadic level of
states has not been achieved any more than harmonization between the monadic
level of the State and that of the individual.
The equality of states remains more formal than substantive. This is partly so
despite international law: whatever the ambition towards world law as analogous
to yet higher than state law, international police forces, where present at all, issue
from among adversarial parties rather than a third superordinate body. (Even if
today forces act under the banner of NATO, the UN, or the African Union they
are still provided by particular member nation-states.) But the state of affairs also
owes something to international law, which is made by treaties but also by prece-
dents, therefore what states do, and get away with doing, is itself constitutive of
international law. In other words powerful states are at an advantage not just in
terms of strength but also in terms of norm arbitration. The balance of largely
formal equality and substantive inequality is reflected in the mechanisms of the
United Nations, where a general assembly with one vote per state was juxtaposed
with a security council whose permanent membership comprised the victors of
the Second World War plus France, i.e. some totalitarians and some of the most
rapacious imperialists of recent centuries.
Furthermore, political independence for new states, often accompanied any-
way by the enduring indirect influence of the displaced colonial power, was
swiftly followed by a choice of economic alignment to the agendas of hegemonic
states within either ideological bloc, or a walk along the tightrope of ‘non-aligned’
status. The Cold War was less a battle of freedom versus unfreedom than between
economic orders and power-brokers, though it was convenient for each side to
preach moral crusade, with the relationship of the ‘First’ and ‘Second World’
225 On for instance the early federalism of Léopold Sédar Senghor (president of Senegal 1960–80)
and the ‘departmentalization’ propounded by the Martiniquean Aimé Césaire, see Gary Wilder,
Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014); cf Samuel Moyn, ‘Fantasies of Federalism’, Dissent (Winter 2015).
powers to the ‘Third World’ reminiscent of the relationship of the ‘civilized’ to the
‘uncivilized world’ only a generation before. The claim that capitalism and
democracy (or any other form of self-determination) were twinned is a propa-
ganda artefact of the period, one given only negative, insufficient substantiation
by the obvious democratic deficit in the Eastern bloc and China. The major
North-Western powers proved no friends of self-determination or the democratic
process in the global South and East when that portended departure from
approved developmental paths and threatened to cut off important resources
from the world economic system: think of Iran in 1953 and several dozen other
successful or failed attempts at ‘regime change’ across the world during and since
the Cold War.
It is as unsatisfactory merely to attribute these interventions to US hypocrisy as
it is to ignore the manifold interventions by the USSR.226 The reason for focusing
on the US is its role as lynchpin of a capitalistic economic order that was in fact
the truly globally integrative institution during the Cold War, as beyond. However
socialist some states might be internally, they still had to compete for hard cur-
rency in the international marketplace. They could not ignore the quest for sur-
plus in their production, nor fluctuations in world markets, nor the international
rules of credit.227 ‘The market’ maintained some of the transcendent quality that
had been established across large tracts of the globe in the nineteenth century,
and the US stepped into Britain’s shoes as the holder of the ring, in roughly the
way described in International Relations ‘hegemonic stability theory’. The rhet-
orical complement to this global role was that of the USA as the ‘indispensible
nation’, the ‘universal nation’, i.e. at once the embodiment and protector of puta-
tively universal values. Such a pleasing self-assessment derived from the view of
the USA as having a divine mission—the ‘heaven’s command’ once supposedly
addressed to Britain.228 An account of the thought of the eighteenth-century
‘physiocrats’ at the national level captures the implications of the US stance as
applied to other states at many (not all) points: they ‘advocate[d] both freedom
from governmental influence with the market and the enforcement of this free-
dom by an all-powerful ruler whose self-interest is tied-up with the “right” eco-
nomic system’.229
226 Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) considers intervention by both sides.
227 Ali Mazrui, ‘Africa Entrapped’, in Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds), The Expansion of
International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 289–398, here 289, 303, and more generally on
the tension between the nation state and global capital.
228 On the ‘indispensible nation’ and its religious hinterland, Christopher J. Fettweis, The
Pathologies of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 21. ‘Heaven’s command’ is from
James Thompson’s early eighteenth-century ‘Rule, Britannia’.
229 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before
Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 98.
To see the way in which certain economic arrangements can infringe sover-
eignty in the absence of any formal political intervention we need look no further
in recent decades than the conditions attached to loans to states from inter-
national financial institutions operating according to ‘Washington consensus’
economics. The Nobel Laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz puts it thus:
We tell developing countries about the importance of democracy, but then,

when it comes to the issues they are most concerned with, those that affect their
livelihoods, the economy, they are told: the iron law of economics gives you little
or no choice [so . . .] you must cede key economic decisions, say, concerning
macroeconomic policy, to an independent central bank, almost always domin-
ated by representatives of the financial community; and to ensure that you act in
the interests of the financial community, you are told to focus exclusively on
inflation—never mind jobs or growth; and to make sure you do just that, you are
told to impose on the central bank rules, such as expanding the money supply at
a constant rate; and when one rule fails to work as has been hoped, another rule
is brought out, such as inflation targeting. In short, as we seemingly empower
individuals in the former colonies through democracy with one hand, we take it
away with the other.230
Decades before the International Monetary Fund started dispensing these pre-
scriptions, it was fundamental to US economic policy that other states should
open their markets for international commerce and their natural resources for
exploitation. Woodrow Wilson’s limited support for national self-determination
sat easily with the existence of some European empires elsewhere as long as the
latter did not place obstacles in front of the ‘open door’. Thus, for instance, US oil
companies entered ‘mandatory’ Iraq under conditions provided by British inter-
war rule there.231 The Atlantic Charter of 1941 proposed a world of states with
equal access to ‘trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for
their economic prosperity’, as if all states were capable of taking equal advantage
of this arrangement. Despite professed Anglo-American ‘respect’ for ‘the right of
all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’, the cor-
ollary of the economic aspiration was that those who did not wish to open them-
selves risked being forced open. Precise American policies varied due to Cold
War exigencies. But in principle the economic openness of others was tied in with
US narrower self-interest and a harmonious world order, which is why it could be
a condition of America’s respecting the sovereignty of other states.
As far as the Charter of the United Nations was concerned, the only condition
for respecting a state’s internal sovereignty was that the State respected the
230 Foreword to Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. xvi.

231 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 190–1.
sovereignty of other states by not invading them. For all of the human rights talk
from 1945, older and newer states were the building blocks of international order.
They, rather than anything above them, were seen as the primary guarantors of
the supposedly universal human rights of their citizens. Ultimately they had great
de facto discretion in the means by which they imposed internal order on their
people, even if the ideological ends of that internal policy might attract the inter-
est of a superpower. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was hortatory, as
was the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and
while one should not underestimate the power of aspirations to articulate norms
that may come to influence behaviour, it is telling that there was even less capacity
for enforcement of either proclamation than had been the case in the interwar
years with the League of Nations’ remit for protection of minorities in certain
states.232 The victorious Allies effectively decreed the undesirability of the forum
internum–forum externum principle of State–minority relations that was pion-
eered in the peace treaties of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries and
redeployed via the minorities protection clauses of the post-1918 peace treaties.
Thus was removed a ‘monadic’ layer between the State and individual people.
From a rights perspective it is incongruous that minority protection was down-
graded after all the violence perpetrated in the name of nationalism and ethnic
and homogeneity in the era of the Second World War. The strategic perspective
makes sense of things given the association of the minorities question with
instability and interstate war. The interwar minorities clauses had been intended
as a measure to smooth the way towards minorities’ assimilation into titular
majorities. ‘Munich’, in 1938, dealt the death blow to that arrangement: Hitler’s
claim to speak on behalf of suffering Czech Germans had provided the justifica-
tion for imperialist expansion and the cannibalization of a neighbouring state,
and it was external war, rather than the character of Nazi rule internally, that
ultimately concerned the architects of the world order. In his closing speech at the
Nuremberg trial of the major German war criminals US chief prosecutor Robert
Jackson reflected that the ‘intellectual bankruptcy and moral perversion of the
Nazi regime might have been no concern to international law had it not been util-
ized to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers’.233
At war’s end, the policy in Europe was no longer that of trying to draw borders
around national groups while providing protection in principle for minorities
within those borders, nor of relying on the mere possibility of emigration for
minorities in one country to join the titular minority in another country as in the
‘option’ provisions of the 1919–20 peace treaties. The model was that of the 1923
232 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 130–3,
141–3.
233 Kirsten Sellars, ‘Crimes Against Peace’ and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 119, emphasis Sellars’s.
Lausanne Treaty which had given international legitimation to the ethnic cleansing
of Muslims from Greece and Greek Orthodox subjects from Anatolia. People were
moved to fit new boundaries in the interests of creating more supposedly homoge-
neous populations and reducing the prospects for future irredentist disturbances
of the international peace. In quantitative terms, the main European victims of this
ethnic unmixing were ethnic Germans from beyond the German state now driven
into Germany, though many other eastern Europeans were also moved around like
chattels on a board. When these Europeans are added to the even greater numbers
of Muslims and Hindus fleeing in either direction on Indian partition around the
same time we are talking about the fates of around 27 million people.
Such realignment of people to borders was not practicable everywhere. Of the
Middle East early in the interwar period one US diplomat scorned: ‘if every group
in the world which desires independence were satisfied there would be thousands
of peanut states and the map would look more like chickenpox than Wilson ever
believed when he created [sic] the slogan of “self-determination” ’.234 After 1945
in the world as after 1918 in Europe, the process of post-imperial territorial sub-
division had to stop somewhere, even if that meant the reproduction of some
imperial dynamics on a smaller scale. Ask the animists and Buddhists of the
Chittagong Hill Tracts as they tried to fight off internal colonization by the nation
state of Bangladesh which had itself emerged in blood from quasi-colonial sub-
servience in the state of Pakistan, which had in turn emerged in the violence of
Indian ‘partition’. As this example suggests, sometimes, though rarely, new national
borders have been established to modify the territorial order established at
decolonization; more often it has been a matter of internal repression, up to and
including genocide, or, where forces are more evenly matched, struggle for control
of the State within its ‘given’ borders.
Given previous experience of imperial rule and the live possibility of neo-
imperial intervention, including at the economic level, postcolonial states were
as loud as any in defending the principle of state sovereignty and an internal free
hand. Depending on circumstances, the attitude to sovereignty could either be
universalist or particularist-relativist. Before and during decolonization aspir-
ations for independence from colonial rule had often been phrased in the univer-
salistic idiom with appeals for human rights universality at the level of the
individual person accompanying calls for collective self-determination, in a way
that harked back to nationalism’s association-by-analogy with liberalism. More
relativistic stances arose later, and had direct counterparts in academic debate.
This shift occurred as a number of postcolonial states fell prey to authoritarian
regimes from the later 1960s, and also because of the suspicion that human rights
discourse was a Trojan horse for neo-imperial agendas. Intonations of the
234 Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 192.

inviolability of local knowledge and values were a way of rejecting external

rights-based criticism and demanding respect for cultural difference.235 Neither
tendency could be said to be anathema to the stipulated principles of world
order; the UN Charter did not specify anything about the internal structure of
states, their governing philosophies, or the type of nationalism guiding national
self-determination.
Some of the arrangements outlined hitherto met with criticism in influential
trends in the Western social sciences and humanities, but those intellectual trends
are relevant here because they also replicate some of the conceptual and norma-
tive problems of elements of the set-up. We will begin with the anthropologist
Marshal Sahlins, as he focused on the relationship between global (economic)
system and culture, without considering the intercultural level. Then we will
examine other famous anthropologists whose relativistic theories imply too much
within-group homogeneity and so obscure much about intracultural relations.
Then we will move to the almost ‘anti-cultural’ prescriptions of Michel Foucault,
and the problems of that and other individualisms for the conceptualization of
interpersonal relations. In closing the section, we will try to establish some overall
impression of the relationship between individuals, states, and the global system
at the time of writing.
Looking back from 1995 on his work since the 1970s, Sahlins invoked the
Herderian origins of the concept ‘of cultures as distinct forms of life’ in oppos-
ition ‘to bourgeois-utilitarian reason’. This is a bit of a caricature of the thought
against which Herder set himself but that can pass. Sahlins reflected on a recent
history of many peoples’ ‘announcing the existence of their culture’, of a ‘marked
self-consciousness of “culture” ’, and saw this as reproducing Herder’s moment,
with particularistic culture standing against pseudo-universalistic market forces.
‘The anthropological concept of culture as a specific form of life thus emerged in
a relatively backward region [i.e. Germany], and as an expression of that com-
parative backwardness, or of its nationalist demands, as against the hegemonic
ambitions of Western Europe.’ Sahlins interpreted the burgeoning cultural self-
consciousness of recent decades likewise as a response by the ‘victims and erst-
while victims of Western domination’, a response more specifically to ‘the
planetary juggernaut of Western capitalism’. ‘Ojibway Indians in Wisconsin,
Kayapo in Brazil, Tibetans, New Zealand Maori, Kashmiris, New Guinea
Highland peoples, Zulus, Eskimo, Mongols, Australian Aboriginals, and . . .
Hawaiians: all speak of their “culture,” using that word or some close local
235 On the rights debates, Raymond Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International
Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). In the shifts Burke details there
are echoes of the interwar world in which some nationalists, disappointed at the limited realization of
‘Wilsonian’ self-determination, turned sharply away from liberal internationalism even as they main-
tained their anti-imperialism. See David Motadel, ‘The Global Authoritarian Movement and the
Revolt against Empire’, American Historical Review 124/3 (2019), 843–77.
equivalent, as a value worthy of respect, commitment and defense.’236 The Vietnam

War, with its connotations of imperialism and capitalist aggression, was influential
in Sahlin’s conception of non-Western resistance to Western domination.237 Yet
cultural destruction was not the solve preserve of Westerners, and, there being no
pure, determinant economic sphere, it was not just capitalism doing the work of
intrusion and destruction of indigenous peoples. In places like Bangladeshi
Chittagong destruction was wrought on animists and others in the name of titular
majorities with their particular cultures and desire to survive in a competitive
world, just as had been the case in the extreme example of Europe earlier in the
century. Recall, too, Herder’s decided ambivalence towards diasporic minorities:
how do they feature in a vision like that of Sahlins?
Sahlins’s work had been shaped by the theory of structuralism, whose
anthropological variant attained its greatest influence in the third quarter of the
twentieth century, at precisely the time of the global consolidation of the nation-
state system. The father of anthropological structuralism was the avowed anti-
imperialist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). While structuralism differed from
historicist monadology, leaning ultimately more to the tradition of Erklären—
generalizing model-building—than Verstehen—hermeneutic understanding—
there are key similarities. As German defeat in 1945 discredited a great deal of
obviously German-derived thought, structuralism, with its apparent francophone
pedigree, stepped into the shoes of monadic doctrines. Idealist conceits about
nations as expressions of divine ‘mind’ or Geist were replaced by more secular
ideas of collective representations, or Bloch’s mentalités, (pp. 21–22) which left
unaddressed the questions of how to conceptualize culture-internal disagree-
ments, present-changing agency, and, ultimately, within-group politics. Again,
the problem of this sort of thinking is that it implies too great a homogeneity
within the culture in question.
Strictly, structuralism is a purely formal doctrine. Structuralist linguistics
posits that meanings are constructed not by reference to a world outside language
but by differences internal to language—be the differences phonetic (matters of
sound) or semantic (matters of meaning as in left–right, night–day)—and by syn-
tax, ie. the placing of words in relation to other words. Anthropological structur-
alism expanded this conception of meaning-construction to non-linguistic
realms like mores, morality, and aesthetics. Thinking to the deeper German heri-
tage, Lévi-Strauss accepted the description of his structuralism as ‘Kantianism
without the transcendental subject’.238 There are indeed parallels at the formal
level between Kant’s ‘categories’ of the understanding and Lévi-Strauss’s idea of
236 All quotes from Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12–14.
237 See ‘In the Absence of the Metaphysical Field: an Interview with Marhsall Sahlins’, Exchange
(2006) online at http://ucexchange.uchicago.edu/interviews/sahlins.html.
238 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 11.
the basic structures shared by minds ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ alike, as they mediated
nature to create culture. Where Kant speculated to gain insight into the categor-
ies, Lévi-Strauss inferred them from formal similarities amongst otherwise very
different cultures. For Kant there was ultimately one true reason available to any
and all rational individuals. For Lévi-Strauss rationalities vary with communities.
His formalism related to the universal, which permits the creation of a value-
neutral scientific metalanguage of study, and implies equality at the formal level,
but on the content and evaluation of different meaning and value systems the
structural anthropologist is entirely relativist. Indeed, when we compare structur-
alism’s relativizing logic to the logic of monadology, we see that structuralism
completes the step begun by Herder as he moved away from Hamann’s religious
concepts. Travelling further backwards along the same intellectual chain,
Marcel Hénaff is surely correct to characterize Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism as
‘Leibnizianism without divine understanding’.239 Where in Leibniz’s thought
lower monads provided differing perspectives on something above, in structural-
ism there was no substantive, higher reconciliation, only formal similarities. As in
Herderian monadic thinking, anthropological structuralism concerns wholes;
both doctrines are internalist in their consideration of order, and structuralism’s
internal oppositions, relativized to a coherent system, are the architecture of the
whole, not evidence against it. Or, to flip things round, monadic culturalism eas-
ily accommodates structuralist propositions. ‘Shortcoming and virtue always
dwell together in one human hut’, Herder wrote, and ‘good and evil are only rela-
tional terms’.240
Geertz’s later symbolic anthropology has much the same holistic connotations,
which often equates to anthropology with the politics removed and an implied
within-group homogeneity at many levels. Consider his famous essay on the sym-
bolism of the Balinese cockfight. He claimed extravagantly that the event
embodied ‘almost every level of Balinese experience . . . animal savagery, male
narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice
. . . [and binds] them into a set of rules, . . . a symbolic structure in which . . . the
reality of their inner affiliation can be intelligibly felt’. The assertion captures
elements of anthropologist Christopher Herbert’s thinking on ‘wholeness’, Ruth
Benedict’s conception on ‘cultural wholeness’, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s view of
the Azande people’s ‘web of belief in which every strand depends upon every
other strand’.241 While structuralist anthropology has syntactics (word relation-
239 Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 109.
240 Herder, Philosophical Writings, 295, and also 294; Michael Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of
Modernity (New York: Continuum, 2010), 59. On Burke and Montesquieu, Charles Edwyn Vaughan,
Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau (1925; New York: Russell &
Russell, 1960), 299 ff.
241 All cited in Li, ‘Marshal Sahlins and the Apotheosis of Culture’, 217–19.
ship) as its paradigm, the paradigm of Geertzian symbolic anthropology is

semantics, or semiology (the meaning of signs). Nonetheless what Jacques
Derrida said of Lévi-Strauss—that his social systems appear as if all having fallen
into place simultaneously, without regard to past and ongoing processes—might
be said of Geertz as he described ‘man [as] an animal suspended in webs of
significance’.242 Programmatic Geertzian statements included comprehending
‘what the devil they [ie. inhabitants of other societies] think they are up to’, and
describing data as ‘really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of
what they and their compatriots are up to’. Yet since he observed that ‘culture is
public because meaning is’, and so meaning could be divined by ‘reading’ public
practices as one would a text, one could cut out the middleman, which is the
route to portraying people as but pedantic followers of a given cultural script,
with ‘culture’ the only actual agent. Geertz owed an interpretative debt to Dilthey,
who in turn felt that hermeneutic techniques could lead to understanding people
of the past better, in some ways, than they understood themselves, but like many
historians Dilthey had no other way of approaching (dead) people than through
their meaning-laden objectifications. Not so fieldwork anthropology which, in
the words of the anthropologist Handelman, ‘is unlike any of the humanities and
other social sciences in that it is not a text-mediated discipline in the first place.
Consequently, it is the sole discipline that struggles with the turning of subjects
into objects.’243
The difficulty of reconciling holistic cultural interpretation with the realities of
social schism and the present-changing capacity of political agency is illustrated
in Geertz’s engagement with the massacre of around half a million Indonesians in
1965. They were killed by fellow Indonesians on the basis of their actual or sup-
posed association with far-left politics. The shortcoming in Geertz’s approach is
accentuated here because the massive, ethno-religiously diverse archipelago com-
prising Indonesia would seem not to admit of any monadic characterization.
Geertz himself repeatedly emphasizes diversity, claiming that ‘it has been the
refusal, at all levels of the society, to come to terms with [diversity] that has
242 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 5; Aletta Biersack, ‘Local Knowledge, Local History’, in
Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1989), 72–96, here 80, which also problematizes Geertz’s claim. Derrida passage from Jacques Derrida,
Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2005), 367–9. Further on the problems of
this ahistorical approach, see Mark Hobart, ‘As They Like It: Overinterpretation and Hyporeality in
Bali’, in Dilley (ed.), The Problem of Context, 105–44, esp. 112–13.
243 Geertz’s ‘what the devil’ cited and scrutinized in Vincent P. Pecora, ‘The Limits of Local
Knowledge’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, 1989), 243–76.
Handelman quote and Geertz quotes on constructions on culture/meaning as public cited in
Katherine E. Hoffman, ‘Cultures as Texts: Hazards and Possibilities of Geertz’s Literary/Literacy
Metaphor’, in Susan Slymovics (ed.), Clifford Geertz in Morocco (London: Routledge, 2013), 97–110,
here 97–100. Further on interpretative problems in Geertz, especially concerning the viewpoints of
those studied, Biersack, ‘Local Knowledge’, 79 and Hobart, ‘As They Like It’. On the general problems
of Geertian understandings of the relations of ‘texts’ to ‘contexts’, Levi, ‘I pericoli del Geertzismo’.
impeded Indonesia’s search for effective political form’, and in many ways this
case does shed important light on the discontents of the globalization of the
nation-state system with its drive for homogeneity. Nonetheless both of the key
elements of crude monadology are present in Geertz’s essay: windowlessness and
the presumption of internal congruity of perspective in relevant respects. One of
the striking things is how little attention Geertz pays to outside forces, as if adher-
ing to Leibniz on the lack of direct causal impact of one monad on another. One
would not guess from his account the role of international Cold War politics: the
USA supported the military and political ringleaders of much of the violence, and
had previously supported an attempted coup against the ‘guided democracy
regime’ of President Sukarno, whose experiment in holding the ring between
Westernizer ‘developmentalists’, Islamic political forces, and communists was
brought to such a bloody end in 1965. Geertz is certainly interested in ‘outside’
ideologies, and insofar as he provides an explanation for the massacres (obvious
causes are absent, with major agents like the military unnamed) it is in the form
of Indonesian rejection of such ideologies—or at least rejection of one of them,
namely Marxism, since capitalism subsequently flourished. Interestingly, the pri-
mary sociocultural tendencies that Geertz sees as doing the rejecting are them-
selves testament to internal heterogeneity. These forces are named as ‘disbelief
and disorder’, ‘dissensus, ambivalence, and dis-orientation’. Nonetheless for
Geertz this is still ‘indigenous’, ‘Indonesian’ dissensus (etc.), which still admits of
discussion under the rubric ‘Indonesian culture’. That the fundaments of monad-
ology remain in place is highlighted by Geertz’s concluding lines—the aforemen-
tioned quote from Burckhardt on the impossibility of evaluating the ‘character’,
the ‘conscience’ of a people, whose ‘defects have another side, where they reappear
as peculiarities or even virtues’.244 Yet we are not dealing with a singular ‘people’
here but rather a large number of individual people murdered by a large number
of other people in an attempt to entrench a particular ideology of social cohesion
and development, and ultimately, in the long run, to create a particular
‘Indonesian culture’. (As to Burckhardt, for all the relativistic overtones of his cul-
tural holism, he had views developing from the same basis as Herder’s attitude
towards Jews. Indeed Burckhardt’s opposition to Jewish emancipation in
Switzerland would prevent Jews being considered a proper part of the relevant
‘people’ to begin with.245)
The difference was noted earlier between today’s neo-historicism and classical
nineteenth-century historicism: many historians today have a more absolute
sense of difference across time culture as well as across place culture. A sense of
244 See ‘The Politics of Meaning’, in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 311–26, quotes from 315,
318, 325, 326. My interpretation of Geertz on the massacres has been shaped by Pecora, ‘The Limits of
Local Knowledge’.
245 Richard Franklin Sigurdson, Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004), 147–9.
temporal difference was not at all absent from Ranke or Droysen, but they had a
sense of cultural unity-amidst-flux. Not so that large number of intellectuals
under the influence of anyone from Marx and the classical economists (who
despite their different inflections emphasized economic epochs related to chan-
ging modes of production) to classical sociology (‘traditional’ community versus
‘modern’ society) to postmodernism (which is parasitic upon certain assump-
tions of classical sociology) to theorists of the State (the nation state versus abso-
lutism or feudalism). Thomas Kuhn’s blockbuster The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1961) achieved much the same thing for the History of science with
his consideration of scientific paradigms that dominated for long periods before
being overthrown by others. At around the same time Kuhn shot to fame, one of
the best known and most rigid historical periodizations emerged from Michel
Foucault’s early work on ‘epistemes’. In one definition, an episteme is ‘the system
of concepts that defines knowledge for a given intellectual era’.246 The similarity is
clear with the underlying generative grammar of structural linguistics and the
formal subterranean structures of structural anthropology. Periodically, in an
‘epistemological rupture’—the concept is that of Foucault’s influence Gaston
Bachelard—the system is replaced wholesale by another system, meaning that we
move from a Renaissance to a Classical then Modern episteme. Foucault’s ‘archae-
ological’ approach to the History of knowledge indicates the layering process
here, as the shared basic assumptions of an ‘era’, within a particular civilization,
shape a host of knowledge-claiming activities much more than the diachronic
internal development of any one such activity over longer periods of time. All of
this Foucauldian theorizing gave a harder, scientistic edge to the sorts of things
that Romantic scholars of art had been intimating for over a century as they
mused to the effect that
Each epoch of history . . . had its distinctive institutions. Men were molded and
remolded by these changing social forms. Thus men could not be regarded as
the same throughout history. The peculiar institutions and the corresponding
psychology of each period gave rise to different styles and standards of art. The
merits of each artistic style were relative to the prevailing social institutions.247
As it happens, Foucault’s epistemes have some of the same problems as the

monadic cultural thought examined above: specialist scrutiny has revealed het-
erogeneity within the supposed boundaries of Foucault’s epistemic epochs, and
some continuity of thought across those boundaries.248 Nonetheless, the hard
246 Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 9.
247 Wolfenstein, ‘The Social Background of Taine’s Philosophy of Art’, 337.
248 Critics including Ian Maclean, ‘Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian
Counterblast’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59/1 (1998), 149–66, and those cited in José Guilherme
temporally-contextualizing, often relativizing neo-historicist spirit from which

Foucault fed and to which he contributed is alive and well in the human sciences.
The question remains as to how far to drive neo-historicist division and sub-
division beyond the level of ‘culture’ or ‘episteme’, because logically the process
could go on ad infinitum, well beyond how someone’s precise circumstances
shaped their identity or perspective on Thursday morning as opposed to
Wednesday night. Foucault himself contributed to this process of subdivision
with his later concept of power whereby the ‘subject’ is produced at the contin-
gent meeting point of a particular combination of discourses. And given
Foucault’s academic influence as the latest in a long line of hard contextualizers, it
is more than noteworthy that when he moved to prescriptive mode, away from
his critical descriptions of the conditions of thought and the workings of power,
he reinforced individualistic tendencies that already had a strong hold in the cul-
ture from which he sprung.
Foucault’s individualism is anything but ‘Protestant’ in the sense that it does
not stem from an intellectual rejection of structuralist-type thinking—even as he
attempted to surpass structuralism he was clearly influenced by it—but it coheres
with a dislike of the implications of structuralist-type insights. Let us hypothesize
that the moral and political attractions of structuralism were strongest for those
who defined themselves against colonialism and externally intrusive behaviour,
while opposition to its connotations was more attractive for those defining them-
selves against totalitarianism and the internally intrusive state. The distinction
is purely heuristic, thus not watertight in practice. In elementary terms, anti-colonial
critiques attacked civilizational hierarchies, their supporting thought-systems,
and the drive to control ‘others’ beyond the metropole. The main beneficiaries of
anti-colonial critiques were non-Westerners who could then determine their own
futures according to their own lights. They, and some anti-imperial Westerners
too, applauded the ‘equalizing’ or in fact relativizing implications of structural-
ism. Anti-totalitarian critiques, conversely, sought to interrogate the pathology of
specific institutional and philosophical tendencies that had manifested them-
selves most extremely within the West, prior to the horrors of Maoist China from
the later 1950s and Cambodia from 1975 to 1978: tendencies that sought to con-
trol the minds of those already under the rule of the totalitarian regime. The main
beneficiaries of these critiques in the first instance would be Westerners who were
enjoined to reject external conditioning in the name of liberation. Foucault
falls more into the category of thought shaped by anti-totalitarianism than anti-
colonialism, even though his analyses rarely focus on totalitarian regimes and are
concerned with what had been considered mainstream modern European social
development, especially in ‘rationalist’ France but also under strands of social
Merquior, Michel Foucault (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 27, 29.
For analogous criticisms, see Derrida, Writing and Difference, 368.
and economic liberalism. Yet whatever the critiques he seemed to have applied to
neo-liberalism, some of his leanings, especially in his later career, are neo-liberal
as well as being libertarian and in some modified sense liberal.249
Foucault’s particular brand of individualism brings him closer to the existen-
tialist Jean-Paul Sartre than is generally thought, whatever their different relations
to Marxism. True, Foucault replaced Sartre’s call for ‘authenticity’ with one for
‘self-creation’, but it is not clear that these cash out differently in practice, espe-
cially since one of Sartre’s most famous formulations was to reverse the Platonic
hierarchy of essence and ‘mere’ existence. Existence, Sartre claimed, comes before
essence, which meant a prioritization of ongoing choice and responsibility. Nor is
it clear how different late Foucault’s ‘self-creation’ is than the ‘experiments in liv-
ing’ that John Stuart Mill advocated.250 Elements of all three of these men’s
thought are foreshadowed by Aristotle’s injunction to shape one’s hexis by praxis,
which coheres with a more general intellectual turn to virtue ethics in post-war
occidental moral philosophy. And at a less rarefied level, we ought not ignore the
cross-over of Foucault’s performative agenda with the general antinomianism of
1960s youth counterculture, enshrined in a poster of Paris’s 1968 May days: ‘it is
forbidden to forbid’.251 Overall, in elements of his lifestyle and his prescriptions
Foucault exemplifies what the historian of morality Rubin calls a ‘morality of self-
fulfilment’.252 Yet according to the distinction between morality and ethics stipu-
lated earlier (p. 141) in Foucault’s case at least what we are actually talking about
is an ethics of self-fulfilment rather than a morality of same. After all, the self
rather than the ‘other’ is still the point of departure and reference, as in Foucault’s
‘technologies of the self ’ and his rapport à soi, or relationship to oneself.253
Like philosopher Alan Gewirth,254 Rubin argues that ‘moralities’ of self-fulfilment,
as they reject higher causes like raison d’état, also rethink relations to ‘others’ who
would before have been seen as supporters of opposing causes. They create the
potential for imagining a broader community of obligation of the sort recently
expressed in heightened internationalism or, better, post-nationalism. In principle
this philosophy is unlike classical liberalism with its conception of the other as a
249 On neo-liberalism, and this despite Foucault’s renowned work on governmentality and mic-
ropolitics, see Daniel Zamora (ed.), Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016);
Michael C. Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed,
1976–1979’, Modern Intellectual History 6/3 (2009), 539–68. When invoking Foucault’s liberalism I am
thinking of classically liberal causes like prison-reform, as well, of course, as his obvious interest in
self-determination, however characterized.
250 Anthony Kwame Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007),
18–19 on Sartre and Foucault, 142 and 147 on Mill. On similarities between Sartre and Foucault, Ian
Hacking, ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’, Economy and Society 33/3 (2004), 277–302,
here 288.
251 On the poster and cultural antinomianism, Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London: Joseph,
1994), 332.
252 Edward L. Rubin, Soul, Self, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), ch. 3.
253 Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 223 ff., 263, 269 ff.
254 Alan Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
limiting influence on my liberties, and it might even lead to the realization that
self-fulfilment can only really be attained in mutually fulfilling relationships. Yet
questions must still remain about the thickness of the sense of obligation that can
be elicited. As for the specific dimensions of Foucault’s thought, whatever his
claims that he was not just validating individualism in his emphasis on self-
styling, he provided little substantiation for his claim that care for others would
follow from the practice of ‘care of the self ’.255 It is by no means obvious that it
should. When praising justice as perfect virtue ‘because its possessor can practice
his virtue towards others and not merely by himself ’, Aristotle noted that ‘there
are plenty of people who can behave uprightly in their own affairs, but not when
they come to deal with others’.256 Nevertheless, Foucault wrote: ‘Care for others
should not be put before the care of oneself. The care of the self is ethically prior
in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior.’257 It is no doubt dam-
nably unfair to pair this claim with one of Margaret Thatcher’s around the same
time that ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good
intentions; he had money as well.’258 The serious point is that, as had been true
earlier (pp. 168–9), the romantic individualism of which Foucault and significant
elements of later twentieth-century counterculture were offshoots did not pro-
vide much of a bulwark against economic individualism, now turbocharged by
neo-liberalism, and in some ways dovetailed with it, as the ‘cultural Left’ enjoyed
significant success in the same societies in which the economic Right
prospered.259
Whatever the laudable concerns about power and domination that led Foucault
to his conclusion about self and others,260 the reasoning is debatable. There is at
least one important sense in which it is not at all obvious that the relationship one
has to oneself is prior to the relationship one has with others. This is the sense
touched on in Plato’s Alcibiades in discussion of the reflective pupil, and analysed
by Fichte’s consideration of Anerkennung, ‘recognition’, in which one only appre-
hends oneself in relationships (pp. 188–9). The concept of recognition was devel-
oped from phenomenological principles in accordance with a recognizably Jewish
ethics of obligation to ‘the other’, and in rejection of Fichtean nationalism, by
Foucault’s older contemporary the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
255 ‘Care of the Self ’ being the subtitle of the third volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. On
care for others, see Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 287 ff. and 271 on his claim that this is not
just what his interviewer called a ‘version of our self-absorption’.
256 Aristotle, Ethics, 142 (bk V, ch. 1). 257 Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 287.
258 Margaret Thatcher, interview for London Weekend Television Weekend World, 6 January 1980.
259 e.g. Samuel H. Beer, Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions of Collectivism (New York:
Norton, 1982); Prince and Riches, ‘The Holistic Individual’. On Foucault as a new sort of Romantic,
see Quentin Skinner (ed.), The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge
260 On those concerns, see Paul S. Chung, The Hermeneutical Self and an Ethical Difference:
Intercivilizational Engagement (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2012), 172–3.
(1906–95).261 Furthermore, while some have attributed significant political

connotations to this element of Foucault’s thought, Foucault himself was more
hesitant.262 Indeed this titan of the postmodern ‘Left’ has no social or political
theory to propound, and most of what he implies about the State is negative, which
is a pity since as well as witnessing the most destructive state behaviour to date,
the twentieth century also provided the best-developed intimations of a state that
was more than just the enforcement arm of some particular class interest.
Where it existed, the more representative state came under increasing pressure
in the final quarter of the twentieth century with the rise of ‘neo-liberal’ econom-
ics. Especially but not only in the Anglo-Saxon states the ‘third way’ accepted
much of the new economic orthodoxy. New conservatives—different to their
patrician predecessors—and third-wayers were primarily separated by the latter’s
social liberalism, which met with significant success in the removal of formal bar-
riers to emancipation on a number of fronts. Nonetheless, as with burgeoning
rights discourse that tended to favour civic and political over social and economic
rights, such emancipation only had a limited impact on informal structural obs-
tacles to substantive, especially economic equality, and did little to counteract the
atomizing logic of the prevailing economic doctrine with its own vast hinterland.
Some distilled spirit of The Wealth of Nations was hived off from the concepts of
obligation and government-enforced justice embodied in Smith’s earlier Theory of
Moral Sentiment. The ‘invisible hand’ remained but not Smith’s ‘impartial specta-
tor’ who might restrain the exercise of naked greed. Neo-liberal economics prod-
uced a ‘social’ theory that society really was nothing more than acquisitive
individual behaviour multiplied. In 1997 the economist and Republican US
House Majority Leader Dick Armey pronounced that ‘markets punish immoral-
ity’, which works if one equates that which is immoral with that which is antithet-
ical to market norms and confirms that anyone who fails by the rules of the
market is morally deficient. This indicates the colonization of the social by the
economic, rather than the utilization of the economic by the social for the social
once the social had been freed from the State.263
So what is the relation now between the global market system, the national
state, and the individual person? We ought not conclude that the rise of multi-
national corporations and borderless finance renders the State marginal, any
more than the rise of mercenaries makes armies redundant. Even if we only say
261 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
262 Chung makes the positive claim in The Hermeneutical Self, 172–3. On the underdeveloped
political element of his salient thought, see Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 294. For an analy-
sis of the political and moral shortcomings of his theory of care in light of such political and moral
claims as Foucault does make for it, see Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the
World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 34–9. See also Behrent, ‘Liberalism without
Humanism’.
263 On Smith and Armey, Don Erler, Lone Star State of Mind (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002),
75–6.
that the State is instrumentalized by greater powers for the coercion of labour and
protection of property, the fact that it is a useful instrument is itself telling, as is
the fear of the vacuum created by ‘failed states’. But there is more to be said.
Genuinely global, fully State-transcending economic integration, while in the
interests of a genuinely free market logic, would actually not be in the interest of
tax-haven users or multinationals who benefit from the race to the bottom in
terms of competing State tax rates and labour costs. In any case we know that
states remain vital to the making of markets, by investing in infrastructure and
‘human capital’ and by appropriate legislation regarding property rights, and to
compensate for market failures. And their very existence as vertical subdivisions
of humanity hinders horizontal solidarity with/of the exploited. It is also in the
interests of richer states and economic alliances of states to maintain some of the
circumstances that conduce to very different national GDP rates, as they maxi-
mise prosperity for at least some domestic constituencies while explaining any
reduction in material fortune by reference to the nature of interstate economic
competition at which one must simply become better.
If statespeople can often appear to be little more than conduits of corporate
power, they can also portray themselves as defenders of the people against said
power—or at least against migrants who might compete with the people for jobs
and threaten the culture, or against assorted ‘enemies within’ as well as without.
The ploy of negative integration by scapegoating confirms that patriotism can be
the last resort of the scoundrel (in more conceptual terms, the identity card is
played against select ‘others’ to enhance solidarity among the ‘we-group’) but its
success is not thereby explained. Some of the reasons for its success were outlined
in the History II section, but even if, given the spread of ‘individualist’ consumer-
ism, states cannot get away as frequently as before with claims to embody values,
they can still claim to be the guarantor of certain things that are valued. Above all
today in the West that seems to mean a technocratic commitment to economic
growth and, beyond dwindling social security, security of property and actual
physical security.
The currently hegemonic ‘securitization’ agenda, in Barry Buzan’s term, was
partly anticipated by Jacob Burckhardt.264 As well as sounding post-ideological,
which all the most successful ideologies do, it is wonderfully subjective, because
who can gainsay someone else’s feeling insecure? And this is before we get to
iterations of the security agenda like ‘resource security’, which forestall equitable
distribution of finite, diminishing resources between states and peoples, and in a
neat circularity turn the desperate into potential security threats. As we continue
to turn the planet into a second Mars through climate change and environmental
264 Barry Buzan, Oly Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 23ff; Jacob Burckhardt, ‘On Fortune and Misfortune in History’, in
Meyerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time, 273–90, here 279.
spoliation we are likely to see the production of many more refugees and of the
accompanying ‘fortress’ plans to keep them away from ‘our’ doors. This is no
approximation to the monadological ideal that Leibniz entertained.
The logic of arrangements is that states compete with states and individuals
with individuals even while the image is that individuals and states enjoy the
negative liberty that permits ‘self-determination’ according to one’s own lights.
The arrangement is given a gloss of harmonizing transcendence at national and
global levels via claims of trickle-down economics, comparative advantage, and
even wealth convergence. Of course the economic ‘game’ is not a zero-sum under-
taking and it would be absurd to ignore the material benefits that it has brought
about. Nonetheless, benefits are spread in vastly unequal measures, and this
within states as well as between them.265 A lesson of political economy as of
psychology is that collectives and individuals are as concerned about relative
standing as absolute gain—none of these entities actually being windowless
monads whose opinion of themselves is entirely centred in themselves.
Moving Beyond ‘Their Own Terms’
This section contrasts internalist conceptions of morality with relational concep-

tions, arguing for the superior empirical foundation of the assumptions upon
which the relational conception rests. To make the contrast clear it helps to sum-
marize the problems of that internalist model which we have called ‘monadic’,
remembering of course that Leibniz should not be held responsible for all of the
iterations of the model.
As its name indicates, monadic thinking is concerned with oneness, whether of
the individual human, the linguistic-cultural community, or the entirety of spir-
itual existence. From the perspective of the smallest significant monad, let us say
the person looking outward/upward, different monadic levels appear as widening
concentric circles of identity. From the perspective of larger monads looking
inward, the ‘relationship’ of the smaller monads is something akin to cells in a
honeycomb, each harmoniously coexisting with adjacent cells, at most being
influenced by its neighbours in some unspecified but basically non-intrusive
sense. Insofar as this model addresses change, it is change roughly analogous to
the way that genes shape attributes, i.e. from within. If the monadological model
is to work, descriptively and normatively, it can only do so if it works evenly, all
265 It will also be noted that the states that achieved the most formidable economic growth in the
later twentieth century, primarily in eastern Asia, have worked on neo-mercantilist principles rather
than accepting Washington consensus doctrine. Economically illiberal China’s growth in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century has been responsible for the bulk of global success in recent
decades in bringing people out of poverty.
the way up, from the lowest monad to the highest and most completely inclusive,
such that particular differences at one level are resolved at the next level above.
Looking ‘downwards’, it is no good if smaller monads have to be coerced into
accepting the broader arrangements within which they are situated. The same is
the case, now looking ‘upwards’ from the people/State, if monadology stops at
some supranational universal like the Umma or the ‘civilized world’, because then
there are still elements whose difference cannot be reconciled in a higher unity. In
that event we are in the realms of exclusionary inclusion. ‘Free trade’ blocs only
promote free trade from within; externally, they are protectionist. Alliances of
countries presuppose countries not in the club. Leibniz fell into this pattern, at
once criticizing Louis XIV’s disruptions in Europe and his failure to direct his
martial energies outside Christendom, ‘against the barbarians’, i.e. the
Ottomans.266 The Westphalian ‘principle’ of non-intervention and the just war
innovations of the period did not apply outside Europe; norms of war-conduct
were likewise restricted. Apart from the extension of European exceptionalism to
lands of white settlement in the wider world, the situation largely endured into
the twentieth century. Indeed, it is unclear that ‘we’ have yet escaped from these
prejudicial presumptions. A variation on exclusionary inclusion is the tradition of
acknowledging a higher unity, such as ‘humanity’, and purporting to act in its
name whilst crushing parts of it.
The precepts of liberal economics and liberal political theory have the individ-
ual person as the basic actor, while international relations and culturalist thought
focus upon the State and the nation respectively, and culture and nation are sup-
posedly brought together in the nation state. The most influential forms of moral
relativism prioritize cultural ‘contexts’ over others. The pre-eminent and mostly
German founders of the modern study of culture can also lay claim to being the
founders of cultural relativism. It is no paradox that German intellectual tradi-
tions were later implicated in the destruction of cultures and their peoples,
because while relativism is often invoked in an irenic sense, it can also have
aggressive-defensive expression. It is a matter of historical contingency which
element is emphasized.
To illustrate one extreme potentiality of relativist thinking, let us turn to the
sense of ineradicable difference that Nazis perceived in the Jews. Put aside some
of Hitler’s more overtly religious or mystical utterances and contemplate the likes
of the senior civil servant in the Nazi interior ministry, Wilhelm Stuckart, who
claimed in the late 1930s that Jews were different but not inferior, whilst of course
vigorously persecuting them.267 Stuckart’s position is not incompatible with
266 Simon Kow, China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 87.
267 Mark Roseman, ‘Beyond Conviction?’, in Frank Biess, Mark Roseman, and Hanna Schissler
(eds), Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 83–103, here 95.
relativism, to which the next section devotes sustained attention. Not a huge
distance ideologically from Nazism was Benito Mussolini, who averred that
If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the
bearers of an objective, immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic
than Fascist attitudes and activity . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of
equal value, that all ideologies are mere fiction, the modern relativist infers that
everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to
enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.268
Thus does the monad become the antinomian, with relativism its sword against
others and its shield against judgement. Whatever the difference in temper,
Mussolini’s logic is not so very different to Jacob Burckhardt’s reasoning that ‘the
people of Europe can maltreat, but happily not judge one another’.269 It is an open
question as to whether that ‘heroic realist’, the SS’s Werner Best, was closer to
Mussolini or Burckhardt when claiming that ‘in times of conflict we will of course
pursue the vital interests of our people even to the extent of annihilating the
opponent—but without the hatred and contempt of any value judgement’.270 It is
not reassuring that maltreatment through annihilation need not be accompanied
by value judgement, but the case shows shows that relativism can be co-opted for
‘heroic realism’ as much as for more peaceable agendas. Best also felt, by the way,
that ‘We can respect even those whom we fight and whom we may have to
exterminate’.271
We need little more than Mussolini’s words to conclude that groups cannot—
whether directly or through the agendas of their internally legitimate leaders—be
the only arbiters of the rectitude of their actions any more than can individuals,
because they do not exist in a state of isolation any more than in a state of abso-
lute unity. The idea of a ‘we’ or ‘our values’ presupposes an idea of a ‘them’ and
‘their values’, quite as much as, in Fichte’s account, the idea of an I presupposes
the idea of a not-I. We cannot effectively say that a belief in one’s own, or one’s
religious community’s or State’s illumination/predestination/righteousness plus
the power to realize one’s agendas renders the agendas beyond criticism, lest we
arrive at a modified version of the obviously faulty doctrine ‘might makes right’.
The modification is that ‘might is right if it believes itself so’. Assuming that the
we-group will always be happy with its own arrangements if it is tightly enough
defined (by whom—its most powerful ‘representatives’, its ‘active citizens’, its
sympathetic historians?), then adopting this position has the peculiar corollary
268 Quoted in Maria Baghramian, Relativism (London: Routledge, 2005), 117.

269 Burckhardt, Civilization, 271.
270 Herbert, ‘Ideological Legitimation’, 105; Roseman, ‘Beyond Conviction?, 92.
271 Roseman, ‘Beyond Conviction?’, 93.
that the only people who are qualified meaningfully to criticize those arrange-
ments are the ones who already support them. As with matters of the individual
interior, the only way that the collective interior can be left to legislate for itself is
in matters that are solely interior. In the unlikely event that Volk-spirits exist,
they, like human souls, cannot be meaningfully evaluated in this world, but any
action that is mandated by the bearer of the collective Geist/soul is a candidate for
external evaluation.
It is eminently understandable why, when confronted with imperialists’ asser-
tions of their own moral superiority, the victims of imperialism, or those
Westerners who purport to speak for the victims, might propound relativism in
moral self-validation (though we have seen that just as frequently anti-imperialists
have used the language of universalism in their resistance). Equally, however, it is
often convenient for elements on both ‘sides’ to inflate criticism across cultures to
a zero-sum game, because that is a good way of rallying everyone to the flag,
silencing internal criticism. Thereby a particular interpretation of a culture is pro-
moted to a position of internal pre-eminence and its proponents promoted as the
only face of the culture presented to the external antagonist. Every sphere of life
within the society is tightly interrelated, it is claimed: one understands nothing
unless one understands the whole, so considering the parts without ability to con-
sider the whole issues in error; and when the whole is viewed as self-sufficient and
independent, then there is after all no means of judging the whole. If for
Burckhardt and Geertz judgement was beyond human ken, for that bestselling
interwar philosopher of History Oswald Spengler it was a highly subjective matter
that properly belonged to the aesthetic not the moral realm. A society may sanc-
tion practices like chattel slavery, which look wrong to Us, but one may not pro-
nounce on that because the same seed that produced the institution may also have
produced other institutions eminently conducive to human wellbeing. Herder
coined a ‘principle of displaced alternatives’ to explain the inevitable losses as well
as benefits entailed in any ‘decision’. While this sounds like the economist’s con-
cept of ‘opportunity cost’, Herder could in fact use the language of evaluation to
argue the impossibility of evaluation. At the individual as at the societal level, the
different gestalt configurations of human life that existed before and after the
decision were matters for empathetic understanding only.272 That elucidator of
the ‘spirit of the laws’, Montesquieu, warned against measures that might lead to
changing ‘the general spirit of a nation’. ‘If the character is good, what difference
do a few faults make? One could constrain its women, make laws to correct their
mores and limit their luxury, but who knows whether one would not lose a cer-
tain taste that would be the source of the nation’s wealth and a politeness that
272 F. M. Barnard, ‘Self-Direction: Thomasius, Kant, and Herder’, Political Theory, 11/3 (1983),
343–68, here 348–9.
attracts foreigners to it.’273 Under Montesquieu’s influence, Edmund Burke made

the same point. Laws and norms could not be transferred from one society to
another (save in Montesquieu’s limited endorsement of imperialism!), nor elaborated
from abstract principle as the contractualists tried to. Changes even in small areas
of what Burke called this ‘mysterious incorporation’ might upset the delicate
balance of the whole, which is why Montesquieu’s thought was so attractive to
anti-revolutionaries like Burke—and why it remains attractive to conservatives.
Rather than leaping to monadological internalism, the way to obviate blanket
judgements about ‘ways of life’ is to depart from the view, common to Burkeans,
Burckhardtians, and Bolsheviks, that societies are coherent wholes to be accepted
or rejected en bloc.274 If one criticizes the practice of female genital mutilation,
one is not criticizing the entirety of the cultures from which that practice contin-
gently springs. If one spends one’s life lobbying against Western intervention in
the Middle East, one may well be commenting on some of the pathologies of great
power politics and the domestic arrogance that encourages them, but one is not
necessarily opposing ‘the Western way of life’, whatever that might be. A New
York socialite and a farmer from the Franche-Comté both partake of that ‘way’
but would seem to have as little in common as a Mumbai millionaire and a
Deccan peasant, even if the first two each know a smidgeon of Voltaire and the
latter pair can quote bits of the Bhagavadgita. The untenable monadic view is as
injurious to certain forms of internal criticism as anything else, since it removes
the huge menu of political options between absolute continuity and fullscale
social revolution.
That the monadic philosophy and its kin like structuralism do not ‘work’ in the
relevant sense is why a critique of certain species of relativism—such as the cri-
tique provided below—that appeals to relational criteria cannot be exploited in
the name of some total critique of any given society. One of the many problems
with imperial agendas is that they tend towards that sort of total critique. They
often involve changing other ways of life, either to conform to that of the imperi-
alists, or to facilitate the serving of the imperialists. They operate, that is, at a wide
range of levels and in a large number of spheres in the recipient society. The act of
intervening in another society with a view to directing its affairs may presuppose
273 Cited in Appiah, Ethics of Identity, 150.

274 I relate certain conservatives and revolutionaries for these reasons: ‘If the present has its roots
deep down in the past, by the same principle the future must draw its life from the present. And when
one generation allows abuses to go unchecked and uncorrected, the next generation, or those that
come after, must look to pay the penalty. That penalty may take one of two forms. It may either lie in
the increased difficulty of rooting out an abuse which has been suffered to grow and spread beyond all
knowledge, or it may lie in the blind fury of a revolution which will sweep away the good with the bad,
the wheat with the tares, in a whirlwind of indiscriminating vengeance’ (Vaughan, Studies in the
History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau, 300). There is a counter-argument about
conservatives as apostles of incremental change, but the concept is rather slippery since there is no
agreed definition of an increment’s authorship, size, frequency, direction—i.e. whether the increment
ameliorates or exacerbates, conceals, distracts from, etc., the abuses in question.
or at least encourage among the interveners an attitude of general society-to-

society superiority rather than a focus on the specific contrast that has been made
in one area of social practice. But it is precisely at the level of ‘ways of life’ that we
cannot make evaluations because they are multifaceted, incorporating a whole
range of more-and-less discordant and malleable aesthetic and moral tenets.
Unlike an internalist paradigm, a relational paradigm is concerned with inter-
actions within and between different ‘ones’. Whether the focus is on interactions
between different influences within the organic individual, or among individuals
within groups, groups within societies, or societies amongst other societies, the
concern is with the element of relation and interaction between non-identical
entities, rather than with unity or identity. This interaction is a key driver not just
of change but of self-definition, self-development, differentiation from others,
and finally alliances and antagonisms with others. A relational model contrasts
with the monadic model where the person or the culture just has a character that
wells up from some internal or ideal source. In the camp of those finding monadic
claims to cohesion inaccurate would come Freud at the level of the ‘individual’ or
the subject (ego, id, superego, or drives, socialization, etc.), Marx at the level of
society (conflicting classes), ‘realist’ IR theorists at the supranational level, and
postmoderns concerned with the ‘difference’ that goes all the way down, as
opposed to the monadology that supposedly goes all the way up. To the list we
might add Machiavelli, at least according to one interpretation. Contrary to the
view of Machiavelli as envisaging the neutralization of internal social conflict
through citizenship in the republic, Étienne Balibar depicts Machiavelli’s political
science as being concerned with negotiating ongoing conflict.275 This disagree-
ment about the man so often called the father of modern political thought points
to the very heart of the distinction between monist and relational models. Where
monadic models are apolitical in either their starting assumptions (about unified
entities) or their vision of the final state (when unity has been achieved), rela-
tional models assume the endless existence of some level of friction between
entities in relations of interactive definition and development.
Balibar is a Marxist and well before postmodern anthropologists and post-
Parsonian sociologists developed theories of ‘difference’ and conflict, Marxists
had provided a counterpoint to much classical sociology and historicist monadol-
ogy by focusing on social faultlines, competition, and unevenness. While (as
pp. 21–2) ideal type theories or accounts of répresentations collectives that draw
on societal cross-sections are apt to miss the element of conflict that can emerge
from factoring in temporal processes, some Marxist theorists have used the idiom
of different temporalities to discuss dissonance in the frozen moment of the cross
275 Etienne Balibar, ‘Essere Principe, Essere Populare: The Principle of Antagonism in Machiavelli’s
Epistemology’, in Fillipo Del Lucchese et al. (eds) The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and
Language (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 349–67, here 355–6.
section too. It is one of those confusions caused by little more than nominal
similarity that the Marxist Louis Althusser (1918–90), who drew on Freud, was
frequently known as a structuralist, when amongst other things he tried to come
up with a non-determinist theory of change that involved reference to social structures-
plural. He was concerned with the interaction of heterogeneous structural
elements within the same society—say religious, educational, economic, and
political institutions all with their own internal cultures and subsystemic logics.
Social change might come as structures of different ages/states of development,
embodying different social principles, clashed with one another. Althusser him-
self owed a debt to Gramsci’s thought: Gramsci illustrated how the ‘present’ of any
given state is fractured, say between metropoles and rural peripheries, and
between different classes.276 And in his 1935 work The Heritage [or Inheritance] of
Our Times, Ernst Bloch deployed the idea of the ‘non-contemporaneity of the
contemporaneous’ (ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen) to indicate the way in
which some social and cultural structures of the past continued to exist alongside
capitalist ones, and not necessarily just as dwindling, irrelevant anachronisms.277
Each of these theories militated against the viability of what Althusser called
‘expressive’ social models whereby economic, political, or moral arrangements
somehow emanate as harmonious phenomena from a shared essence, as in
Montesquieu’s ‘spirit of the laws’. They also stood opposed to the structuralist
model with its centred balance and even gravity.278
Bringing together Marxism and anthropology, Eric Wolf saw

civilizations as social sets, in which the elements are linked to each other in a
large variety of ways and with very different degrees of cohesion.
Methodologically, this means that we do not have to account for all the elements
contained in the array or in the set—only for those we hold to be significant.
Our account need in no case assume that civilizations are special wholes; they
are only temporarily occurring arrays or sets . . . There does not seem any need
276 Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, in Althusser, For Marx (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1969), 89–116, with reference to Gramsci at 114 and more traces of Gramsci’s influence on
the matter of cultural ‘survivals’ at 114–16. Further to Althusser’s theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, with
its emphasis on chance, Louis Althusser, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, i (Paris: Éditions Stock,
1994), 21 and passim. As to Gramsci’s relevant thought: Morera, Gramsci’s Historicism, 34–5;
Peter D. Thomas, ‘Althusser’s Last Encounter: Gramsci’, in Katja Diefenbach et al. (eds), Encountering
Althusser (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 137–52, here 141–3; Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian
Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 327; Sue Golding, Gramsci’s
Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1982),148 n. 25.
277 Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Zurich: Oprecht and Helbling, 1935).
278 Althusser ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, 103; Althusser, ‘The Object of Capital’ in
Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, pt 2 (London: New Left Books, 1970), 71–98,
here esp. 94–6, 186–7.
to deal with civilizations as wholes characterized, in [the sociologist Pitirim]

Sorokin's phrase, by ‘immanent self-determination’.279
One reason to reject Sorokin’s rather Leibnizian ‘immanent self-determination’ is

a cause of change that is underemphasized in Gramsci and Althusser. That cause
is cross-cultural contact. The world historian William H. McNeill is only one of
the most prominent scholars to observe that cultural contact has been the key
historical driver of social change—precursors include Jean Bodin in the sixteenth
century and the Cambro-Norman cleric Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century.280
In the 1950s the anthropologist George Peter Murdock described ‘cultural bor-
rowing’ as ‘by far the most common and important’ of ‘all forms of innovation’.
Murdock’s American culture took language from England, alphabet from the
Phoenicians, numerical system from India, family and property structure from
medieval Europe. Ancient Babylon provided the fundaments of its systems of
banking, credits, loans, and so forth, after refinements from Italy, the Netherlands,
and England. Its favourite ice cream flavours—chocolate and vanilla—were taken
from the Aztecs. The USA’s major religion was and remains an assemblage of
inputs from the ancient Hebrews, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, and, one
might add, its systems of morality are just as heterogeneous.281
Not absolutely always but very, very often, societies have rubbed along in inter-
relationships of coexistence as well as conflict. Trade, slavery, interbreeding, war-
fare, colonization, migration, and investment have left their marks. All societies
with access to other societies engage in appropriation to some degree and some,
like Indonesia, are renowned for their syncretic openness,282 which makes
Geertz’s Burckhardtian talk of ‘Indonesian culture’ all the odder (pp. 217–18).
China has been famously less forthcoming about its borrowings, and on the
whole that is true of Western civilization too, but that does not mean there have
been none.283 Given all such intercourse, Wolf wrote:
The habit of treating named entities such as Iroquois, Greece, Persia, or the United
Slates as fixed entities opposed to one another by stable internal architecture and
external boundaries interferes with our ability to understand their mutual
279 Eric R. Wolf, ‘Understanding Civilizations: A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 9/4 (1967), 446–65, here 448–9.
280 McNeill, ‘The Changing Shape of World History,’ History and Theory 34/2 (1995), 21. Cf. Jean
Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (New York: Octagon, 1945), ch. 9; Gerald of
Wales, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Topography of Ireland (Cambridge, ON: In Parentheses, 2000), dis-
tinction III, ch. 10.
281 Murdock, ‘How Culture Changes’, in Harry L. Shapiro (ed.), Man, Culture, and Society (1956;
New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 247–60, here 253–4.
282 J. D. Legge, Indonesia (Sydney: Prentice Hall, 1977).
283 Consider some of the West’s claims to unique ownership or origination critically examined in
Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and also Goody’s
comments at pp. 120–1 on cultural exchange.
encounter and confrontation. One need have no quarrel with a denotative use of
the term society to designate an empirically verifiable cluster of interconnections
among people, as long as no evaluative prejudgments are added about its state of
internal cohesion or boundedness in relation to the external world.284
The anthropologist Alexander Lesser likewise suggested ‘adopt[ing] as a working

hypothesis the universality of human contact and influence’, and thinking ‘of
human societies—prehistoric, primitive, or modern—not as closed systems, but
as open systems’ which are ‘inextricably involved with other aggregates, near and
far, in weblike, netlike connections’.285
Whatever hypothesis we favour, the evidentiary record of cross-cultural
exchange also shows how overblown are some of the concerns, developed under
the shadow of structuralism, about conceptualizing change purely from within a
closed system of culture, power, or whatever, by deconstruction or by a
Foucaultian self-reinvention whose conditions of possibility are, given his account
of power-knowledge and discourse, obscure. These empirics suggest, whatever
the claims about the impossibility of an ‘outside’ in the thought of, say, Foucault,
or Jean-Luc Nancy, that there is indeed always some ‘outside’ that may intrude on
the ‘inside’, even though it is not a transcendent outside, just a foreign country
making contact.286 True, there will be a perimeter—that surrounding the shifting
totality of human ways of being and acting under the sun—which one cannot
outside, but the humanist would well ask: what on earth would it mean to get
outside it? Once one adopts a relational paradigm as descriptively better than an
internalist paradigm, one can not only secularize and demystify the question of
exteriority (i.e. the exterior entity need not be a lawgiving deity), one is always
guaranteed another exteriority. That is the condition of politics, not of politics’
end in some monadic ideal condition.
In one sense it is of the utmost importance to remind ourselves that we are
always within some context, but in another sense it is banal because there are so
many sorts of context and our power to modify them is so variable. The inter-
action of two elements can produce a third, ‘emergent’ structure just as the
encounter of two people can produce a unique structure of understanding which
only exists between them rather than within either on their own. This also means
284 Wolf, Europe and The People without History, 18.

285 Cited in Wolf, Europe and The People without History, 19.
286 Jean-Luc Nancy and Richard Livingston, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, Yale French Studies 79 (1991),
20–38, here 37; on Foucault’s pronouncements on outsides, Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: Power/
Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Harvester
Press, 1980), 141, 142, and Robert M. Strozier, Foucault, Subjectivity and Identity (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2002), 57. Derrida’s claims that ‘there is no outside-text [hors-texte]’, sometimes
translated as ‘there is nothing outside the text’, and his similar claim about outside-context, are slightly
different to these other cases in Derrida’s meaning (though not always in Derrida-exegesis), while
arising from a related tradition of thought: Derrida, Limited Inc., 9, 136, 148, 152.
that to talk about contexts in the sense of structures, and to talk about human
relations across the boundaries of those contexts, is not to talk about things that
need be conceptually opposed.
Tolerance, Respect, Relativism
This section brings out the implications of relational thought for moral evaluation
across all cleavages, and does so by engaging in philosophical debates. The focal
point is cultural contextualizations. To refresh the memory, ‘cultural’ contextual-
izations are contextualizations to different value systems, as opposed to ‘func-
tional’ contextualizations that imply a common value system applied to special
situations (see p. 39).
Reflection on cultural differences has prompted at least three sorts of argu-
ments against evaluation, and all three will be shown to be wanting. One set of
arguments is relativist. The varieties and complexity of relativist positions mean
that they are accorded most attention hereafter. A second argument abjures
evaluation in the name of tolerance but falls down because it fails to consider the
conditions of tolerance. The third argument is more patronizing and therefore
implicitly judgemental anyway. The three positions are now considered in
reverse order.
The third argument is that there is no point criticizing people who could not
have known better. This is already a thorny area given that it raises questions
about who and on what bases the better is judged, but the automatic assumption
that ‘we’ know morally better than predecessors can give a distinct slant to the
whole discussion. It is the sort of assumption decried by Nietzsche and Ranke, as
they criticized that form of History that depicted the latest arrival in the develop-
ment of manners as ipso facto the greatest form of humanity to date, as if moral
advancement marched forward as surely as technological sophistication.287 The
key issue is that disapprobation is implicit in all such assumptions. It is only the
forbearance towards the ignorant bearers of the relevantly inferior culture that
varies, as if in accordance with Thomas Aquinas’s claim that an errant conscience
still binds provided that its bearer was not ignorant of a law that she should have
known. In the Catholic tradition such a state of innocent ignorance is known as
invincible ignorance, as contrasted with vincible ignorance.
287 Joseph McBride, ‘Tragic Philosophy and History in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche’,
Maynooth Review 5/2 (1979), 25–33, here 30; Leopold von Ranke, The Secret of World History: Selected
Writings on the Art and Science of History, ed. Roger Wines (New York: Fordham University Press,
1981), 160–1, including: ‘We can assume in the areas of material interest an absolute progress, a highly
decisive ascent which would require an enormous upset to bring about a decline. But we cannot find a
similar progress in moral affairs.’
Let us contemplate such thinking as applied to the present, before turning to its
application to the past. Consider the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which up to
800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, were murdered by the ‘Hutu Power’ regime. If we
suggest that Africans, or perhaps inhabitants of the Balkans, are more likely to
murder each other than Western Europeans, owing perhaps to some primitive
atavism, or some childlike state then we would rightly be accused of racism as
applied to the groups in question even as we seem to be absolving the relevant
members of those groups from blame for their actions. We are saying that the
collective ‘they’ did not know better, that their cultures lacked the resources for
the sort of moral discernment that ‘we’ have. The remotest acquaintance with the
cultures in question shows that their bearers had the resources to make the rele-
vant moral distinctions. Mass murder was the outcome of specific, conscious
political projects, not of some general cultural disposition. In both cases mass
murder was a concerted attempt to change the world not a reproduction of
entrenched ways of being in the world. The perpetrators of genocide need to be
judged morally as relevantly discerning beings.
In popular culture there is often no equivalent stigma attached to saying the
same sorts of patronizing things about cultures of the past. Some of the first
responses to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia invoked its ‘medieval’ quality, as did
much of the rhetoric around the murderous Islamic State movement in Syria and
Iraq from 2014. On a personal note, I am struck by the number of university stu-
dents who, when they encounter them, wrongly regard medieval peasants collect-
ively as dimwits lacking any discernment except that forced upon them by Church
and State. Not blaming these students for what are inculcated views, I blame ten-
dencies in a society (ours) that has, since the Renaissance and with additional
force since Voltaire and Condorcet, developed a knee-jerk assumption of its
superiority over some of its own historical antecedents, associating the Middle
Ages with barbarity and so forth. This sort of attitude, which can produce the
conviction that moral advance has occurred in much the same way as techno-
logical advance, was what Ranke had wished to counter. The reaction to the
Lumières judgementalism also helped to shape the profession’s opposition to
evaluation more generally.288 Clearly this book does not argue against evaluation
as such. What it does reject—and this without prejudice to the obvious fact that
certain moral concepts were unavailable to certain inhabitants of the past owing
to the concepts’ being developed later on—is the default assumption of the pre-
sent’s full spectrum, society-to-society level superiority over the past. Under that
wrong-headed assumption, any given problematic practice in the past appears as
a predictable manifestation of a general moral deficiency back then. Equivalent
terms for racism or ethnocentrism that encapsulate such retrospective stereotyp-
288 On the—to him misplaced—fear of yielding a ‘gratuitous victory to Voltaire’, Lord Acton,
Lectures on Modern History (London: Fontana, 1960), 38–9.
ing of whole societies might be epochalism or chronocentrism. In sum: even when

epochalism or chronocentrism is deployed ‘positively,’ in the sense of absolving
past people for their not being as morally advanced as ‘us’, it is still implicitly dep-
recating of their world.
When History is written under the assumption of general contemporary moral
superiority there is either a pseudo-evaluation where the conclusion is known
before the process begins, or a putatively anti-evaluative stance that is actually
premised upon evaluation. Any proper process of evaluation cannot start from
such positions. The same sort of reasoning stands in rebuttal of that smaller but
not insignificant band of proper reactionaries who assume that our forebears
were better than us. Since this book argues for a non-relativist position in practice
(see below for possible distinctions in theory) it is important to distinguish non-
relativism from ethnocentrism/chronocentrism. For the sake of ease let us just
focus on ethnocentrism, though the same considerations apply to chronocen-
trism. Ethnocentrism it is not the same as anti-relativism despite the effective
titular equation of the two in the exchange between the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz and the philosopher Richard Rorty, when the former’s ‘anti-anti-relativism’
was met with the latter’s ‘anti-anti-ethnocentrism’.289 To be sure, anti-relativism
and ethnocentrism can contingently accompany each other and often have done.
The assumption of their logical linkage has been reinforced by strands of post-
modern and anti- and postcolonial scholarship that tie anti-relativism to univer-
salism and at the same time depict universalism as nothing but ethnocentrism
spuriously generalized.290 Nevertheless, there is no logical linkage. Practical non-
relativism implies that it is meaningful, intellectually defensible and sometimes
necessary to make judgements across, say, cultural boundaries. Ethnocentrism is
the belief that one’s own culture’s arrangements are always the better, and it is
closely related to the imperialist’s prejudicial society-to-society comparison
debunked above (pp. 228–30). The inquirer who rejects ethnocentrism along, for
practical purposes, with relativism, as this inquirer does, must be open to the
prospect that some of the principles and practices of other societies in the past (as
in the present) are preferable to certain principles and practices in his or her own
society. That is what it means not to prejudice the inquiry.
The second argument against judgement tries to excise evaluation because
judgement is deemed to be incompatible with tolerance. Traces of the argument
that historical study is conducive to tolerance are there in Descartes, and it is
289 Clifford Geertz, ‘Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist, ns

86/2 (1984), 263–78; Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 203 ff.
290 Overall it is important to establish whether the objection is to universalism per se (in the name
of something like relativism) or to pseudo-universalism (in the name of genuine universalism) or
whether one is saying (in the name of scepticism) that it is impossible to distinguish universalism
from pseudo-universalism.
explicit in the writing of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751),

Collingwood, Butterfield, and Richard Evans. What are the prospects for this
History as tolerance? When Evans, for instance, claims that History will encour-
age democratic pluralism by encouraging the historian to tolerate human variety,
he is prejudicing the issue.291 The attitude that is supposed to be inculcated by
studying the past is imposed, or already possessed, prior to any encounter with
the past, otherwise there is no guarantee of the right outcome.
‘Tolerance’ is not even the correct category if one wishes to avoid judgement, as
most of its proponents do. It has been said that for Spinoza, one of the most influ-
ential early modern thinkers on toleration, that ‘Toleration is not a maxim of
mutual indifference laid down by raison d’état (Hobbes and Locke), a negative
limit to a rational requirement of conformity: it is mutual understanding based
on recognition of the variety of the human imagination; that is, charity made sci-
entific by the new science of hermeneutics.’ The first definition resembles toler-
ance as practical necessity: the second tolerance as principle.292 Clearly tolerance
based on mutual understanding sounds more attractive than that based on
mutual indifference, but either way there must be limits. Mutual indifference can
no longer suffice when interaction becomes necessary, and here some attempt at
mutual understanding provides the alternative to obliteration or enslavement.
Mutual understanding may pave the way for provisional harmony but under-
standing is inter alia a precondition for disagreement, and one can only ‘agree to
disagree’ up to the point that resolving disagreement is the only alternative to
physical conflict—a conflict the end point of which will in any case be the reso-
lution of disagreement in favour of one party. Tolerance of either sort is a prin-
ciple which will have at points to compete with other principles.293 One cannot
say in advance of encountering a specific practice that one will be tolerant of it.
That would be to forswear the possession of any other principle than tolerance,
indeed to render oneself so completely mutable as to have no identity as a value-
bearing individual qualified to be tolerant.294
291 Examples of conceiving History as a tutor of tolerance range from Lord Bolingbroke, Letters on
the Study and Use of History (London: T. Cadell, 1779), 25–7, to Evans, ‘What Is History’, 5, 7. For
other examples see the works cited in the Introduction, p. 8 n. 22.
292 Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1991), 107; Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
293 I stress ‘at points’, not ‘all the time’. My target is the argument that it is both possible and desira-
ble to be tolerant of all other practices, indiscriminately. Manifestly there are matters of, for instance,
manners and etiquette that vary from setting to setting and about which tolerance is eminently pos-
sible if it is actually deemed relevant (the very idea of tolerating something can imply distaste for it
and differing manners need not prompt distaste). The problem comes with extending tolerance
beyond some borderline between matters like dining etiquette and matters like sending children
down coal mines. To be sure, the borderline itself may be blurred but that only means that certain
cases are marginal—many others are not.
294 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964),
312: ‘To say “Yes” to everything and everybody is manifestly to have no character at all.’
It might be objected that ‘tolerance’ retrojected is different to tolerance practised

in the here and now. The encounter with denizens of the past is notional, and as
such does not really bring the potential conflict of tolerance with other principles,
does not really engage the pragmatic judgement that guides action. If that is so,
then the point undermines the proposition that studying History can/will
make one tolerant. After all, it is only if tolerance costs something that it is true
tolerance. If the previous paragraph pointed to the limits of tolerance, here we
have the condition for tolerance. Via both we corroborate the semiological claim
that tolerance only acquires its meaning in differential relation to the concept
intolerance.
One can take one of two directions. One can take talk of tolerance seriously.
This would mean that at times, after every effort of understanding and perspective-
taking, one would also have not to be tolerant towards some bits of the past; this
disposition is that of the author, but it is not what advocates of tolerance generally
mean. Alternatively, one discards the notion of tolerance along with intolerance.
If carried through, this would issue in a sort of natural-scientific positivism
resembling the utterly disinterested observation of, say, termite cultures. Even if
operable, which is unclear, that attitude does not seem desirable when discussing
other humans. We will return to the question of tolerance and intolerance during
discussion of relativism.
Let us open the discussion of relativism with a stance sometimes called descrip-
tive moral relativism. At its most elementary this position simply recognizes
diversity in norms across cultures, perhaps observing how culture A has a sharply
different view to culture B of a particular practice or set of practices. As such it
does not really qualify as relativism, because it is more a report about different
standards than any attempt to establish or reject criteria for evaluating such
standards from a position outside any given culture. At best it is a description
from which one makes an inference about relativism, perhaps on the basis that
different moral systems appear to be so different for that difference to be categor-
ical.295 But the relativist needs to take at least one more step if she is to give that
inference more than purely suggestive force. The step may be onto the terrain
sometimes marked meta-ethical moral relativism, or meta-ethical relativism,
though each is a potentially confusing moniker not adopted by everyone who dis-
cusses the position it denotes.
One definition of meta-ethical moral relativism is this: ‘The truth or falsity of
moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative
to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.’296 Meta-ethics is
295 On descriptive relativism, Baghramanian, Relativism, 270–1; Claudio Corradetti, Relativism

and Human Rights: A Theory of Pluralistic Universalism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 37–8.
296 Chris Gowans, ‘Moral Relativism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy [online] (Summer 2019 edn), quote from section 2 of ‘Moral Relativism’. Also on
not a study of what is good or bad per se, but rather of what moral theories are
about and how they function. The usual starting point is that the world does not
seem to contain any mind-independent property of goodness/rightness, so we
need an explanation of what claims like ‘justice is good’ or ‘greed is good’ mean
that does not interpret them as made true by mind-independent properties.297
The only sort of explanation that works, so the argument goes, is that groups
produce their own moral conventions embedded in particular historico-cultural
circumstances and for particular purposes. Philosopher Gilbert Harman wrote:
‘What is morally right in relation to one moral framework can be morally wrong
in relation to a different moral framework. And no moral framework is object-
ively privileged as the one true morality.’298
Let us be clear about what meta-ethical relativists reject (though I do not imply
that only meta-ethical relativists reject the following positions). They reject tran-
scendent sources of morality, the most obvious examples of which are divinely-
inscribed stone tablets. They also rule out moral objectivism. Under some
definitions moral objectivism, like the concept of moral realism, incorporates
transcendent concepts of morality of the sort just mentioned—think back to the
medieval ‘realists’, as opposed to the nominalists, discussed in the History I sec-
tion. Moral objectivism/realism can also incorporate the idea that moral codes
are somehow woven into the material stuff of the world, testable against the evi-
dence in much the way one could establish the law of gravity. Relativists cannot
accept either of those positions because relativists see moral codes as being gener-
ated within minds and cultures, not by things external to them. Indeed post-
religious ‘naturalistic’ or scientific understandings of the world have given great
impetus to relativism precisely on the grounds that nature does not seem to have
an inherent moral quality. (Again, compare this view with that of medieval theo-
logical ‘realists’ who associated transcendent morality with the material world as
the ‘book of God’.) Now many non-relativists would also reject the idea of moral
transcendence and objectivism or realism under any of the foregoing definitions.
Things get more interesting when non-relativists come up with arguments that
are compatible with naturalistic precepts because they do not appeal to moral
properties of the natural or supernatural world. An obvious example of such non-
relativistic thought is the Kantian suggestion that human rationality (as opposed
to anything that can be tested against evidence in the material world) working
on its own (absent divine decree) is capable of justifying moral rules that are in
principle binding on all rational beings. Meta-ethical relativists reject Kant-like
meta-ethical moral relativism, Baghramanian, Relativism, 281 ff.; and for different versions of what he
calls meta-ethical relativism, Corradetti, Relativism and Human Rights, 40.
297 See e.g. the clarifications in Alex Miller, Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction (Cambridge:
Polity, 2013), ch. 1.
298 Cited in Baghramanian, Relativism, 285.
positions as well, arguing that there are no conceptual foundations or yardsticks

for values and evaluation outside any and all societies against which the values or
the value-generating mechanisms of any given society can be measured.
Philosophical debate endures between non-relativistic moral rationalists and
meta-ethical relativists, and your author is not competent to arbitrate between the
positions. Fortunately he does not need that competence, since the intention here
is the more modest one of showing only that the most powerful moral relativisms
do not produce logical or moral objections to relevant forms of moral judgement.
Pursuant to substantiating these more modest claims, the present argument
warns relativists away from any negative argument about the morally transcend-
ent/objective that implicitly depends on the idea of the transcendent/objective for
its efficacy. As suggested earlier, the doctrine of moral relativism developed at the
point of the secularization of religious metaphysics, with the disappearance of the
divine-universal force in whom all differing earthly perspectives were supposedly
reconciled. Yet the scenarios are not symmetrical. An absence does not work
in the same way, or rather it does not work in the equal-but-opposite way, as a
presence. To build a positive theory on the basis of the absence of an external
moral authority or source is to make the absence into an ‘absolute ground’ or
‘foundation’—and it is precisely the absence of such ‘foundations’ that relativists
appeal to in the first place.
An example of a species of moral relativism that falls into just this trap is the
popular theory that has variously been called vulgar (moral) relativism and naïve
relativism and is sometimes included under the rubric of normative relativism.
The claim of this theory is something like: ‘the only standard by which to judge
the practices or concepts of a culture is the standard provided by that culture and
it would be wrong to use other standards’ or, slightly differently, ‘it is wrong for
members of one group to judge the values of another group’. This species of rela-
tivism is self-undermining because it makes a non-relativized judgement about
what is right and wrong while trying to argue for relativism in judgements about
what is right and wrong. It proposes a group-transcending, universal moral
standard for the principles of judging across group boundaries whilst denying the
existence of such group-transcending moral standards.’299
Emphasizing the flaw in this species of relativism strikes at the heart of the idea
that relativism can provide us with any instruction about how to think beyond
the level of abstract thought about the constitution of values. Assuming that some
relativisms are coherent, they only have implications at the level of the meta-ethical
rather than the ethical (or moral, in the terms of this book)—they cannot provide
practical guidance on adjudging this or that practice/value good or bad. It is the
299 For the labels ‘vulgar’ and ‘naïve’, see Baghramian, Relativism, 274 (and also for hints of self-
refutation in what she calls normative ethical relativism, 279); on identical self-refutation problems in
what he calls normative relativism, Corradetti, Relativism and Human Rights, 37.
mistake of equating moral relativism with any particular practical position that
led the intellectual historian Hayden White to proclaim ‘relativism to be the basis
of social tolerance’.300 White’s position is adopted by the historiographer and
postmodernist Keith Jenkins, who bases tolerance on ‘moral relativism’.301 The
claim is most famously associated with the anthropologist M. J. Herskovits.302
‘Has any group been less culturally relative than the Nazis?’ asks literary theorist
Robert Eaglestone in what he wrongly takes to be a rhetorical question.303
Obviously many Nazis and Fascists were not remotely relativist, but we have
already encountered Mussolini and the Nazi Werner Best in relativist mode
(pp. 70–71, 226–7).
Putting aside the aforementioned fact that tolerance cannot be infinite and
indiscriminate, one may be tolerant in addition to being a relativist, or, equally,
intolerant. The strongest anti-relativism is no more incompatible than relativism
with tolerance or respect. A belief that one’s beliefs are right in an absolute sense
can sit easily, all else equal, with tolerance or respect for the differing beliefs and
belief-related practices of others. It is unsurprising that tolerance and relativism
are often confused, because they seem to have the same function of avoiding con-
flict, but there is no conceptual relationship between them. No more than univer-
salists or sceptics do relativists comprise a particular character-type with a
common civic or affective disposition.
If someone claims to be a relativist that tells us nothing about their specific,
effective conceptions of what is right and wrong, good and bad, nor about how
they will judge or act upon those conceptions in any concrete situation. In actual
interactions, i.e. beyond abstract discussions about the nature of value justifica-
tion, it makes no difference if one identifies as a constructivist, relativist, univer-
salist, particularist, etc. This is a reason that we need not associate relativism with
the absence of any criteria of judgement, even nihilism. The relativist will still
have local standards of judgement to adhere to and will adhere to these just as
strongly as someone who believes in absolute standards—indeed the relativists’
philosophy must lead them to the conclusion that local standards are all that there
are, such that whatever their local standards are at any given moment, those
standards are, for them, effectively absolute in their force. That also applies to the
relativist’s encounters with someone else who holds different local standards
when they differ on some substantive moral matter.
At the same time, relativism in the abstract, ie. without thinking about specific
judgements, will not be welcomed by all the peoples of the world, however much
it has been associated with anti-imperialism and tolerance. Say that the relativist
300 White, Content, 227.

301 Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London: Routledge, 2003), 68.
302 Melville J. Herskovits, Cultural Relativism (New York: Random House, 1972), 31.
303 Robert Eaglestone, Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (London: Icon, 2001), 6.
contemplates another culture whose inhabitants conceive of some value as

objectively given, perhaps because it was articulated by a deity. (Of course many
such people exist in ‘our’ culture too.) While the relativist accepts ‘their’ belief as
valid, in the sense of being regulative ‘for them’, he does not accept as correct their
estimation of their belief—as in correct in virtue of the particular justification
they claim for the belief. In denying that their values really are objectively given,
the relativist claims a higher insight than the relevant members of that culture
into the nature of their values. In the event that inhabitants of this culture get to
hear of the relativist’s thoughts, they will reasonably infer that the relativist
believes their belief system to be conceptually wrong—and since their morality is
justified on the particular conceptual basis that the relativist finds to be conceptu-
ally wrong they will after all see relativism as an attack on their moral system. If
relativism is irrelevant where it might be thought to matter in practice, i.e. in ‘real-
life’ interactions, there is no guarantee that people will welcome relativism in
principle, as a concept.
The last few paragraphs help remove some of the moral baggage that has
become attached to arguments for and against relativism. Neither relativism in its
most persuasive iterations nor non-relativism should be conceived as being good
or bad in the moral sense, even while each of them obviously pertains to how
good and the right and bad and the wrong are conceived. They are rarefied con-
ceptual arguments ‘only’, not moral arguments. Having already contended that
the more sophisticated relativisms do not rule out cross-cultural judgements on
moral and otherwise practical grounds, let us now work our way through the
issues in order to substantiate the claim that they do not rule out relevant judge-
ments on conceptual grounds either.
If, for argument’s sake, we granted that moral relativists are correct to deny the
existence of Kant-like as well as objective/transcendent grounds of moral
arbitration,304 it would remain a matter of debate as to what relevantly follows. One
could still adopt non-relativistic positions including scepticism about the possibil-
ity of knowing moral truths of any sort, or reject any system of validating moral
claims, including relativistic systems.305 More importantly for the present argu-
ment, even if one accepted that it makes no sense to talk about matters bearing on
all societies from a point conceptually outside them all, one could still talk about
matters between societies, and matters common among societies. In pursuing
those thoughts it helps to address the matter of conceptual incommensurability.
304 One need not grant this position, though, again, your author is not qualified to argue either
way. See e.g. the groundwork towards the argument in support of some measure of normative
absolutism in Paul Boghossian, ‘Relativism about Morality’ at: http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/
nyu-as/asSilverDialogues/documents/PBoghossian-RelAboutNorm-final-SilverDialogues%20v3.
pdf and Boghossian, ‘Should We Be Relativists about Morality?’, at https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.
com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/1/1221/files/2016/09/BoghossianPublicHandout-1kxhlx0.pdf.
305 Gowans, ‘Moral Relativism’, section 6.
Incommensurability means the absence of any standard by which two or more

things can be considered comparatively. Ruth Benedict harnessed the term to her
own relativistic wagon in discussion of three particular cultures: ‘They differ . . .
because they are oriented as wholes in different directions. They are travelling
along different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends and these means
in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because
essentially they are incommensurable.’306 We do have good reasons to believe
that some values are indeed incommensurable: how, for instance, does one
adjudge—instead of just asserting—that social equality is a higher or lower value
than personal liberty? But disagreement over those two values can exist within
the confines of a single culture as well as across cultures.307 The same goes for
different systems of moral thought: deontology and consequentialism, for
instance, can clearly exist in the same society, but are incommensurable as frame-
works for moral decision because of the concept of the individual within their
schemes.308 Identifying such cases of incommensurability substantiates an argu-
ment for value pluralism, which is itself important, but it does not itself justify a
more broad-ranging relativism and obviously it does not justify the equation that
is sometimes made of incommensurability with incomprehensibility or ‘talking
past’ one another: consequentialists and deontologists understand and argue with
each other about the superiority of their positions all the time, as do the sides in
the liberty–equality battle. Incommensurability in certain areas of value does not
imply incommensurability in all and there is no reason to think such incommen-
surability as exists must be specially and extensively tied to intercultural differ-
ences unless one has already adopted a sort of whole-culture, monadic view of
things, as in Benedict’s quote above. Such whole-culture views are consistent with
the particular secularized-religious view of the nature of cultures as they devel-
oped from Leibniz to Herder, which should sound alarm bells for aforementioned
reasons. We need again to be sure that when rejecting the religious-metaphysical
assumptions on which monadological thinking was based (Geist, God, and so
forth) we do not keep the rest of the monadological structure, either at the level of
the individual or the collective.
One flaw in whole-culture views, as if any given culture were the product of
logical extension from a differing founding axiom, with each part of that culture
infused with the unique character of its parent axiom, is that just as any given
culture can be riven over some value dispute, some commonality in value exists
across many cultures. Something can be universalized, in the sense of gaining
general assent as a good idea or practice, or the best of the menu of options that
306 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 223.

307 See e.g. the discussion of Isaiah Berlin in Baghramian, Relativism, 294–8, which also distin-
guishes between pluralism and relativism.
308 Larry Alexander, ‘Deontology at the Threshold’, San Diego Law Review 37 (2000), 893–912, here
911–12.
appear to be available given what outcomes it produces in the world, without

being found as an injunction carved on tablets of stone or stemming from a set of
rational principles whose force is universally evident. Differently, some arrange-
ments might turn out to be necessary in the ordinary, non-philosophical sense of
the word. They might for instance just turn out to be functionally necessary for
humans living in at least some non-conflictual relations to other humans.309 The
relativist might wish to call these arrangements ‘ubiquitous’ as opposed to
‘universal’,310 but there is no harm in calling them contingent, effective universals.
Contingent universals are already observed in cultures, in shared bans on arbi-
trary killing and arbitrary violence more generally, or shared promotion of truth-
fulness, which are presumably pretheoretical and functional in origin, requiring
retrospective anthropological genealogies to explain their evolution, but not to
commend them, for their justification has already been provided by the human
coexistence to which they conduce. In summary, to deny transcendent morality
and moral objectivism in the foregoing sense of moral realism is to make a claim
about what is (and is not) and can (and cannot) be the case, whereas to deny uni-
versals in principle (as opposed to being sceptical about any particular universal-
ist claim) is to forestall a possibility that might come to pass—or to refuse to
recognize one that actually, if contingently, exists. This point will be elaborated no
further here, given that the historian is concerned with the past, rather than pos-
sibilities for the future, and given, too, that historians, like anyone else, are entitled
to concern themselves with the areas in which groups differ morally, rather than
in the areas of effectively universal common ground.
Another challenge to cultural hermeticism (Benedict’s claim that the incom-
mensurability of entire culture A and cultures B, C, D, etc. automatically implies
that any given practice or concept in culture A cannot meaningfully be judged
from within cultures B, C, D) is the empirical one, elucidated in the section
Moving Beyond ‘Their Own Terms’ that cultures just do change as a result of
intercultural contact as well as internal conflict. This historical and sociological
fact bespeaks general cultural syncretism rather than substantiating a view of any
given culture as tantamount to the genetically determined product of a unique
309 Combining this sort of sociological perspective with the insights of theories about evolutionary
theory and developmental psychology, David B. Wong, Natural Moralities (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009) produces a pluralistic account of morality based on the naturalistic criteria that the rela-
tivist Gilbert Harman sees as tending to conduce to relativistic conclusions. See p. xv for the contrast
with Harman, and Wong’s claim that his own theory is pluralistic ‘because it recognizes limits on what
can count as a true morality’. Note, though, in connection with the discussion in n. 307 about
Baghramian’s distinction between relativism and pluralism that Wong’s book is subtitled A Defense of
Pluralistic Relativism, and before his account of his theory’s pluralism he notes that his ‘theory is rela-
tivistic because it holds there is no single true morality’. However Wong conceptualizes the relation-
ship between pluralism and relativism, he clearly holds the adjective ‘pluralistic’ to qualify the reach of
the noun ‘relativism’.
310 For reasons highlighted in J. David Velleman, Foundations for Moral Relativism (Cambridge:
Open Book, 2015), 93–4.
seed. Cultures comprise a variably related set of structures among other sets of
structures in which people can express themselves and which mutate in virtue of
internal action and external engagement.311
Recognition of the way cultures change by a combination of internal argument
and external contact brings us to the point that, depending upon the species of
relativism, relativists cannot rely for support on the doctrine of social construct-
ivism. Constructivism is not identical to relativism, though it has enough family
resemblances to appear the same to the casual observer. Here the sole focus is
social construction of the cultural world, because the issues around the social
construction of the natural world are sufficiently different as to cause confusion
when discussed under the same rubric.312 Indeed, it is tautological to talk of the
social construction of the cultural world, but not of the natural world—which is
not to say that there will not be debate about the interpenetration of the two
worlds and the location of the border between them.
Constructivism implies variety (as relativism does) but also potentially endless
mutability so can, as one possibility, envisage fusion and even convergence
between different cultures’ norms and practices across time. It is perfectly pos-
sible to be a constructivist who also believes in contingent universals even if con-
structivists, like relativists, tend to reject moral objectivism and the idea of
transcendent morality. The constructivist may be contrasted with the cultural
essentialist, whereas it is perfectly possible to be a relativist and a cultural essen-
tialist. Some postmodernists fail to see this distinction, emphasizing their com-
mitment to contingency and difference/particularity as against necessity (in its
philosophical rather than everyday sense) and universality respectively, while
overlooking the fact that one could appeal to contingent universals (the con-
structivist possibility) or necessary particulars (the essentialist-relativist
proposition).313 Herder’s thought was essentialist-relativist, whilst globalizing
consumer-capitalism, with its homogenizing potential, represents a strand con-
sonant with constructivism-universalism. Stalinism evinced both tendencies at
different points as the regime variously embraced the annihilation or forced
reconstruction of ‘enemies’, as well as sometimes encouraging the expression of
cultural difference amongst the USSR’s constituent peoples in what one scholar
has called ‘affirmative action’.314 Imperialism also expressed different modes of
311 This is shown by those instances when certain harmful social practices have been jettisoned as a
result of the development of an attitude of shame towards them and is also shown by, say, the case of
the end of foot-binding in early twentieth-century China, when shame was stimulated by outside
scorn (but note also that shame about that practice did not equate to a wish to abandon all traditions).
See Appiah, The Honor Code, on that case of ‘moral revolution’ plus the cases of the end of duelling in
nineteenth-century Britain and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade.
312 On the differences, see Hacking, The Social Construction of What?.
313 For key distinctions made here, see Steve Fuller, The Philosophy of Science and Technology
Studies (New York: Routledge, 2006), 35–7.
314 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
thought across time and place. In one example, in India the British sometimes
gave great interpretative authority to conservative Brahmins whose advice about
the way things were turned out to be a scheme of how they wanted things to be.315
In that instance, as at points in the colonial rule of Ireland, gaining some version
of ‘local knowledge’ of ‘difference’ was important to the imperial power, as
opposed to imposing metropolitan views of difference.316 In further British
examples, the more ‘optimistic’ ‘civilizing mission’ of the earlier nineteenth cen-
tury, with its intimations of convergence in accordance with the tenets of British
‘universalism’, gave way later on to the more ‘pessimistic’ attitude of problem-
management as concepts of irreconcilable/essentialist difference and enmity
gained credence in the era of social Darwinism and ‘scientific racism’. It is prob-
ably the impact of imperialism, with its shifting combination of universalism
(which points towards convergence) and racism (which is a species of essential-
ism) that led to the alliance of resistance between relativists and constructivists,
but the alliance is politically contingent and conceptually problematic.
The fact that constructing oneself, i.e. changing oneself, can involve cross-
cultural judgements about desirability, in the sense of what to assimilate, and
undesirability, in the sense of what to define oneself against, is evidence that
cross-cultural judgement is not a meaningless activity in political or existential
terms. Moral relativism need not imply the conceptual meaninglessness or non-
sensicality of such judgements either—and as previously noted, relativists who
contend that such judgements are morally right or wrong undermine their own
relativism. All that the moral relativist necessarily contends, and here we are
really discussing the meta-ethical moral relativist, is that there is no ground,
rational or otherwise, on which to prioritize any value judgement as having some
kind of universal, transcultural authority. The thrust is that one cannot force by
reason relevantly different others into accepting one’s standards of judgement. If
correct, that position is only a problem in theory for those who seek to create or
believe themselves already to be in possession of a moral theory to which every-
one should subscribe in virtue of its persuasive force. The relativist could not gain-
say the empirical point that moral argument across (say) cultural borders can
change views. Nor need the relativist consider it pointless or irrational to make
cross-cultural judgements if they fail to persuade members of the group whose
practice is under criticism. This is an important point because to take a contrary
view would be another instance of labouring under the influence of a religiously
inflected monadic paradigm of conscience, where the individual interior is the
ultimate locus of interpretation and the decisive factor is whether or not the
315 O’Hanlon and Washbrook, ‘After Orientalism’, 210–11; see also Nicolas Argenti and Deborah
Durham, ‘Youth’, in John Parker and Richard Reid (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 396–413, here 398–9, 401–2.
316 Niall Ó’Ciosáin, ‘The Poor Inquiry and Irish Society—A Consensus Theory of Truth’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (2010), 127–39, here 132–3.
individual offers up a ‘free confession’. At the level of the cultural interior the
mind goes back to Burckhardt’s conviction that however poorly the peoples of
Europe treated each other, they could ‘happily not judge one another’;317 of course
they could judge each other, and frequently did, but Burckhardt’s mistaken belief
was that this judgement had no meaning given that cultures were answerable only
to what Emerson called the within and the above.
Beyond conceptually legitimating moral judgement in the relevant cases one
needs to establish the particular character or focus of that judgement. Moral the-
ory revolves around two fundamental questions. The questions are: ‘what is good/
right?’, which is a matter of value, and ‘what ought one do?’, which is a matter of
obligation.318 In the terms of moral judgement we say of the convicted criminal
that what he did was bad/wrong, which we can call the evaluative element, and
that he ought not have done it, which we can call the normative element. (Different
scholars would give different names to these two elements in judgement, and of
course different accounts exist of the relation between value and obligation in
moral theory.)319 Whatever additional purposes the distinction between the
evaluative and normative elements has served in moral inquiry, it merits a par-
ticular emphasis when we are thinking about judgment across the boundaries of
different value systems. As opposed to the case of the convicted criminal in ‘our’
society, it would be odd to tell actors in another society that they should have
acted differently when they behaved in ways that were morally justified by their
lights. The normative element, in the sense defined above, does not then apply.
But the evaluative element may still apply as regards the lights according to which
those actors acted given, say, the implications of the mandated practice for other
people within or beyond that society.320 If this distinction holds for the person
looking at the diverse world around herself, it has at least as much weight for the
317 Burckhardt, Civilization, 271.

318 Bayles (ed.), Contemporary Utilitarianism, 2.
319 Ralph Wedgwood provides the evaluative-normative duo used above, while Christine Tappolet
refers to evaluative and deontic elements respectively. See Wedgwood, ‘The “Good” and the “Right”
Revisited’, Philosophical Perspectives 23 (2009), 499–519, here 499; Tappolet, ‘La Normativité des con-
cepts évaluatifs’, Philosophiques 38/1 (2011), 157–76.
320 This position seems consistent with Gilbert Harman’s distinction between ‘using the word
“wrong” to say that a particular situation or action is wrong from using the word to say that it is wrong
of someone to do something. In the former case, the word “wrong” is used to assess an act or situation.
In the latter case it is used to describe a relation between an agent and an act.’ That distinction is an
expression of Harman’s distinction between ‘inner judgements’ and other judgements. He wrote: ‘My
relativism is a thesis only about what I will call “inner judgments,” such as the judgment that someone
ought or ought not to have acted in a certain way or the judgment that it was right or wrong of him to
have done so. My relativism is not meant to apply, for example, to the judgment that . . . a given insti-
tution is unjust.’ Harman’s conception of ‘inner judgement’ here, which could actually be accommo-
dated within what this book earlier called moral contextualism, is related to the ‘motivational
internalism’ and ‘judgement internalism’ strands of ethical theory mentioned in this Part’s
Introduction (p. 127, n. 1). As noted, these sorts of internalism are related to the monadic internalism
with which the main text has been so preoccupied. For the relevant quotes, see Harman, ‘Moral
Relativism Defended’, in Russ Shafer-Landau, Ethical Theory: An Anthology (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackweel, 2013), 35–43, here 37, 36.
historian who is sensitive to the moral content of the past but appreciates the fatu-
ity of issuing oughts and ought-nots to the dead. In other respects, distinctions
are more apparent than real between judgements on things past and things
present.
The philosopher Bernard Williams, influential at many points in this book,
would not agree with the latter claim, and this section closes by countering his
argument as to the relativism of distance. The first step in Williams’s argument is
consistent with arguments above about the practical irrelevance of relativism in
real-life, say cross-cultural, encounters. Williams observes that at the moment of
contact it is already ‘too late’ for relativism to be relevant, because on contact
there is no separate ‘us’ and them’, but rather ‘a new “we” to be negotiated’.321
Precisely because of the encounter it is impossible to sit back and think abstractly
about cultural difference, because the relationship has to be continually negoti-
ated, whether to find some common ground or to fight it out in some more or less
literal fashion. The present work concurs with this argument, though it departs
from Williams’s further argument as it contrasted the interactive attitudes that we
must adopt towards ‘others’ who we encounter in the present with the attitude
which we can adopt towards past times or far-off others with whom we have
nothing more than notional contact. The contrast does not relevantly work, even
if one cannot engage in an argument with people in the past.
As against Williams’s ‘relativism of difference’ argument, even in the event of
clear water between ‘them’ and ‘us’, what seems from a distance like a homoge-
neous ‘them’ might fragment under the sort of scrutiny that the historian brings
to their affairs. Depending on their social set-up and our knowledge of its ramifi-
cations, we may not be able to talk of ‘their values’ in the collective singular, and
the character of social relations might stimulate the evaluative faculties. A hypo-
thetical example illustrates.
Say that in reading some historical evidence I discover a practice that seems to
bring happiness or suffering to some member(s) of the past foreign society in
question. My immediate reaction on encountering the practice is to think how
favourably or unfavourably that compares with some approximately equivalent
practice to which I am accustomed, or just to think how pleasant or unpleasant
the practice seems, period. Does the relevant relativist (or for that matter the non-
relativist advocate of blanket tolerance) tell me that I cannot have that initial, let
us call it ‘gut’, reaction? If so, then he is whistling in the wind. As well as the matter
of the impossibility of my controlling my gut reaction, the question of desirability
comes in to play here. First and foremost, in encountering this practice I am rec-
ognizing that something is being brought to bear on one or more entities who are
humans as well as being members of such-and-such a group. With that
321 Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed, 68–9. For an extension of the argument, see
his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 9.
recognition come a host of assumptions about significantly shared cognitive

capacity, shared capacity to experience pain, humiliation, joy, pride, love, shared
capacity to act and to perceive others to have acted well, poorly, justly, unjustly,
whatever the local standards of good and bad may be. The baseline parameter
whereby one assumes some shared humanness, in which ‘the human’ is not just
an empty, formal category, is presumably also subscribed to by most relativists.
This is what was meant at the outset of this book by the claim that relativism is,
generally speaking, an anthropocentric conception. If any given relativist does not
subscribe to that parameter, they need to clarify what their parameter is, because
relativism without a parameter to which things are relative does not make sense.
Perhaps, instead of protesting against the ‘gut’ reaction, the relativist tells me
that I cannot progress from that reaction to any further cognitive processing that
might result in a reasoned value judgement, whether less or more favourable? If
so, then even if such a dictum can really be followed in practice, it cannot remove
my initial reaction, so my visceral impression will remain the same, and will
merely be unadulterated by any reflection. This is a shame: the relativist will actu-
ally hinder any understanding of the other society, as that understanding might
be furthered by contextualized comprehension of the practice—comprehension
of its social function, of the theories underlying it, of the attitudes to it of various
practitioners, including the issue of how far those attitudes vary along power
cleavages, and so forth. Any prospect of sympathetic or admiring understanding
is thereby excluded alongside condign judgmentalism.
Perhaps the relativist permits the cognitive process up to but excluding any
evaluation that I might make about the practice. Can such a dictum really be fol-
lowed? Possibly, insofar as it is true that, while understanding and evaluation are
not opposed—the former should aid the latter—they are not the same thing. Yet
actually no, insofar as the drive to understand in this scenario was provided pre-
cisely by the desire to progress beyond the initial judgemental reaction. Even
without some formal conclusion to top off the whole business of reflection, it will
be impossible to ignore the way in which the greater understanding negated, rein-
forced, or diluted my initial reflex-appraisal. Evaluation is already upon me
whether its result is positive, negative, or neutral. The only question at this stage is
whether the evaluation will be informed or uninformed, reflective or unreflective.
Then the question comes as to how I should present the matter to my audience,
which returns us to the considerations raised in Part 2 of this book.
Past and Present in Conversation
Relational thought does not just lift conceptual silos surrounding discrete indi-
viduals or groups in the past; it also removes some of the sharper divisions
between past and present. In closing this Part of the book, with a mind to Part 4,
let us return to Williams’s concept of the relativism of distance. Another problem

with that argument is that it can elide different meanings of ‘distance’ between
past and present. To be sure, there will be temporal distance, but that is not the
only sort of distance in question. Williams’s formula does not make sufficient
allowance for the proximity or even contiguity of past and present in at least a
significant subset of historical inquiries.
Williams understandably seems to consider causality or its absence only in so
far as it flows from ‘us’, here and now, to ‘them’, whether past or elsewhere in the
present. The causal relationship of us to them has indeed been the main issue at
stake in the debates over Western foreign policy, where relativism relates to ques-
tions of intervention, i.e. what it is legitimate for ‘us’ to do to ‘them’. Such dilem-
mas of self-justification include when and whom it is legitimate for us to arm/
bomb/sanction/economically-penetrate/rule. The question of reciprocity is rarely
raised, namely when it is legitimate for ‘them’ to tell ‘us’ that our behaviour is
unacceptable, and to take remedial action. This is generally not a practical con-
cern these days, given extant power relations; one reason terrorism has become a
preoccupation of the world’s most powerful states is that it is one of the few effect-
ive weapons that otherwise weak people can use. However, there can be influence
from ‘them’ in the past to ‘us’ in the present, in the form of all sorts of material
bequests and identity legacies mediated inter alia by historians. The next part of
the book addresses these past–present relationships.
PART 4
H ISTORY, IDE N T IT Y, A ND
T HE PR E SE NT
Introduction
This, the final Part of the book, considers the role of historical consciousness in
the shaping of social and political identity. It is critical of prejudicial, upper-case
‘Identity History’, while calling upon historians to embrace their roles in histor-
ical arguments that pertain to identity. The balancing act is difficult. One needs to
distinguish between ways of participating in these identity arguments. It helps the
process of elucidation to address inconsistencies in the way some historians navi-
gate connections and disconnections with the past.
Distinguishing between the practices of different scholars within the discipline
of History also means refuting some of the general characterizations of historians
and their craft that are in circulation. These critical depictions may apply to cer-
tain works of History but not all. Consequently, as shown in the first section, such
‘solutions’ as are prescribed for the discipline by critical theorists are often remed-
ies for problems that do not exist at the relevant level. That first section clarifies
what falls outside the definition of pejorative Identity History, noting that a great
deal of excellent historical scholarship pertains to identity and even serves iden-
tity goals without being prejudicial in the way Identity History is.
The second section highlights where historians working on identity matters
are likely to fall into conceptual difficulty. The relationship between past and pre-
sent is complex indeed and raises the question of how distant our ancestors are
from us when we depart from purely temporal senses of ‘distance’. Is the relation-
ship between ‘them’ and ‘us’ a matter of identity or difference or a bit of both?
The answer has significant ramifications for how ‘we’ relate to ‘their’ behaviour.
Identity History is inconsistent in this area, with different attitudes taken
depending on whether that past behaviour was good or bad by present lights. In
the confrontation with what can be argued to be historical injustices, when the
knee-jerk response is not that ‘our’ past should be left to ‘us’ to investigate, which
is a species of ethnocentrism, it tends to be that the past should be left in the past,
which is only ever a selectively implemented doctrine that finds its greatest
employment among those whose constituencies have most benefited from the
past in question.
There are consequences for the historian’s engagement with past rights and
wrongs, harms and benefits, because claims on these matters constitute stakes in
the identity game whose winner gets to decide what is desirable in the here and
now. The third section develops such themes and distinguishes between more
and less appropriate idioms for characterizing the relationship between contem-
porary polities and social groups on one hand and the deeds of relevant ‘fore-
bears’ on the other hand. It is a mistake to talk of contemporary guilt, or for that
matter virtue, in light of what one’s predecessors did, but the language of shame
or pride may be perfectly appropriate, and both pride and shame can influence
one’s orientation in the present, as Part 3 of this book was at pains to illustrate.
The fourth section addresses the material legacies of past action. It considers
compensation, repatriation, and redistribution as significant political and moral
issues in their own right. That discussion also gives an obviously practical focus to
what can be abstract discussions about the legacy of the past as a bone of conten-
tion in the present. To the broader matter the concluding section returns.
Influential Misunderstandings
For most of its history, albeit with many exceptions, the occidental discipline of
History focused upon elites, the big battalions, wars and other matters of State
and Church, and national development. One reason is that History was often
written by members of elites for other members of elites.
An extensive and concerted challenge to these tendencies was the twentieth-
century proliferation of social History, broadly defined, as it grew from seeds
planted in earlier centuries. The rise of social History can be attributed to the rise
of new social movements from the nineteenth century, the general spread of lit-
eracy, then the broadening of participation in higher education. In its own way
the new cultural History of the final decades of the century further diversified
historical focus, while the recent trend towards global and world History has
expanded it yet further. The common factor in all of these ‘turns’ is a shift away
from elite actors to broader forces and to the conditions, movements, and experi-
ence of life of the many within and then beyond the global North-West.
Changes in historical focus have often been justified in ways in which the
political and the moral elements are intertwined. The Australian historian Greg
Dening talked of studying those ‘on whom the forces of the world press most
hardly’.1 Dening’s principle inheres in the very name of the intellectual project
1 Denning, cited in Klaus Neumann, ‘History, Memory, Justice’, in Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy,
and Andrew Sartori (eds), A Companion to Global Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014),
466–81, here 470.
History, Identity, and the Present 253
and publication series Subaltern Studies, while the popularity of ‘History from
Below’ showed the appetite for such a refocusing. Rendering ‘ordinary’ people
into more than abstractions also dignifies them with the recognition that they
were not just grist to the mills of greater forces. History is in principle the record
of all human experiences and experiments, however much erasure of the traces of
the marginalized limits History’s practice, and however much some historians of
power equate invisible with irrelevant. The importance of such projects as wom-
en’s History is intrinsic but also instrumental, in the sense of being counter-pre-
emptive. Women’s History, or the History of African Americans that buttressed
the civil rights movement, or the History of the working classes, and, more
recently, of people with different sexual orientations, and so much more besides,
seeks to disturb established presuppositions about what merits study, drawing
attention to what have too often been caricatures, or silences. Social Histories bore
implicit or explicit critiques of the prevailing dispensations at the time of their
writing, since even if important social conditions had changed over the centuries,
patriarchal, racist, and economic inequality had proved capable of reproducing
itself by adaptation. Such History not infrequently implied a critique of the social
arrangements of past worlds too, as most obviously when E. P. Thompson invoked
an imperative to ‘take sides’ with one or other historical party.2
If some of these Histories were politically forthright, or romanticizing, this was
not without reason.3 Sometimes their authors felt more obligation to those groups
than to the national professions—not to mention states—that had marginalized
them. While establishments might charge these new Histories with politicization,
we need to consider what this ‘politicized History’ was implicitly being contrasted
with, and to disavow any presupposition that more established sorts of History
were somehow more objective or apolitical, or unromanticized, or that their sole
concern was ‘the past for its own sake’. Social History was given impetus by the
desire to challenge the way in which many earlier high political and constitutional
historians forged coherent national stories out of the record of heterogeneous and
sometimes antagonistic social forces or just ignored such forces and focused on
national figureheads, and durable institutions. Indeed we can chart a moderately
strong correlation between the disavowal of overt moral judgement in a profes-
sionalizing nineteenth-century historiography and the desire for domestic unity
in the face of other states, as well, sometimes, as the desire for interstate harmony
in the face of international tensions: moral judgement, like focus on social disunity,
might be politically divisive.4
Any charge of politicization can elide distinctions between History written
for political reasons, History with political ramifications, History in which
2 Thompson, The Making, 226.

3 See Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s reflective introduction to the 2nd edn of their
Witches, Midwives and Nurses (New York: Feminist Press, 2010).
4 Bloxham, Why History? A History, ch. 6.
uncomfortable or thesis-challenging evidence is omitted for political ends, and

History whose content is manipulated by parts of its audience for political
reasons. There is no necessary contradiction between faithfulness to procedure
and political engagement. It is a fallacy to think that the commitment to truthful-
ness and rigour in the drawing of inferences from evidence must be undermined
if the historian writes with additional motives. One cannot judge the validity of
people’s intellectual claims by their motives for making them. A criticism of some
narrative of the ‘rise of X’ or ‘the benevolence of Y’ could at once be politically
motivated and more plausible—better substantiated—than the narrative under
criticism. Now consider the historian who wishes to write the History of group X
‘back into the historical record’ out of some sense of injustice, or fidelity to group
X in the present. Obviously the writing ‘back’ can be done in better and worse
ways in the procedural sense but if one has evidentiary warrant to infer that group
X has been the subject of an enduring cultural stereotype, or suffered historically,
or made some contribution hitherto ignored in the historiography, then under-
mining the stereotype or recording the suffering or contribution can serve such
political motives as the historian may have while honouring the precepts of robust
investigative procedure.
Whatever your author’s sympathies with so many of these Histories, whatever
his gratitude that they exist and belief that we need many more of them, there
nonetheless should not be a rule about what or who any given historian chooses
to study. A general principle of historianship such as the one this book explores
cannot be tied to specific objects of historical inquiry—high politics versus every-
day affairs, men versus women, dominators versus subalterns. Besides, if the
emphasis is on relative power rather than elites per se, a change of focus to ‘newer’
objects of historical inquiry does not automatically solve the problems per-
ceived as inherent in elite History. However widely ‘great man’ History has been
lampooned, the concept of a ‘great man’, or great woman, is always relative to the
scale of the historical drama under scrutiny.5
Historians of causation have good reason to focus on the powerful irrespective
of sympathies, antipathies, or moral indifference towards them, because the
powerful are disproportionately influential in bringing about change or, what is
just as significant and contrived, ensuring reproduction in conditions. For the
same reason of causal efficacy, it is a mistake to equate all work on the powerful
with elitism in the pejorative sense meant by references to the ‘great man school
of History’. After all, part of women’s History has been to show the causal role of
women too—the chief consideration for the causal historian is causal significance,
thus relative power, and as soon as, say, the relevant women are shown to be caus-
ally effective they must become part of the causal account too, or it is deficient
5 Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual, 62.

causal History. Elitism in the pejorative sense only comes into the picture if the
historian of the texture of life focuses on the relatively powerful as somehow espe-
cially important as manifestations of that texture—as if what the king felt about
his realm, separately to anything he did about that perception, was more import-
ant in telling us about life in that country than what any given peasant thought.
In order to clear the ground to focus on the implications of the position about
how historians discuss bits of the past rather than what bits they discuss, it is neces-
sary to address five clusters of well-meaning but flawed arguments to the contrary.
We may approach the first cluster of arguments by way of psychoanalyst Shoshana
Felman’s claim that ‘history by definition silences the victim, the reality of degrad-
ation and of suffering—the very facts of victimhood and abuse—are intrinsically
inaccessible to history’.6 She does not tell us who penned this peculiar definition,
but it is probably drawn from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas or the cultural
critic Walter Benjamin.7 The literary theorist Robert Eaglestone draws on Levinas
to make a similar point.8 Amongst other things, Levinas wrote that
The judgment of history is set forth in the visible. Historical events are the visible
par excellence; their truth is produced in evidence. The visible forms, or tends to
form, a totality . . . The invisible must manifest itself if history is to lose its right to
the last word, necessarily unjust for the subjectivity, inevitably cruel. . . . The
invisible is the offense that inevitably results from the judgment of visible his-
tory, even if history unfolds rationally. The virile judgment of history, the virile
judgment of ‘pure reason’, is cruel. The universal norms of this judgment silence
the unicity in which the apology is contained and from which it draws its
arguments.
But however Levinas has been interpreted, his main target was Hegelian specula-
tive philosophy of history, with its Aufhebung, its onward march of spirit, its
supra-historical progress, and so forth. Whatever else Levinas was doing, he was
scarcely engaging with the artisanal practice of all the historians in universities of
his time or subsequently.9 Benjamin’s thought too was oriented to ‘progressive’
philosophies of the ‘historical process’.
6 Shoshana Felman, ‘Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the
Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust’, Critical Inquiry 27/2 (2001), 201–38,
here 229.
7 Walther Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968), 253–64, esp.
256. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 241–3.
8 Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157.
9 Quote from Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 243. Dennis Beach writes that ‘For Levinas, “history” is
almost always Hegelian history’: Beach, ‘History and the Other: Dussel’s Challenge to Levinas’,
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 30/3 (2004), 315–30, here 318. Indeed in reference precisely to the
reproduced passage that Eaglestone also cites from Levinas about the ‘judgment of history’, Leslie
MacAvoy notes: ‘In Totality and Infinity Levinas writes disparagingly of history, particularly what he
calls the judgment of history, which he consistently associates with totality. It is clear that he has
The second flawed strand of argument can be a secularized derivative of the

first, or a homespun wisdom. It is that History is always written by the victors, the
powerful, the winners, and therefore amongst others the killers. The problem
with the victors’ claim is that even in the unlikely event no one in the victors’
camp is capable of self-criticism, victors themselves get defeated over time and
new ones arrive. The arrivistes need not have the same reservations as their pre-
decessors about criticizing those predecessors’ activities. Germany illustrates the
point as well as any state, as it has developed a culture of contrition, memorializa-
tion, and historical scholarship about the once-dominant ‘Third Reich’.
The third strand of argumentation can draw on either of the first two. The
claim here is that ‘to focus on a dominant process is necessarily to celebrate its
outcome’.10 On some accounts, such celebration may have implications of backing
the winner in some meta-historical development, or it may just be a way of focus-
ing on historically dominant elements in order to entrench a certain idea of
History and vindicate the position of such dominant elements in the process. A
variation on the claim that writing about a historical force somehow celebrates
that force is the claim that writing about the force actually reinforces it. This is the
fourth strand of arguments, and the sort of thing to which the historian of Africa
and imperialism Frederick Cooper alluded when talking about the difficulty of
studying imperial rule during his graduate years (1969–74): ‘studying pre-
colonial history or resistance constituted genuine African history, but bringing a
similar specificity of inquiry to that which was being resisted risked having one’s
project labeled as a throwback to imperial history’.11
The postcolonial theorist Gyan Prakash threw out an accusation analogous to
the one Cooper feared when he wrote that historical research necessarily ‘func-
tions to universalize capitalism and the nation-state’, without ever illustrating why
this was so.12 Prakash raised ‘the narrativization of Indian history in terms of the
development of capitalism’ and asked: ‘How is it possible to write such a narrative,
but also contest, at the same time, the homogenization of the contemporary world
Hegel’s teleological conception of history in mind’ Leslie MacAvoy, ‘Levinas and the Possibility of
History’, Philosophy Today 49/5 (2005) (suppl.), 68–73, here 68. See also on mistaken identity Levinas,
Totality and Infinity, 247: ‘What is above all invisible is the offense universal history inflicts on particu-
lars’; ‘the visible judgment of history which seduces the philosopher’. Emphases added.
10 David D. Roberts, Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity After Metaphysics (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 287, emphasis in Roberts. Roberts criticizes
the sort of claim in question, and he has in mind Joan Scott’s position in her dispute with the con-
servative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb that culminated in the article Joan Scott, ‘History in Crisis?
The Others’ Side of the Story’, American Historical Review 94/3 (1989), 680–92. See more generally
Roberts’s discussion at pp. 262–5, 280–90.
11 Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, American
Historical Review 99/5 (1994), 1516–45, here 1522.
12 Gyan Prakesh, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review 99/5
(1994), 1475–90, here 1489.
by capitalism?’13 Unless this question is set up to be construed in a circular fashion,

the answer is: easily enough, if one writes critically about capitalism.
There is only a problem here if one is labouring under a sort of discursive
idealism whereby even criticism of something buttresses its reality by dint of
invoking it. To be sure, that is a real concern in issues of, say, ascribed gender
roles, where the repeated use of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in certain connections rein-
forces a perception about ‘naturalness’ or propriety in relation to such-and-such a
capacity and activity. But that case is not analogous to the one in hand, because
Prakash claims to identify something true about capitalism (its homogenizing
tendency) while seeking to combat that thing. Contesting something presupposes
some knowledge of it, and knowledge of the sort in question can only be acquired
and transmitted discursively, so Prakash is in a dilemma.14
Prakash’s confusion is of the same sort as when terms like ‘Eurocentrism’ or
‘Western-centrism’ are bandied about without due regard for what the work in
question is actually saying about Europe or the West, and what the author’s stated
or inferable attitudes are to non-Europeans or non-Westerners. The broad selec-
tion of people to whom Eurocentrism might be and indeed has been applied
includes racists who insist on the natural superiority of Europeans over Asians,
Africans, and indigenous Americans; cultural chauvinists who think that, for
whatever reason, ‘the West’ has achieved a higher level of cultural development
and ‘rationality’ that has given it an advantage in every other respect; environ-
mental determinists who believe that Europe has some distinct ecological advan-
tages; non-racist historians who neglect or underestimate the role of Western
imperialism in European history; and [those], who are neither racists, nor cul-
tural chauvinists, nor ecological determinists, nor inclined to underestimate the
evils of imperialism, but who believe that certain specific historical conditions in
Europe, which have nothing to do with European superiority, produced certain
specific historical consequences—such as the rise of capitalism.15
The quoted words are Ellen Meiksins Wood’s and it is to be hoped that the forego-
ing historical critiques, and indeed this whole book, fall into her final category:
13 Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World’, in Vinayak Chaturvedi
(ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2012), 163–90, here 177.
14 As Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook point out in their ‘After Orientalism: Culture,
Criticism and Politics in the Third World’, in Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies, 191–219.
15 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 27–8;
Wood, ‘Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism’, Against the Current 92 (May/June 2001), 29–35. Note that in
Wood’s original text the word ‘Marxists’ appears where I have used the parenthesized ‘those’. This is
not because I wish to hide the role of Marxists in the sort of project with which Wood is sympa-
thetic—quite the opposite. It is just that excerpted from the context of the book and article cited
above, with its specific focus on Marxism and theories of capitalism, the quote might give the impres-
sion that only Marxists opposed Eurocentrism in this way, or that no Marxist had ever been
Eurocentric, both of which are wrong.
this study is Occident-focused through and through because it is concerned with

some influential, and in important ways faulty, occidental ways of seeing things.
The basic point as applied to historiography is that there is no such thing as a
conservative, or authoritarian, or radical (or whatever) choice of historical topic,
only a conservative, or authoritarian, or radical (or whatever) way of dealing with
that topic.
The fifth relevant strand of arguments contested here derives from the idea that
‘the archive’ binds the historian to the perspective of those who produced the
records in it. Unlike the first three strands, the historian is not a dictator to the
historical record and her contemporary world, nor an executor of some grand
philosophy of History. Rather, she is helpless in the face of what ‘the documents’
tell her to think and who to sympathize with. It is true, for instance, that in the
historiography of the Highland Clearances of the nineteenth century, those who
have used the estate records of the evictor-landlords have sometimes clashed with
those working from the testimonies of the evictees. The mind also goes back to
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips 1918 account American Negro Slavery which infamously
replicated American slave-owners’ view of themselves as paternalistic, the slaves
as content—a view that survived in some form through some major academic
works of the 1950s.16 But the implicit equation must be resisted that the use of a
certain set of sources necessarily makes the historian identify with the people
whose sources they were, since that would lead us to the curious conclusion that
Roberts Conquest and Service are morally sympathetic to Stalin or Ian Kershaw
taken in by his biographical subject Hitler.
Many of these stances and others like them have been adopted in recent years
in the historiography of the Holocaust, especially as regards which elements of
the genocide different historians focus on. Historian Omer Bartov asserts, with-
out substantiation, that ‘Writing the history of genocide only from the perspec-
tive of the killers, whatever one’s intentions, leads to writing a history of atrocity
lacking a human face, thereby becoming complicit in the depersonalization, not
to say dehumanization of the victims sought by the perpetrators’.17 Note that writing
about the killers becomes in this understanding writing ‘from the perspective of
the killers’. Historian Alexandra Garbarini writes, with another historian’s remarks
about the importance of studying perpetrators in mind, that
Perhaps genocide prevention and activism could be equally well served by

people considering deeply, and empathizing with, the historical experiences of
genocide victims as well as perpetrators. Activism does not necessarily follow
16 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: Appleton and Company, 1918);
Davis, ‘Reflections’, 157.
17 Bartov in ‘Review Forum: Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide’, Journal of Genocide
Research 13/1–2 (2011), 107–52, here 128.
from people getting in touch with their own ability to violate others’ human
rights. It may just as much follow from people understanding those whose rights
have been violated.18
Consider the phraseology. In one case it is a matter of scholars understanding

those who have been violated. In the other it is scholars accessing their own ability
to violate. This is much the same as implying that an interest in the causes of
crime makes the criminologist herself an aspiring criminal. Historian Doris
Bergen pronounces that the ‘biggest challenge’—not one of many big challenges
but the biggest challenge—‘facing scholars of the Holocaust and of every case of
extreme violence is how to develop methods to talk about the people on the receiv-
ing end of persecution and abuse’. She also implies that only the historian who
examines victim experiences can be said to evince ‘understanding’.19 Like Bartov,
Bergen provides no philosophical justification of her position, and she does not
tell her readers what she understands by ‘understanding’. Nonetheless she has
assigned herself the role of awarding praise or criticism to works of Holocaust
History depending on the extent to which they address victim experiences.20
A peculiar logic is in play when historians are told what to study by Bergen as
she adopts a quantitative approach, as if dedicating x number of pages to matter a
incurs a moral responsibility to devote x number of pages to matter b, which
would mean only giving half of the attention one felt merited to matter a or writ-
ing a book twice as long.21 Ultimately the quantitative attitude gives the game
away in its implication that there is a sort of accounting balance to be struck—as
if the moral negative of focusing on perpetration had to be countered by the
moral positive of focusing on victims. Certainly Bergen’s school of thought would
see that it might be intellectually complementary to focus on both perpetration
and victims, and depending on precise line of inquiry that is surely right. But in
moral terms the assumption is of antagonism between the two lines of inquiry,
which is incorrect. There is no reason why focusing on perpetration cannot be
complementary in moral terms to the important task of examining victims’
18 Alexandra Garbarini, ‘Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History’, Jewish Quarterly Review
102/1 (2012), 81–90, here 90.
19 Bergen, in ‘Review Forum: Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide’, 134.
20 As opposed to her criticisms locatable via n. 19, see Bergen’s positive review of Garbarini’s
Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) in Central
European History 42/2 (2009), 364–6. Note that Bergen is also inconsistent in her reasoning. In
reviewing Garbarini’s Numbered Days she linked it explicitly to Saul Friedlander’s ‘integrated history’
which weaves together accounts of perpetration and victims’ experiences, even though, as Garbarini’s
title suggests, her book is about victims and their accounts, not perpetrators or perpetration. In this
review the relevant connotations of ‘integrated’ are not about incorporating different angles of inquiry
at all; they amount to the study and use of personal victim accounts and what Bergen asserts, without
defining, as ‘profound and critical empathy’. ‘Empathy’ and its connotations will be considered below.
21 For Bergen’s remarks on book size and representative proportions, ‘Review Forum: Donald
Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide’, 134.
experiences, just as there is no reason focusing on the mechanisms of empire

cannot be morally complementary to studying the victims of exploitation.
The matter hinges on the quality of evidence to some degree, a little more on
skill in interrogating evidence, and most of all on purposes in so doing. The only
point at which the operations of the historian of Hitler, Himmler, or the lowliest
Ukrainian auxiliary policeman become problematic in moral terms is when these
historians move from explanation/understanding to justification or obfuscation
of what they brought about. Justification, or at least a tortuous mitigation, was the
problem with Ernst Nolte’s The European Civil War (see p. 108). The historian
Michael M. Gunther opened his Armenian History and the Question of Genocide
claiming to provide ‘an objective analysis of the Turkish point of view’, which is at
once disarmingly frank and raises the question of what it is that he meant to be
objective towards—the official Turkish view is the one he broadly adopts over the
coming pages, so he could be said to have reproduced that ‘objectively’. (One sus-
pects that this is not what he meant.)22 Clearly not all historical accounts legitim-
ate in this way, though, because explanation and justification are not necessarily
the same things, though Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, who is probably
the inspiration behind Bergen’s and Bartov’s assertions, does sometimes conflate
them. He wrote that ‘no one of sound mind would wish to interpret the events
from Hitler's viewpoint’.23 Here Friedlander depicts ‘interpretation’ in just the
problematic way that Gustave le Bon defined proper understanding (p. 105).
However ‘interpretation’ could alternatively pertain to an explanation in which
the historian recognizes that Hitler was a virulent anti-Semite and shows how
that world-view affected Hitler’s actions, but in which the historian does not take
on that world-view. The evidence for the viability of the latter interpretation of
‘interpretation’ is widespread in the historiography of the Holocaust.
If one wishes to clear up these conceptual misunderstandings then conceptual
precision is all important, especially as regards that protean term ‘empathy’, which
has been hovering around this whole conversation and is weaponized by Bergen
alongside ‘understanding’.24 Conceptual precision is not aided by the fact that
salient definitions have differed across time and between contemporaries. Kant,
for instance, distinguished between Mitleidenschaft and Teilnehmung.25 The for-
mer, meaning compassion or commiseration, was passive. The latter connoted a
more active participation in others’ feelings and experiences. The former coin-
cides with at least one important definition of sympathy, while the latter coincides
with at least one important conception of empathy, which is the focus here.
22 Michael M. Gunther, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), p. ix.
23 Friedlander, ‘The “Final Solution” ’, 32. 24 See nn. 19 and 20.
25 Anna Wehofsits, Anthropologie und Moral: Affekte, Leidenschaften und Mitgefühl in Kants Ethik
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), passim, esp. 140.
In much nineteenth-century thought, through R. G. Collingwood’s version of

it, empathy was considered a cognitive, not affective, matter. It was a way of think-
ing, a form of temporary perspective-understanding, not a way of feeling in the
emotional sense. This changed, at least in common usage, at some point in the
twentieth century, and empathy gained stronger affective connotations in much
usage. But even working with the more recent popular affective conception of
empathy, there is no need to read into empathy any of the warmth or solicitousness
that we might imply by use of the word sympathy (in one of its common usages).
The understanding-of-the-other that is the only necessary component of
empathy—the only component without which the concept is incapable of per-
forming the work of any definition of it—will be shown by the competent torturer
or boxer just as much as the friend or therapist. In other words, if empathy does
have an affective component, it has no inherent normatively ‘positive’
calibration.26
Once we have accepted that study of the powerful can be complementary
rather than antipathetic to the concerns of those examining the experience of
power’s victims, we are actually back to a fairly standard ethics of historical prac-
tice, subject to the arguments of this book hitherto about factoring in ‘external’
moral evaluation in the characterization of acts. Precisely because historians need
not identify with particular past actors when engaged in transmitting to their
readers what they infer about those actors, the politics of the past need not be
reproduced with the historian as witting or unwitting advocate for one side.
Indeed we may need to take issue with those historians who do identify in this
way in the event that their identification affects the moral contextualization of
relevant historical actors and the characterization of their acts. So we come to
examine how History that is relevant to identity, i.e. lower-case identity History,
might metamorphose into a more problematic upper-case Identity History.
Relating to the Past
The influence of past on present comes in many forms, through many channels.
There just are some ways in which the past shapes us that exist independently of
what we say about it—say economic, legal, or environmental structures into
which individuals or polities are born. This does not mean what we say about
those structures cannot contribute to their alteration, which is important in sub-
sequent sections. The present section focuses not on enduring material structures
but on the sort of ‘inheritance’ that is more completely shaped by how it is
26 I thank David Deutsch, whose speciality this is, for insights on empathy, including, if my mem-
ory is correct, the example of the torturer.
discussed, which is where historians—professional, amateur, official—and the

heritage industry are key players.
The issues are especially challenging in identity History because of the tension
between historicity, meaning the embeddedness of oneself in historically shaped
contexts and by extension the relevance and conceptual proximity of the past, and
modern historical consciousness, with its connotations of the past’s separateness
from the present. Some wordplay helps elucidate. ‘Relative’ roots two different
things. ‘Relativism’ points to moral-cultural difference and accords with the neo-
historicist orthodoxy of treating the historical actor as a distant ‘other’. ‘Relatives’,
or ‘relations’, points to proximity or similarity in some respects. The perception of
some proximity or similarity, embedded in the sense of historicity, explains why
so many Americans are interested in American History, so many French people
in French History, etcetera. Herein lies the difference between many sorts of
History and anthropology.
Despite the formal and logical similarities between understanding people in
the context of their times and of their culture, History in the global North-West
has had more difficulty with negotiating the ramifications of relativism/relation-
ality than has anthropology in most of its historical variants. This is because with
anthropologists (generally speaking), the consideration of temporal change
comes ‘after’ the apprehension of cultural difference. Anthropologists generally
locate physically and culturally distant ‘others’ in the present and may study ‘their’
past to shed further light on them, but the historical element of the examination
has few ramifications for reflection on their ‘otherness’ from the perspective of
any present-day interface between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In other words, study of the
pasts of ‘others’ does not close such anthropological gaps as have already been
opened by distinguishing between their ways and our ways in the present.
Conversely, the societies that have produced most paid historians have produced,
in numbers disproportionate to the total, historians who study the History of
their own society. For the French historian of France, the route may begin by
charting ‘otherness’ in the past, but in the knowledge that at some point there
may be a convergence between Their ways and Our ways, between Them and Us.
In the title A History of the English-Speaking Peoples the temporal differentiation
indicated by History is tempered by the identity of cultural-linguistic commonal-
ity. In The Rise of the West, historical movement (‘rise’) exists alongside referential
stability (‘West’).
Histories with a major identity component tend to rely especially on genealogy,
analogy, or metonym, though these are not always distinct and the genealogical
element tends to run through each. Identity by genealogy is a question of con-
necting oneself to those whom one chooses as relevant forebears. An especially
influential genealogical type is the ‘national story’, which is concerned with
epochs, episodes, and people from a given nation’s past.
National genealogy can help to establish that Wir-Gefühl, that sense of

‘We-hood’ or ‘Us-ness’ that was promoted by historians in early medieval Saxony,
as by the monk Bede (c.673–735) in England or the Royal Frankish Annals whose
production coincided with Charlemagne’s founding of a grand public court.27
Coleridge’s The Constitution of Church and State invoked a national clerisy of
schoolteachers tasked ‘to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civil-
ization, and thus to bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to the same,
and thus to connect the present with the future’.28 Coleridge bears out the convic-
tion of one scholar of nationalism that if ‘there is no memory, there is no identity;
no identity, no nation’.29 An issue for the nation-builder is that ‘On the one hand,
the nation is always coming into being but not yet fully itself, hence the need for it
to be educated about itself. On the other, it has always already existed, is eternal,
and its people are linked with one another in a linear fashion through history,
hence the need for the nation’s past to be vindicated.’30
Confronting the education issue was the historian and journalist Max Hastings
(b. 1945), one of the most prominent pundits on historical issues in Britain’s
national press. He mused as follows on school curricula.
[The Labour Government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority report of

2005] argues that schools ‘undervalue the overall contribution of black and
other minority ethnic peoples to Britain's past, and . . . ignore their cultural, sci-
entific and many other achievements’ . . . Yet how is it possible to do much of this
in a British school without distorting the western experience, which anyone liv-
ing here is signed up to? Pupils in modern African or Indian schools obviously
focus their historical studies on the experience of subject races under foreign
rule. But, as a profound sceptic about multiculturalism, I can't see the case for
such an agenda, unless the vast majority of British people are to pretend to be
something they are not. . . . History is the story of the dominance, however
unjust, of societies that display superior energy, ability, technology and might. If
one’s own people were victims of western imperialism, it is entirely understand-
able that one should wish to study history from their viewpoint. But, whatever
the crimes of our forefathers, this is the country of Drake, Clive and Kitchener,
not of Tipu Sultan, Shaka Zulu or the Mahdi. . . . At the weekend, I glanced at
some of my old school essays. . . . They were no more ‘relevant’ to middle-class
white teenagers then than to schoolchildren of West Indian or Muslim origins
27 Wolfgang Eggert and Barbara Pätzold, Wir-Gefühl und Regnum Saxonum bei frühmittelalterli-
chen Geschichtsschreibern (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984); Rosalind McKitterick, ‘Constructing the Past in
the Early Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997), 101–29, here 115.
28 Coleridge, On the Constitution, 43–4.
29 Anthony D. Smith, ‘Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of
Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 2/3 (1996), 371–88, here 383.
30 Richard Seymour, ‘The British Have Invaded 90% of the World’s Countries: Ha ha?’, The
Guardian, 6 November 2012. Emphases added.
now. We addressed them, first, because education is properly about learning to

think, and objectively to assess evidence; second, so that we knew something
about a broad sweep of the history of the society to which, whether by birth or
migration, we belonged. We were developing a sense of British cultural identity,
which no amount of social engineering can honestly relocate far from Crecy and
Waterloo, Pepys and Newton31
Oddly, Hastings distinguishes his recommendations from ‘social engineering’,

which he associates with ‘multiculturalism’. He dislikes multiculturalism, but
since a certain level of multiculturalism is the current state of affairs, he must
mean to endorse altering the fact of diversity by policy. It is hard to see this as
anything other than social engineering. His agenda is forging a We in the present
by ‘appropriate’ historical instruction, which is a common form of History as
national genealogy.
Identity by analogy operates along some of the same lines as the classical and
medieval idea of History as moral instruction by examples. We might alterna-
tively call it the ‘contemporary relevance’ strand. It primarily concerns identifica-
tion with or against bygone doing in the form of discrete events or the actions of
personages. For the significance of political analogies long after most academic
historians decided that exemplarity was an outdated conceit, one need only con-
sult Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and
the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.32 The most attractive analogies are substantive as
well as logical. In a substantive analogy the comparison is not only effective in its
reasoning across the case in question and the analogized case (which suffices to
make a logical analogy), there is some plausible identity between the objects com-
prising the analogy and the situation to which the analogy is made. What consti-
tutes a substantive analogy is in the eye of the beholder, as when the failure of
appeasement in the 1930s was invoked to justify—amongst many actions at other
times—the 2003 invasion of Iraq.33 An alternative substantive analogy to the
invasion was the story of earlier counter-productive and self-interested Western
meddling in the Middle East.
Metonymy means using one thing to refer to something else associated with it
or of which it is part. ‘The guillotine’ is a metonym for the French Revolution, not
an analogy to or metaphor for it, because it is part of what we understand by the
Revolution and represents the whole. Since the conceptualization of the whole
varies among historians, it is not always easy to distinguish metonymical refer-
ences from genealogical or analogical ones in Identity Histories. Episodes in the
31 Hastings, ‘This Is the Country of Drake and Pepys, Not Shaka Zulu’, The Guardian, 27 December
2005.
32 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
33 For many such examples of appeasement as a ‘lesson of history’, Sidney Aster, ‘Appeasement:
Before and After Revisionism’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 19/3 (2008), 443–80.
past of ‘Great Britain’ can be used genealogically in the sense of that past being
related developmentally to the British present, as one would think of a grandpar-
ent; they can be used analogically or metaphorically as points of alleged similarity
that just happen to be from the history of Great Britain but could be part of any
polity’s history; or they can be used metonymically in the sense of establishing
identity between past and present Great Britains, such that past episodes of
British history stand for Britain today.
Adapting the terms of historian Charles Maier, we may dub as matters of ‘hot
memory’ those specific bits of the past on which identity Historians are especially
apt to alight, whether they deploy genealogy, analogy, or metonym.34 Golden
ages, bygone empires, and famous victories vie with defeats, servitude, and dark
ages. Images or triumph and success need not win out—one may relate positively
to failures. Vainglory is a resource, as shown by the use of Serbian memories of
defeat by the Ottomans in 1389, or my adopted country’s unofficial national
anthem, ‘Flower of Scotland’. Lachrymose uses of identity can be just as useful as
positive images, as the competitive identity politics of victimhood in the contem-
porary USA shows. It might seem, intuitively, that the hottest memories are apt to
concern the more recent past, as with, say, the idea of the Italians as the brava
gente of the Second World War Axis alliance, France with its Vichy syndrome and
résistancialisme, the Soviet Great Fatherland War, and so on. But not only are heat
and proximity relative concepts, in some cases the very distance of the salient past
is itself the point. To those Lebanese who still proudly call themselves Phoenicians,
or those early medieval Franks or Anglo-Normans like Henry of Huntingdon
who claimed lineage from the Trojans, the antiquity of the reference point is an
important indicator of civilizational pedigree. In such cases, as with aristocrats
tracing family trees, the more distant the relevant past, the better. In order to sub-
stantiate its self-congratulatory claims about the progressive evolution of English
liberties, ‘Whig’ History required an assimilation of the ostensible disruption of
the Norman Conquest into a yet longer island story. Judging by references to such
things as the ‘classical heritage’, or Judaeo-Christian civilization, occidental iden-
tity goes deep and, with it comes a very long History of ‘othering’, selective bor-
rowing, and selective acknowledgement of debt. Those Serbian nationalists who
hark back to the 1389 defeat at Ottoman hands on the ‘field of blackbirds’ in
Kosovo in substantiation of their claim to the province do not perceive the inter-
vening years to have diminished the relevance of the historical episode. Such
demands, and the counter-demands that may ensue, illustrate the general
selectivity of the politics of History, but they also show why one does not need to
be an historian of the modern to get an animated audience that extends well
beyond the academy of vocational scholars.
34 Charles Maier, ‘Mémoire chaude, mémoire froide: Mémoire du fascisme, mémoire du commu-
nisme’, Le Débat 122/5 (2002), 109–17.
When historians write on matters of hot memory, they are doing their most
sensitive work. Different historians not only write for different audiences—the
popular market, the profession in general, the Annales editorial board, the cur-
rently fashionable crowd in the American Historical Association—but they
cater to differing degrees to what they might perceive those audiences want
from them. The catering might take the form of style or jargon, and is often
just a harmless form of window dressing, but we would scarcely have to tax
ourselves to find examples where History is tailored altogether more in terms
of content than which theorist or potential referee one finds it professionally
expedient to cite. Whence and whither the identity thrust cannot be codified,
but the inclinations, expectations, foreknowledge and forejudgement of pre-
sent audience and social order can be powerful influences on the historian
who is a member of one or more identity groups prior to and after becoming a
historian of one of those identity groups. The result is not necessarily circular
reinforcement of a given world-view: many ‘self ’-critical Histories exist even
if they are not abundantly represented in cases like some of those recently
mentioned.
Inconsistencies, moral and otherwise, can ensue as scholars advertently or
inadvertently cross the line between identity-relevant History and prejudicial
Identity History. Three examples from my island context illustrate. The historians
in question have been chosen not because they are intellectually unusual but
because they evince common contradictions and have a voice beyond the
academy.
The first case is the aforementioned Geoffrey Alderman. He was the historian
who argued in 2008 against posthumous pardons for ‘witches’ and ‘deserters’
(p. 116). What was ‘then’ considered ‘ “right” may now be considered very wrong’,
he found. Understanding of the past was to be separated from present concerns
by the application of neo-historicist principles. Alderman’s opinion was different
when in 2010 he commented on the new Conservative government’s proposal to
rewrite the national school History curriculum in a spirit contradictory to that of
the report of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority under the previous
Labour government—the report of which Max Hastings disapproved (p. 263).
‘History’, Alderman wrote, ‘is the collective memory of society. It is that memory
which informs society’s attitude to itself and to the world around it.’ That is why
he disapproved of the teaching in schools of what he understood to be an ‘essen-
tially negative impression of British political and social development over the past
500 or so years’. Let us underline that Alderman was no longer objecting to the
idea of positive or negative impressions of the past as anachronistic failures to
observe the historicist principles that he urged in the contemplation of deserters
and witch-trials. He merely wished for a more positive view of the past, as in his
enthusiasm for the sort of History he had learned at school: ‘Above all, perhaps,
I was taught that imperialism had its virtues as well as its vices.’35
Other historians only need the space between one sentence and the next to
shift from ‘neutral’ to partisan status. Our second case is the military historian
Antony Beevor, who wrote:
I would never argue that historians or history teachers have a moral role. Their
main obligation is to understand the mentality of the time and to pass on that
understanding: it is not to apply 21st-century values in retrospect. Nor should
they simplify for moral effect. It is absolutely right to convey the horrors of the
Atlantic slave trade, but the role of African leaders themselves in promoting
slavery must also be explained. So must the fact that the eastern slave trade,
mainly to the Arabian peninsula, was older and more lethal. Certainly it led to
the death of more victims in peculiarly horrible circumstances.36
The only consistency of this passage lies in its defensiveness. In the first three
sentences Beevor plays the neo-historicist, seeking only to comprehend the differ-
ence of foreign countries past. In the next three he is advocate for the defence,
using evocative and evaluative language to stigmatize others more than the
Atlantic slave-traders. Historians and history teachers should not have a moral
role—except where they must remind their audience that others have done worse
things than the British, and so should have more of any blame that is to be spread
around.
We return to Max Hastings for the third case. We will bear in mind his recom-
mendations for the teaching of History at school (pp. 263–4), which is a topic that
binds together all three of these historians. In that manifesto he acknowledged in
passing ‘the crimes of our forefathers’,37 but it is unclear what he was prepared to
do with such recognition. In one of his review essays, entitled ‘High-handed
moral condemnation’ (somehow ‘vindication’ is never conceived as high-handed),
he noted:
All participants in all wars are in some degree morally compromised by the
experience. [The philosopher Anthony] Grayling seems to have nothing more
useful to tell us about the [Allied Second World War] bomber offensive than
writers who inveigh against, say, the conduct of the British empire in the 18th cen-
tury. We know that today we would do it all differently, but that is not the point.38
35 Geoffrey Alderman, ‘Bring on the History Revolution in Schools’, The Guardian, 3 June 2010.
36 Antony Beevor, ‘Antony Beevor in Defence of History’, The Guardian, 12 November 2010.
37 Hastings, ‘This Is the Country of Drake and Pepys’.
38 Hastings, ‘High-Handed Moral Condemnation’, Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2006.
What of the conduct of the British Empire not in the eighteenth century, but the
1950s, then? When Hastings was brought by a pair of accounts of the British
counter-insurgency war in Kenya (the ‘Mau-Mau’ conflict) to acknowledge the
‘painful’ truth of what had been done there—painful, that is, to those who still
sympathize with some of the British Empire’s projects, not to the erstwhile victims
and their families—he objected forthrightly to any compensation for survivors of
torture by the British army, and advocated leaving the matter to historians alone.39
Hastings was keener that non-historians take a definite stand when it came to
British preparations for centenary commemorations of the outbreak of the First
World War. He chastised politicians for their reticence on ‘the virtue of Britain’s
cause, or the blame that chiefly attaches to Germany for the catastrophe that over-
took Europe’: the government, he mocked, ‘calls this a “non-judgmental” approach.
The rest of us might call it a cop-out.’40 This judgement was in the same spirit of
his claim that ‘Winston Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the
greatest human beings of the 20th century, indeed of all time’.41 But it was also
made shortly after he reviewed another book on the Allied bombardment of
Germany in which he concluded that a ‘sensible judgment about wartime bomb-
ing, as about almost everything in life, must lie somewhere in the middle ground’.42
Opaque in all this is just where Hastings stands on evaluation and the relation-
ship between historicism and historicity. He has some concept of anachronism,
albeit not one that hinders the occasional transhistorical judgement about ‘great-
ness’. In his curricular recommendations he professed authority on what History’s
remit is, though his prescriptions alternated between the story of dominant ‘soci-
eties’ and the story of one’s own society. Even then ‘society’ was not the correct
word for what he was really getting at: dominant states, classes, or sexes would
have been more appropriate given that he selected Newton, Pepys, Clive,
Kitchener, Drake, and some wars as his emblems of Britishness/Englishness,
rather than, say, Victorian child labourers, deported convicts, executed ‘deserters’,
persecuted homosexuals, or African slaves in Britain’s transatlantic dominions. In
sum, it was not just a matter of trying to homogenize the present We by appropri-
ate historical education; it was a matter of selectively constructing an ‘ideal’ past
We to which the present We was supposed to relate. Hastings’s principles of
anachronism do not sit easily with these identity interests. On one hand Britons
born and naturalized are supposed to immerse themselves in British History for
39 Hastings, ‘The Dark Side of the Empire’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2005; Hastings, ‘The Folly of
Judges, Vulture Lawyers and a Nation Addicted to Masochism’, Daily Mail, 16 July 2012; and in the
same vein, ‘Yes, Slavery Was Evil: But It Would Be Insane to Force Us to Pay Damages for Age-Old
Wrongs’, Daily Mail, 11 March 2014.
40 Hastings, ‘Sucking Up to the Germans Is No Way to Remember Our Great War Heroes, Mr
Cameron’, Daily Mail, 11 June 2013.
41 Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–1945 (London: Harper Collins, 2010), p. xv.
42 Hastings’s review of Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane,
2013), Sunday Times, Culture magazine, 29 March 2013, 38.
the present (anachronism ignored), while on the other hand matters like carpet
bombing of cities or the conduct of the British Empire are dismissed as having
nothing to do with identity (anachronism invoked).
If Hastings sees himself as tolerant towards the inhabitants of the past then he
only achieves this selectively. Since the actions of eighteenth-century imperialists
and twentieth-century bombers had huge, deleterious repercussions for the
people on the receiving end, tolerance of the perpetrators in this sense is tanta-
mount to taking sides. If he does have some properly relativistic account of differ-
ence, rather than the sort of absolutism that he attributes to Grayling, some
further explanation is needed as to why he only applies that relativism inconsist-
ently. Given his ‘We know that today we would do it all differently’ he will also
need to clarify why his conception of different standards is not also a claim of the
superiority of today’s moral sensibility. If he forbears from explicit judgement on
grounds of sufferance, then he has already made up his mind that past or other-
wise different worlds are morally inferior to Ours such that we can adopt a pater-
nalistic attitude to them. If chronocentrism/ethnocentrism is indeed his position
he needs to be open about it—though that will show him to be thoroughly
embroiled in judgementalism.
Hastings’s sometime pose as detached neo-historicist notwithstanding, he fully
understands History’s power to shape identity (a sense of historicity) in the pre-
sent, as his intervention on curricula matters shows, and this explains his attempt
to have his cake and eat it. For Hastings, British History is for actual and would-
be Britons, against the backdrop of an empire that sought to make the world
England. The past means everything and nothing. We have triumphs without real
slaughter, enrichment without real exploitation, expansion without real dispos-
session, historically informed identity without historically derived identity chal-
lenges. ‘Our historical identity’ turns out to be highly selective between the good
and the bad, even before we get to the crass politicians who wax populist about
Our Island Story, or whatever the equivalent narrative elsewhere is.
These tendencies and variants on them are anything but unusual. Judgement is
made where it suits identity purposes, and the relativism of distance invoked
where it does not. Inhabitants of the past are of ‘us’ in certain ways but not in
others, and their allocation to either side of the divide conveniently maintains the
integrity of our usable past. The enduring greatness of Greek civilization is neatly
separated from Greek slavery, which of course has nothing to say to Us, Now.
Compare and contrast this treatment with the long-standing focus on the vio-
lence of the Mongols as somehow definitive of their record, as opposed, say, to the
provision for cultural exchange and mutually enriching commerce of the Pax
Mongolica. Victorians are men of Their times when massacring Africans or
deploying child labour (of course we’d do things differently now), but Our forebears
when it comes to their achievements in industry, engineering, and civics. The latter
achievements become common cultural property, as Englanders with no technical
training whatsoever bask in the reflected glory of ‘Western medicine’ or ‘technol-

ogy’ or the parliamentary tradition as if this were a mark of personal achievement.
But then we change our minds when it comes to things like colonialism: nothing to
do with me, m’lud—unless we are among that not insignificant band still prepared
to argue that colonialism was a Good Thing.
The former Australian premier John Howard exemplified the tensions and
resolved them, to his own satisfaction at least. On historical violence and dis-
crimination towards the indigenous peoples of Australia, Howard stated repeat-
edly to the effect that we should ‘understand the past in its own terms’, not in
accordance with ‘our own contemporary standards’,43 yet as with Alderman and
Hastings the moral separation of past from present militated against his desire to
celebrate, as he once put it, what ‘many generations of Australians have worked
hard to secure’.44 Sensitive to the contradiction, it seems, Howard resorted to that
treacherous rhetorical device, the language of balance: ‘I believe that the balance
sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much
more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed.’45
Given the much greater weight of good in the scales, a weight established ‘by
assertion rather than audit’,46 it hardly made sense to dwell too long on any
marginal flaws.
The selectivity deployed in Identity History is a world away from the sort
entailed in cross-cultural borrowing (pp. 232–3). Each sort of selectivity involves
value judgements in the comparison/contrast between some of ‘their’ practices
and ‘ours’. The difference between the sorts of selectivity is the difference between
the effort of reflection and the complacency of self-satisfaction. The nineteenth-
century historian and political philosopher Ernest Renan identified the selective
memory required for the construction of nationalism’s ‘imagined communities’,
and the basic point has been handsomely extended by studies such as Marc Ferro’s
Comment on raconte l’histoire aux enfants.47 For Identity historians, whether in
the university or beyond, it is not a matter of casting a genuinely critical eye over
aspects of the past and employing consistent evaluative thought. It is a matter of
surreptitious, partial evaluation that ends in excusing, justifying, spuriously miti-
gating, or minimizing or otherwise obfuscating those aspects.
43 Bain Attwood and S. G. Foster (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra:
National Museum of Australia, 2003), 13–14. For further evidence of his abhorrence of anachronism,
see John Howard, ‘Practical Reconciliation’, in Michelle Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation: Essays on
Australian Reconciliation (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000), 95.
44 John Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values Which Guide the Federal
Government’ (18 November 1996), 10. Online at: https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/
transcript-10171
45 Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition’, 9.
46 Quote from Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne
47 (Paris: Payot, 1981).
Some things are just convenient to avoid: ‘Forgetting is the shears with which
you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme direction of mem-
ory. Forgetting and remembering are thus identical arts’, as Kierkegaard put it.48
On the other side of Kierkegaard’s coin, accentuation can take the form of prefer-
ential treatment for chosen historical agents. So Identity historians become judges
in their own case, albeit judges who, like Michael Howard, rule in preliminary
hearings that their case should never reach court.
Pride and Shame about the Past
Moral evaluation seems apt to lose its compass in the choppy waters of identity-
relevant History, where judgements have most contemporary relevance because
they relate directly to people’s sense of historicity. The philosopher Frank
Ankersmit pinpoints why fear of the intrusion of the historian’s moral and polit-
ical commitments might exceed fears of other sorts of intrusion, such as writing-
style, adherence to an interpretative tradition, and so forth:
style, affinity with a certain kind of topic, scholarly affiliation, etc. are clearly all
attributes of the historian that do not have their counterpart in the ‘objective’
past itself. So we shall immediately recognize them for what they are—namely,
immixtures of the subject—and we shall never be tempted to project them onto
the past itself . . . [Conversely, m]oral and political values have their existence in
both the subject and the object . . . [and are] feared so much by historians because
the spheres of the object (the past) and of the subject come infinitesimally close
to each other . . . Not only may historians be tempted to project their own moral
and political values on the past, but it may also happen that the moral and polit-
ical values active in the past invade the world of historians and of their
contemporaries.49
Those historiographical areas in which moral judgement might seem most

applicable and straightforward, i.e. in the treating of cultures that seem closest to
‘ours’, or the encounter with events most salient by analogy, are precisely the areas
in which we might be lured into disregarding important contextual differences.
Thus confused, one might act against Collingwood’s warning, falling ‘into the fal-
lacy of imagining that somewhere, behind a veil, the past is still happening’.50
All that can be done is to acknowledge this very real danger and to try to avoid it.
48 Cited in Donald W. Shriver, Honest Patriots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15.
49 F.R. Ankersmit, ‘The Ethics of History: From the Double Binds of (Moral) Meaning to
Experience’, History and Theory 43/4 (2004), 84–102, here 86–7.
50 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 404.
In the terms of Part 1, engaging in such projection is to fall at the first hurdle of
moral contextualism.
There are at least two ways of falling at this hurdle, and one tends to be less well
advertised than the other. Butterfield’s warning that the ‘whig’ historian might
exercise her moral opinions on things ‘anathema only to the whigs’ can be read as
a warning against the historian’s bringing historical Others towards her, enlisting
Them in her own political battles. But we must guard equally against the histor-
ian’s aligning herself with historical actors without moving them. This tendency
does not always appear to be anachronism, because it is ostensibly the reverse of
the most obvious anachronism.
‘Reverse’ anachronism just means that the historian’s viewpoint and that of her
chosen historical objects coincides, and each is used to legitimate the other.
Consider the scholarship of pro-imperial British scholars like Niall Ferguson and
Andrew Roberts, whose own world-views resemble in some respects the world-
views of their historical objects. Instead of appearing to apply present values to
the past, they use the past to validate some present attitudes towards (neo-)
imperialism, a certain Anglo-Saxon political culture, and so forth.
Consider in particular Ferguson’s pro-imperial blockbuster Empire: How
Britain Made the Modern World. Rather than its overtly political stance, let us
focus on an issue that sheds light on the relationship between its politics and
Identity History: its relationship to counterfactuals. This issue merits attention
since Ferguson’s career was partly built on the use of the counterfactual as a device
for contemplating historical contingency,51 yet in Empire he vacillates on the util-
ity of the tool. He begins by claiming that ‘while it is just about possible to imagine
what the world would have been like without the French Revolution or the First
World War, the imagination reels from the counter-factual of modern history
without the British empire’. Then he dictates that whatever that unknowable
counterfactual world would have been like, it would not have been as good.52
Ferguson’s inconsistency should not obscure the importance of contingency:
quite the opposite. His agonizing over his primary counterfactual would be irrele-
vant to the historian who really understood contingency, one of whose implica-
tions is not oracular insight into alternative universes but intellectual humility.
One of the things Ferguson could safely say about an alternative history without
the British Empire is that in that scenario there would be no one socialized like
him into pronouncing on why he could not conceive of modern history without
the British Empire. The words of the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing
(1872–1933) are appropriate for Empire. Lessing wrote that our relationship
51 Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997).
52 Ferguson, Empire (London: Penguin, 2004), p. xxii; cf. p. xxviii with its rhetorical question of
‘whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity’, to which the rest of the book suppos-
edly provides the implicit answer.
towards the past often seems to resemble ‘a fabric in which, like the spider in its
web, we always constitute the centre and the origin of all the threads’.53 The
subtext of Ferguson’s teleological bias is: without that past you wouldn’t have this
present—and his book hinges on the idea that a particular sort of economic
globalization is a Good Thing for which we can thank the ‘Anglobalization’ of the
British Empire. By such reasoning the past can be viewed positively or negatively
in correspondence to one’s perception of the present, but what E. P. Thompson
called the deafening propaganda of the status quo stacks the deck in favour of
particular contemporary arrangements.
The commonplace that we can only know who we are by knowing where we
come from can rather lead from open inquiry to a protectiveness towards one’s
identity group’s path through History. Again in Lessing’s words:
We adjudge, for example, the old Roman Empire’s hideous orgies of blood as
historically reasonable and necessary because we see ourselves as the ultimate
outcome of the empire, though we would probably have considered no curse too
harsh for it had we remained slaves under its yoke. We judge even the most
senseless historical reality of Tamerlane’s bloodshed and horrors to be historic-
ally inevitable and necessary, because without Tamerlane’s historical appearance
the Turks would be ruling in Europe today and our own treasured world history
would not have transpired at all.54
Burckhardt had made much the same point in 1871: our ‘self-seeking first regards
those times as happy which are in some way akin to our nature. Further, it con-
siders as praiseworthy such past forces and individuals on whose work our pre-
sent existence and relative welfare are based’, ‘as if the world and its history had
existed merely for our own sakes!’ It would be worth conducting an opinion sur-
vey to test the endurance into the present of those reflex historical convictions
that Burkhardt observed in his time, such that ‘It was fortunate that the Greeks
conquered Persia, and Rome Carthage; unfortunate that Athens was defeated by
Sparta in the Peloponnesian war; . . . fortunate that Europe, in the eighth century,
on the whole held Islam at bay; . . . fortunate that first Spain, then Louis XIV were
eventually defeated in their plans for world domination.’ With such deep civilization-
grounding consensus established, he went on, there might be scope for a little
disagreement on more local matters.55
Scholars with the established fact of various forms of hegemony—patriarchal,
capitalist, Marxist-Leninist, statist, imperial, or whatever—behind them can pose
as neutral in their views towards past as well as present. It is rare these days to
53 Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (Munich: Beck, 1921), 14–15.
54 Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen, 14–15.
55 Burckhardt, ‘On Fortune and Misfortune in History’, 274, 281.
find someone sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, though it may be that, had
the Eastern bloc prevailed in the Cold War, more historians would be found
speaking in the idiom of eggs and omelettes while identifying with the chefs in
the Kremlin. Being ‘neutral’ here may be to prejudice one’s History in favour of
forces that are influential in the present as well as the past, and this is no more
evident than in ‘national story’ genealogical historiography. The practice of
understanding the past then equates to reiterating the ascent of history’s victors
by colourfully recounting the stories of national figureheads, decisive military
campaigns, forms of governance, and the contributions thereto of ‘universal’
qualities such as sacrifice, heroism, far-sightedness, and strong leadership.
Having discarded the detritus of failed alternatives, competent national Identity
historians will be able to assimilate more successful opposition movements in the
form, say, of organized labour, or drives for female emancipation or religious
reform. The success of those erstwhile ‘others’ is assimilated into the narrative as
further proof of the inherent, inclusive reasonableness of the tradition. Consider
the extent to which the historiography of slavery in Britain was for so long really
the historiography of slavery’s abolition, as if that negated all that went before, as
if abolition were just a natural part of the maturation process, rather than some-
thing a dedicated minority had to fight for, alongside resistant slaves themselves,
in the face of greed and racist violence. A compelling circularity is created. Those
who remain ‘othered’ by being defeated, dominated, or dismissed, be they internal
or external to the culture, must simply have been irreconcilable or not have had
anything to offer in the first place. What ‘we’ did to ‘them’ becomes understand-
able in the overall scheme of things. Those who are to some extent incorporated
by making themselves sufficiently amenable or by mobilizing effectively, are told
that the advances they have secured are precisely in the right measure. Any more
would be unreasonable—until, that is, the reflective equilibrium shifts again and a
new base standard of reasonableness is established, from which, for the time
being, it would be unreasonable to diverge, as if W. G. Sumner were correct that it
is ‘the times’ that change and people that follow, rather than people changing ‘the
times’ by refusing to put up with existing arrangements (p. 123). The concept of
‘reasonableness’ is then projected backwards via the Identity historians and a
parameter of reasonable disagreement and tone is created, transgression of which
renders one anachronistic, ahistorical, presentist, and so on. One of Britain’s fin-
est journalists, Gary Younge, encapsulated the tendency in 2018 in a discussion of
the American commemoration of the murder of Martin Luther King:
the US will indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation, selectively misrepresenting

King’s life and work, as if rebelling against the American establishment was, in
fact, what the establishment has always encouraged . . . the struggle is to ensure
that King’s legacy isn’t eviscerated of all militancy so that it can be repurposed as
one more illustration of the American establishment’s God-given ability to

produce the antidote to its own poison.56
Dissident scholarship—marked purely negatively, in terms of opposition to

whatever the prevailing order may be—can look anachronistically ‘presentist’
simply by looking unreasonable in the present (see pp. 100–101). That need only
tell us about the present. There may come a point in which it seems more signifi-
cant to dwell on the monumental atrocity that followed Columbus’ arrival in the
Americas than the manly spirit of ‘discovery’ occasioning his advent. The
Columbian events themselves will not have changed in the interim, but one can
infer something about the sort of society that prioritizes the record of the one
over the other.57 And it is contemporary societies doing their memory work that
we are now concerned with, which is why, given the inherently ethical nature of
relationality to one’s forebears, and the moral quality of their relationship to
others, this book can only commend more systematic and consistent moral reflec-
tion on the past as an element of present-day political practice.
Elaborated counterfactuals can be just as much of a problem here (see also pp.
78–80), as selectively disavowed counterfactuals à la Empire. When they are not
just a waste of time, elaborated counterfactuals can well turn into validations of
what transpired by invocation of worse alternatives or—the reverse—validations
of imagined ideal alternatives by contrast with the real course of events. In either
case the exercise is prejudiced in some direction by the choice of counterfactual
and when to graft that diverging counterfactual branch onto the trunk of the
empirically inferable. Moral evaluation provides a course different both to the
contemplation of frictionless alternative worlds—utopia meaning famously ‘no-
place’—and to the worship of ‘the god of things as they’ that mascarades as open-
minded interest in contingency.
Just because the past turned out as it did, we owe some normative account of
what was done to make it so. We must provide that account precisely because
there is no overarching course of history whose advancement automatically legit-
imates the costs incurred, because, against some of the scholarship examined
earlier (pp. 114–15), history cannot be reduced to a sort of niche-adaptivity (the
triumph of the morally ‘best-fitted’) and because the analogy between the maturing
individual and the nation is a misleading artefact of that thinking-in-concentric-
circles that is characteristic of certain monadic doctrines. Since the undertaking
of History is not the same as ideal theorizing, the question is never about what
they in the past should have done by some ideal-universal standard, but about the
character of what ‘they’ did, just as in the world today the question is not of
56 Gary Younge, ‘Martin Luther King: How a Rebel Leader Was Lost to History’, The Guardian, 4
April 2018.
57 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (London: Routledge, 2003), 9.
imposing a utopian blueprint on a tabula rasa, it concerns what we do in the

circumstances prevailing now.
Just as no book can cover everything and no reader can read everything, and
no community can practise an undifferentiated cult of remembrance,58 so it is
vital to interrogate what we do choose to remember, to contemplate chosen actors
and acts not just in their ‘own terms’ but also as regards their effects in the world.
Apropos the discussion of historiographical misunderstandings in the first sec-
tion of this Part, it is not necessarily a question of which actors one focuses upon
but rather how one handles that which is in focus. Think back to the sort of alle-
gations levelled at historians of the perpetrators and perpetration of the Holocaust
(pp. 258–60), as if their concentration on such matters alone in any given work
must somehow connote lack of sympathy or concern for victims. Sometimes
these allegations have gone further. Saul Friedlander associated a perpetration-
centred approach with ‘the (mostly involuntary) smugness of scholarly detach-
ment’, and he once wrote of the historian’s placing the reader ‘in a situation not
unrelated to the detached position of an administrator of extermination. Interest
is fixed on an administrative process, an activity of building and transportation,
words used for record-keeping. And that’s all.’59 The impression is that historians
of the Nazi machinery are in the business of contemplating trains to Auschwitz
but without giving any thought to what Auschwitz was. Perhaps some are, but it is
deeply hazardous to generalize from any individual case. One retort would be
that the very name ‘perpetrator research’ or Täterforschung in German, connotes
awareness of the significance of things done: the root of the German word for
perpetrator is Tat, act or deed, i.e. something done in the world, in this case
something done to someone else—the victims. It is eminently possible for a his-
torian to devote a book to the study of Holocaust perpetrators without concealing
from herself or the reader the moral gravity of the perpetrated deeds.60
One can, conversely, think of regions of historical discourse in which what was
brought about is minimized, marginalized, or substantially ignored. In American-
led wars over the last few generations, six to seven million Koreans, Vietnamese,
and Iraqis died, mostly civilians, compared to the combined American death toll
of c.96,000, the vast majority servicepeople. The millions barely register in
American national consciousness.61 The American historiography of, say, the
Vietnam War has been complicit in this. Accompanying the prevailing fascin-
ation with the military and political history of the conflict is a preoccupation with
58 That is Tzvetan Todorov’s phrase.

59 Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (London,
Harper Collins, 2007), p. xxvi; Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and death (New
York: Harper and Row, 1984), 90–1.
60 e.g. Browning, Ordinary Men.
61 John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (New York: Oxford
its impact on American society, which looks like an extension of the partisan con-
cern displayed during the war itself.
Tendencies towards narcissism may be found in the imperial endeavours of
many states, where signifiers like ‘Suez’ or ‘Dien Ben Phu’ indicate how much
more We tend to be concerned with the moments at which imperial matters dis-
agreeably affect Us rather than anyone else. While the actual empire clearly forms
part of British History, it is absent from many Britons’ sense of historicity. To be
sure, that sense may be informed by the notion of having had an empire, espe-
cially what Joseph Conrad called ‘the idea’, meaning the ‘good faith’ justifications
for empire. But it is generally much less well informed by an awareness of actual
policies and deeds. To the extent that this is different in France, Algeria is the
major variable, being that territory that was not only geographically close to
home but actually claimed as part of Metropolitan France. Only in recent years
has Belgium’s ‘great forgetting’ of mass slaughter and hyper-exploitation in the
Congo been somewhat rectified by the memory guardians who previously
espoused the self-comforting ‘civilizing process’ line.62 The conventional focus on
self-justifications explains why it is not necessarily effective for critics of, say, that
‘Victorian Titan’ Salisbury, to describe his views as imperialist. It is not just a his-
toricization of Salisbury that works in his defence, but an enduring view amongst
a sizeable part of the British public today that imperialism was merited simplici-
ter, not just ‘legitimate’ according to the standards of its times. Such views have
their own moral or quasi-moral facets, so their proponents are in no position to
delegitimate additional moral argument. A proper moral accounting would take
cognizance of the baser motives of many imperialists and, irrespective of motives,
empire’s deleterious effects.
One possible inference from so much talk of evaluation is that this book is sug-
gesting that bearers of a historically informed identity (everyone) might bear the
same virtue or guilt as certain historical forebears. That is not the implication.
One cannot talk of individual or collective credit or guilt for acts preceding the
given individual or generation of the collective. Mention of guilt, and its counter-
part innocence, is a red herring anyway; it is the wrong idiom, carrying the wrong
connotations. A better idiom is that of pride and shame,63 on which Michael
Howard alighted and which we have already encountered in some of its social
valences.
62 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Pan Macmillan, 1999), ch. 19 ‘The Great
Forgetting’; on civilizing mission rhetoric and limited attempts to change the picture, Alex Marshall,
‘Belgium’s Africa Museum Attempts to Lose “Pro-Colonialism” Image with Redesign’, The Independent,
10 December 2018.
63 On the idiom of pride and shame, W. H. Walsh, ‘Pride, Shame and Responsibility’, Philosophical
Quarterly 20/78 (1970), 1–13; Farid Abdel-Nour, ‘National Responsibility’, Political Theory 31/5
(2003), 693–719.
Unlike in the discussion of the Homeric Greek case (pp. 139–42), this section is
concerned with feelings of pride or shame around things that one has not oneself
done. Manifestly many people feel pride in what they see as the achievements of
their identity group(s)—and this was also true of the Homeric Greeks. One may
be proud of oneself but also proud of some person or persons X with whom one
perceives some form of connection. To be proud of X in that way is in an import-
ant sense not (or not just) to be vicariously proud of them, as in the way that one
might empathize with the doings of another person of whatever background as
revealed in her autobiography, or the way that one might act vicariously for
another in some professional capacity (eg as an estate agent). It is to be proud
because in some respect X is held to exhibit some identity with oneself. This
shared element might be ‘blood’ in the familial or nationalistic sense, or a shared
experience of suffering and resistance, and so on for as many iterations as there
are types of identity collective. All the same considerations apply to being
‘ashamed of . . . ’. One may be ashamed of oneself or of X.64
Now shame is not a popular feeling for much the same reasons that costs are
less popular than benefits and the memory of suffering endured is more powerful
than that of suffering inflicted. Yet historically oriented pride is alive and well
‘even’ in those cultures that supposedly have a ‘modern’ or neo-historicist histor-
ical consciousness. And pride is sensitive. Those who criticize, say, the record of
imperialism or slavery quickly discover this when they are labelled self-haters and
suchlike. The aggressive-defensive response is self-evidently not a consequence of
the responders’ having a relativistic or neo-historicist historical consciousness
that sees judgement on the foreign country of the past as a category error. Thus a
July 2014 poll of more than 1,700 British adults recorded 59 per cent as ‘proud’ of
the British Empire and 19 per cent as ‘ashamed’. Perhaps all of the 23 per cent
responding ‘don’t know’ rejected historical evaluation in principle. It is more
probable that that attitude was significantly less well represented, vying with
ignorance and equivocation on empire’s merits and demerits.65 Clearly enough,
given pride, shame is not some anachronistic residue that can be discarded out of
hand. If shame is to be jettisoned as a possible response to the past, then so must
be pride, at which moment we can say that the historical part of identity has lost
its purchase. Opinions divide on whether an all-embracing capacity to disregard
the past would be a good or a bad thing, but for the while it is most unlikely.66
64 Abdel-Nour, ‘National Responsibility’, 693–719; Appiah, The Honor Code, 63–4.

65 YouGov survey results, fieldwork 24–5 July 2014, sample size 1,741 British adults, survey ques-
tion ‘Thinking about the British Empire, would you say it is more something to be proud or
more something to be ashamed of?’ Survey results available online at: http://cdn.yougov.com/
cumulus_uploads/document/6quatmbimd/Internal_Results_140725_Commonwealth_Empire-W.
pdf.
66 See David Rieff ’s stimulating In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
Since people are apt to disagree over what in the past merits pride or shame,
arguments ensue about what is, good, bad, right, and wrong. When these argu-
ments are about the past they are nonetheless arguments for the present. In them,
moral judgement about the past is unavoidable and ramifies on political orienta-
tion in the present: a moral reckoning with the British Empire cannot but affect
visions of what Britishness should be today.
With the empire example in mind, we hear quite a lot about the need for post-
colonial states and others affected by North-Western foreign policy not to live in
the past, take responsibility for their own ills, and so forth. Sometimes these sorts
of remarks are made in good faith, after extensive, sensitive inquiry. They may
find support among members of postcolonial communities themselves, as in the
work of the novelist V.S. Naipaul, or the Cameroonian philosopher Achille
Mbembe. Sometimes the sentiments express the aggressive-defensiveness that
stems from cognitive dissonance, as when the then British chancellor of the
Exchequer, later prime minister, Gordon Brown, decreed that ‘the days of Britain
having to apologize for its colonial history are over. We should move forward.’ By
‘moving forward’, he did not mean putting the past entirely in the past, such that
any evaluative attitude towards it, positive or negative, was inappropriate. With
the self-serving inconsistency familiar from recent pages he claimed: ‘We should
celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.’67 (Some observers reason-
ably queried when Britain had started apologizing.68) Sometimes the issue is sim-
ple bad faith, as those who stress the historical identity of their own seem
unprepared to contemplate how deeply others might be shaped by intrusive his-
torical processes. One way of knowing whether the stance is the product of sym-
pathetic reflection is to see whether it is arrived at by weighing the arguments of
the Mbembes against the opposing arguments of the likes of Edward Said and the
Australian academic and Australian indigenous rights activist Aileen Moreton-
Robinson. But ultimately, however well informed the ensuing conclusion of the
argumentative process, it is beside the point when contemplating ‘our’ identity-
relevant History. It was Butterfield who wrote that the acme of effrontery is telling
someone else to turn the other cheek.69 In the identity vein, the we-group’s
responsibility is to reflect on what its salient ‘members’ have done through time,
not to pronounce on how anyone else should respond to those deeds.
The vocational historian can have an important role to play in all this. In clari-
fication of some of the parameters of that role it is important to address the point
made by the historian Mark Edele that bad History may make good politics, in
the sense that some tales about the past are politically useful for various purposes
67 Benedict Brogan, ‘It’s Time to Celebrate the Empire, says Brown’, Daily Mail, 15 January 2005;
editorial, ‘An Imperial History Lesson for Mr Brown’, The Independent, 16 March 2005.
68 Owen Jones, ‘William Hague Is Wrong . . . We Must Own Up to Our Brutal Colonial Past’, The
Independent, 3 September 2012.
69 Butterfield, Christianity and History, 63.
whatever their evidentiary warrant.70 We need not contest this point. Nothing
follows from it for the vocational historian. If ‘bad’ History here does not mean
deliberately misleading History it must mean demonstrably weak History, in the
sense of poorly substantiated or feebly argued; it cannot reasonably mean History
that has been empirically or conceptually superseded, because that happens to
some degree to all historianship, however well regarded. Politicians can always
find something in historiography to use to their advantage, and they may be as
adept at exploiting bad History as good. Edele is only necessarily at loggerheads
with the present argument if he is proposing, as he does not seem to be, that voca-
tional historians deliberately write poor or misleading History in the hope that it
will be used for some good purpose. That prescription would assume a level of
control over how a work of history is read that is disconfirmed by the record of
politicians and activists exploiting such works. It is as likely as not to result in
discrediting the historian, removing her from the ranks of those who warrant
particular trust as interpreters of the past.
Saying historians cannot control how they are used by those who do not share
their procedural ethos is not, however, the same as saying that historians cannot
establish criteria by which certain readings may be adjudged illegitimate. They
can, within limits. Attention to especially sensitive contexts of dissemination is
important, which means embracing one’s responsibilities to speak without fear or
favour, and can sometimes imply saying what one believes a particular audience
should hear, irrespective of what it may want to hear. (This is not the same as the
undesirable practice of saying one thing to one group and a contradictory thing
to another group.) Yet one will never be able to anticipate all potential audiences.
No: since this is a matter of procedural ethos, the key level of arbitration is that of
process and methodology, of what one might call ‘working’ in very loose analogy
to mathematical working.
This working, i.e. the moral reasoning that the first three Parts of this book
have tried to provide some grounds and guidelines for, is simultaneously func-
tional and performative. In making clear the relationships between historical
empirics, moral concepts, and evaluative conclusion it lays down a challenge for
competing accounts to do the same. Now of course one cannot stop historians
who are intent on pursuing another course under any circumstances, or readers
who want some Identity matter validated at all costs—such people certainly exist
alongside others who study the past with open identity questions in mind rather
than prefabricated Identity answers. Yet commending more consistency and
transparency in evaluative thought means not only that those who have fallen
unawares into the ways of Identity History may have the tendency raised to
70 Mark Edele, ‘The Ethics and the Politics of History: Beyond the “Moral Turn” ’, Monash
University Symposium ‘The Ethics of History, Morality in History’, 21–2 July 2016.
consciousness, but also that those who deliberately persevere as Identity histor-
ians will be more easily exposed in light of it.
How far can or should the process of historical self-interrogation proceed?
Since societies need narratives about themselves, too much historical criticism
might contribute to social dissensus, demoralization and the collapse of shared
projects.71 So goes the argument and it merits serious attention given that the
historian who heeds the moral weight of the past seems unlikely to disregard
questions of human coexistence in the present. A response would be that historic-
ally oriented shame, like shame of any provenance, can be just as ‘positively’
reconstructive as pride is constructive. That is the function of shame, full stop,
which is why it is not some remnant of the collectivist past that the good modern
individualist needs to shake off. The fear of social fragmentation, if we assume it
to be sincere rather than just a spectre raised to sustain any given social arrange-
ment, is in danger of assuming an initially monadic condition from which self-
criticism portends a radical departure. But contrary to what Hastings desires for
the present and wishes to impose in the study of the past, the present is no more
monadic than the past. The ‘we’ is always already just one coalition of individuals
and factions, and the point of politics is to articulate disagreements between such
factions and find ways to accommodate them while moving into a future that is
always somehow different from the present. Discussions about the past are refer-
ence points for contestation about choice in the present. In the here and now the
state of Guatemala, for instance, has a reality that cannot be ignored, a reality
comprising the legacies of its past as well as other matters like its topography.
Whatever might happen in future, the present question is of the stewardship and
direction of the good ship Guatemala.
Some of the most striking instances of historical reckoning have occurred in
the context of regime transition, as in the Nuremberg Trials or the truth commis-
sions established in South Africa and South America, yet consolidated social
orders, including consolidated democracies, may obviously also feature historic-
ally inherited social injustices.72 Consequently, certain pasts that are not presently
matters of hot memory for the majority may need to be made into such in the
interests of driving social justice in the present, on the principle that marginaliza-
tion or denial of past oppression may lead to relevant constituencies distrusting
broader society and its governing institutions.73 Furthermore, even absolute con-
sensus within a polity may not be enough in the event that members of an exter-
nal entity have some historical grievance. All shareholders are stakeholders but
not all stakeholders are shareholders, as is clear to anyone outside the USA who is
71 As discussed in Abdel-Nour, ‘National Responsibility’.

72 On the latter cases, Bashir Bashir, ‘Reconciling Historical Injustices: Deliberative Democracy
and the Politics of Reconciliation’, Res Publica 18/2 (2012), 127–43.
73 Bashir, ‘Reconciling Historical Injustices’, 133.
affected by decisions of internally elected US politicians and internally account-

able US security services.
Material Legacies
While it would be wrong to hold individuals or groups responsible for things

done by salient predecessors, they can be held responsible for the way in which
they act in relation to those things. In material terms just as much as in other
terms, the past saw the creation of losers and beneficiaries. The inheritance of ill-
gotten gains presents a moral problem for beneficiaries. Owing to the individual-
ism that permeates social and economic thought today, popular discussion of
inheritance is apt to be shot through with inconsistencies, but it is inheritance at
the collective level with which this section is principally concerned.
The first question to address is that of statutes of limitations, whether in the
literal, legal sense or the sense of ‘mere’ matters of principle. Such statutes need
not correspond to the lifetime of individual humans or generations of humans.
Where the matter is of state policy, for instance, international law provides for
inherited obligations in virtue of the quasi-permanence of state structures.
Individual generations and regimes pass but the State remains, which is essential
for issues like the honouring of loan repayments over the long term, or the adher-
ence to treaties signed decades before by state governments of different outlooks
to the present one.
States are not the only sort of universitas with lifespans of a different scale to
that of humans; all corporate entities potentially have this quality. A corporation
denotes people united in a collective for some common purpose. It derives from
the Latin corpus, body. The modern corporation has more than just nominal
similarity. It is a legal person under law, with accompanying rights and liabilities,
and exists from the moment of legal incorporation to that of liquidation, whether
that be days or centuries.74 During its lifespan any number of people may pass
through it as successive officeholders and partake of it as shareholders. As long as
the corporation ‘lives’, however, it bears some of the same responsibilities as the
organic individual.
Whether at the level of the individual or the universitas, a culpable relationship
of actor to earlier misdeed by another is captured by the legal concept of the
accessory after the fact. The analogy of the accessory after the fact may sometimes
be replaced by the analogy of the recipient of stolen goods—as legal concepts the
74 Susan Mary Watson, ‘The Corporate Legal Person’, Journal of Corporate Law Studies 19/1 (2019),
137–66.
latter developed out of the former anyway.75 The actions of the Turkish state in
the years and generations after the Armenian genocide illustrate both relation-
ships. In most instances of genocide or genocide-like massacre perpetrators have
got away not just with the murder or expulsion of the victim group, but its dispos-
session. The Armenian genocide involved a huge capital transfer, partly to the
State, partly to regional bigwigs best positioned to get in on the pilfering of land,
buildings, and businesses, and partly to more and less organized groups which
predated upon the deported Armenians who carried what they could into the
deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Many orchestrators of genocide went on to
form the administrative elite of the Republic of Turkey that emerged from the
Ottoman carcass, and many descendants of the private profiteers still head busi-
nesses stolen in 1915.
The way in which wealth is distributed can at once expand the circle of bene-
ficiaries and complicate the issue of liability. (Note that ‘liability’ is not used in a
narrowly legal sense.) Wealth taken, then invested, may now constitute the fab-
ric of the social infrastructure of many more people than the initial appropri-
ators and their immediate, greatest beneficiaries. Ditto the fruits of labour
extracted by slavery. The appropriation of common land that has characterized
modern state-development projects—accompanied by destructive contempt for
subsisting peasants and hunter gatherers across the globe—is now thoroughly
‘normalized’ and very often its economic consequences have been diffused,
unevenly, via the market mechanism. With relevant considerations in mind John
Stuart Mill opined:
It may seem hard that a claim originally just, should be defeated by mere lapse of
time; but there is a time after which . . . the balance of hardship turns the other
way. With the injustices of men as with the convulsions and disasters of nature,
the longer they remain unrepaired, the greater become the obstacles to repairing
them, arising from the after-growths which would have to be torn up or broken
through.76
What should we make of this?

One response to Mill would be to distinguish between what we can expect
from individual beneficiaries and from the polities within which those beneficiar-
ies live—polities that may themselves have benefited, of course. If under certain
circumstances it may be very difficult, perhaps illusory, or by Mill’s account even
75 ‘Receiving the Proceeds of Stolen Goods as a Criminal Offense’, Columbia Law Review 19/3
(1919), 229–33.
76 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, i (London: Parker, 1848), 257 (bk II, ch. 2 §2).
wrong to seek redress from individuals, that says nothing to the possibility and
desirability of restitution by relevant polities.77
Secondly, Mill’s point, at once of practicality and principle, is not an argument
to neutrality or any sort of historically oriented relativism, but groundwork
towards the consideration of recompense. It is curious how many parties to such
debates fail to realize that they are already engaged in the evaluative exercise even
when arguing against restitution. Take the matter of repatriation of culturally
valuable property from foreign private or public collections. The argument against
repatriation that is based on the claim that the initial acquisition of the property
was consensual not only opens the door to argument about what consent means
in the context of historically inequitable power relations, it also tacitly affirms that
repatriation is appropriate in cases of non-consensual acquisition. It is sometimes
said that the Parthenon frieze, aka the ‘Elgin Marbles’, was legitimately taken from
Athens since in situ it would, neglected, have fallen into disrepair. This argument is
roughly one of holding in trust. If it is accepted, then once arrangements have been
made in Greece for appropriate care of the antiquities, they should be returned.
Thirdly, Mill does not specify the ‘time’ after which ‘the balance of hardship
turns the other way’, because the principle and the pragmatics will vary with each
other. That is, one may not stipulate that in principle all claims stemming from
before a certain time should automatically be rejected. Nor should complex prac-
ticalities automatically rule out the pursuit of an earlier claim. It may be that there
is no way to be found, but a will is needed to look for the way in the first place,
even if only to establish its impossibility. Sometimes the will is palpably lacking,
as in the thirty years, at the time of writing, from 1989, during which the US
Congress annually rejected HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation
Proposals for African Americans Act.78
When the dispossessed or their disadvantaged descendants are around to make
a legal or moral case for a reckoning, it is only half the battle to raise awareness
among beneficiaries, whether they be individuals or polities. It is one thing for
recipients to abhor the ill-getting of gains, another for them to reconcile them-
selves to surrendering gains that have landed in their lap. Moral pressure might
be needed.
It was contended earlier on that justice is the highest virtue because it can be
demanded in the way that its traditional competitor for the title, love, cannot be
(p. 139). Demanding something does not mean one will receive it, but that one
77 Of course a beneficiary society contains its own winners and losers, and the poorest in a popula-
tion may be affected most by measures taken on behalf of the whole, as noted by Neil MacCormick,
Practical Reason in Law and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 140. Some principles of
compensation that may militate against this tendency in an analogous case are outlined towards the
conclusion of Christian Baatz, ‘Responsibility for the Past? Some Thoughts on Compensating Those
Vulnerable to Climate Change in Developing Countries’, Ethics, Policy and Environment 16/1 (2013),
94–110.
78 Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘The Case for Reparations’, The Atlantic (June 2014).
asserts a claim as of legal and/or moral right. Demanding reparations or restitu-

tion is a way of self-assertion and a way of shaming. Reparations have more than
material connotations—or, rather, material connotations are rarely ‘just’ material,
as the German etymological equation of debt and guilt makes clear (p. 147). The
German for reparation is Wiedergutmachung, literally ‘making good again’. It
compounds the noun Gut, which like its English equivalent ‘good’ at once con-
notes property and the opposite of evil.
Returning to Mill, we need to note a major qualification. ‘It is scarcely needful
to remark’, he wrote, ‘that these reasons for not disturbing acts of injustice of old
date, cannot apply to unjust systems or institutions; since a bad law or usage is not
one bad act, in the remote past, but a perpetual repetition of bad acts, as long as
the law or usage lasts.’79 Some continuities are less obvious than others, but no less
important for that. When one talks of the reproduction of power across time,
cleavages may remain similar while social forms change—discrimination over
centuries on grounds of sex and ‘race’ being emblematic. Legal scholar and civil
rights lawyer Michelle Alexander’s coruscating The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness concludes that ‘we have not ended racial
caste in America; we have merely redesigned it’ for a post-civil-rights era in which
laws are supposedly colour-neutral.80 Social prejudices and unequal social struc-
tures continue to perform the work to which legalized segregation had previously
contributed. As in accessory-after-the-fact scenarios, the relationship of benefi-
ciaries to legacies may buttress the reproduction of elements of the power rela-
tions that conduced to the historical act in the first place, even if other parts of the
overall context-nexus have shifted. Armenian claims for genocide recognition
and compensation are met with implicit threats against the small Armenian
minority still in Turkey, threats justified with the same rhetoric of alien disloyalty
that spawned the genocide in the first place. The much greater openness among
former perpetrators of mass violence in Indonesia can serve the same function, as
celebration of the political slaughter of 1965 serves as an ongoing warning to any
contemporary dissidents.
In the case of laws that remain in force in their original form, it is easier to
ascertain continuities or Mill’s ‘repetitions’, though that is a far cry from saying it is
easier to change the situation. Consider the matter of land right disputes. Are states
whose topography is still shaped by historical sequestration simply able to dismiss
arguments for redress on the grounds of anachronism, in the sense that when the
land was taken the expropriators believed themselves to be in the right and had the
power to assert that right by law as well as force? This is not quite the same issue as
the one in cases where law ‘preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and
79 Mill, Principles, i. 258 (bk II, ch. 2 §2). 80 (2010; New York: New Press, 2012), 2.
time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory’,81 because the
original reasons may still be present to mind. The question of when earlier
authority is to be deemed invalid is nonetheless common to both situations.
The issue around anachronism in landownership cases is less, pace Alderman
on ‘witches’ (pp. 116–17), about whether one is doing justice to the values and
intentions of earlier lawgivers and more about whether the sway those earlier law-
givers hold is unreasonable in the present. For defenders of the status quo in
Australia, however, the very fear that the past is not so ‘past’ after all issues in a
firm determination to enshrine it as such, while at the same time trying to pre-
serve its legacy in the present. In protest against the very modest ‘native title’
measures that were given force of new law under the Wik judgment of December
1996, Queensland premier Rob Borbidge impugned the relevant High Court
judges as ‘dills about history’. Note, though, that even the dissenting judges who
argued against native title’s coexistence with established settler pastoral leases rec-
ognized that the ‘principles of the law’ that they had applied ‘reveal “a significant
moral shortcoming” which can be rectified only by legislation or by the acquisi-
tion of an estate which would allow the traditions and customs of the Wik and
Thayorre Peoples to be preserved and observed’.82
Legal and constitutional History get their general relevance from the fact that
laws, along with other sorts of rules, traditions, and precepts provide some of the
sinews that hold corporations and polities together over time, while zeitgeists and
‘great men’ wheel and pass. The neo-historicist view can tend to obscure this
truth. The same sort of emphasis of ‘horizontal’, synchronic contextualization that
has shaped recent intellectual History against an older tradition more preoccu-
pied with ‘vertical’, diachronic connections83 characterizes the work of the ‘law
and society’ school as it reacted against the older ‘black letter’ tradition of legal
scholarship. The ‘law and society’ approach seems much more professionally ‘his-
torical’ insofar as the black letter tradition has overtones of whiggishness and
even teleology. But in bringing the law overly into social and economic History,
the law and society approach might in fact impose what one scholar calls ‘epis-
temological closure’.84 By this expression he means giving effective capacity to
entities like society and the economy as they operate at any one point, let us say
synchronically, whilst removing such a capacity from ‘the law’—i.e. its canon and
specific institutional history—as might radiate outwards to affect the other
entities. Much the same goes for separating what historians used to call the (say)
81 This analysis of the endurance of antiquated authority comes from Lord Mansfield’s 1772 judg-
ment of the English Court of King’s Bench in the Somerset v Stewart case, 98 ER 499, available online
at: http://www.commonlii.org/int/cases/EngR/1772/57.pdf.
82 Bryan Horrigan, Adventures in Law and Justice (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press,
2011), 207–8.
83 Stephan Collini, ‘Intellectual History’, at: http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/
articles/.
84 Johnson, Making the Market, 20.
Western artistic canon, or the history of treatment of mental illness, into discrete
time periods as if some temporal ‘context’ cut one epoch off entirely from its pre-
decessor. For historians who like to talk of the context of the times, the ‘tempta-
tion’, to quote the scholar of the Enlightenment Norman Hampson, ‘is always to
look away from the work of art itself and the technical evolution of a particular
genre, ‘to “influences” which, whatever their social importance in general, may
have had little significance for the artist himself ’. Such examples could be multi-
plied in other areas or art and science but also in everyday discourses such as that
of sexism.85
In sum, we need to take care that recourse to the particular neo-historicist use
of the language of context does not hinder historical understanding of balances of
continuity and change—or, better put, we must insist that historical understand-
ing is not automatically equated with neo-historicist precepts. In the legal con-
nection we need not reproduce all of the blind spots of the black letter tradition to
note that the law has some institutional autonomy and self-generated influence;
of course it changes across time but that does not mean its rhythms are all dic-
tated from outside its own variable precincts. Here is a prime example of the point
that societies comprise tendencies and institutions of different historical ‘age’, of
different temporality, in the terms of Ernst Bloch or Gramsci (p. 231).
By the same token, one cannot use the historical givenness of certain legal dis-
pensations as a way of rendering something sacrosanct and unarguable in the
present. In land-right disputes, the law is central to debates over what sort of state
one wants to live in. Many opponents of indigenous land rights are really seeking
to indenture any such vision of the future to the fait accompli created by earlier
invasion. So it is not always enough to defer to the meanings and intentions of the
original lawgivers, because it may be necessary to take issue with the system of
precedent and statute by which their interest-value amalgam entrenched itself
through the present at the expense of Others’ ways of life. In plain language, that
means saying that you dissent from the justice of those lawgivers—saying you
think them wrong.
It is in the areas of law, economics, philosophy, and political science that prin-
ciples of restitution and restitution’s relative, affirmative action, will be worked
out, if at all; it is in the political domain that the principles will be acted upon, if
they are. The central concerns of this book are less with the nature, range, and sum
of apologies, pardons, and awards, and more with the process of self-reflection
that is not subject to any statute of limitations.
85 For the quote, Hampson, The Enlightenment, 108. On treatment of the mentally ill, Merquior,
Michel Foucault, 27; for important social discourses in which continuity across large tracts of time is
just as marked as change, see Wahrman, ‘Change and the Corporeal’.
Closing Thoughts
A final note on self-reflection concerns that part of the material inheritance from
the past which is the focus of cultural geographers, students of the politics of
space and of material culture. Civic buildings; monumental architecture; public
space; sacred space: each of these categories brings together material and ideal/
mental components of identity. Think of those grand municipal structures, town
houses and country dwellings built on the proceeds of slave labour, or the Turkish
roads and landmarks named after the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide.
Think too of those kitsch appropriations of extinguished cultures like ‘Cherokee’
jeeps or ‘Apache’ helicopters—there is nothing like celebrating the noble savage
once ‘he’ has been eradicated. And think of monuments like the one erected in
1907 in Berlin to the colonial Schutztruppe which had recently conducted the
campaign of extermination against the Herero people in the Imperial German
colony that later became Namibia. In Namibia itself, a statue of the leading
perpetrator, General Lothar von Trotha, marks the site of a former German con-
centration camp from the genocide, and his name was given to a street in the
capital Windhoek.86
During a visit to Namibia in 1998, the President of Germany, Roman Herzog,
declared that ‘too much time has passed for a formal apology to the Hereros to
make sense’. He also tried to argue that German actions had not contravened
international law at the time—a legalistic argument (itself of dubious strength)
that was somewhat undermined by the fact that avoiding an apology was patently
a matter of avoiding an admission that might facilitate compensation claims.87
Clearly there are all sorts of practical and political reasons for a head of state to try
to limit his country’s liability for past crimes, or, in the German case, to try to
restrict critical reflection to the Nazi period alone in order that other periods
might be salvaged. The problem with the historicizing argument to the passage of
time and the changing legitimacy of colonialism across time is that Germany’s
civic landscape still featured the 1907 monument to the perpetrators—the momu-
ment, and that for which it stood, was a part of Germany’s present. Only in the
twenty-first century, some thirteen years after Herzog’s statement, and after exten-
sive pressure from activists, was another monument erected next to that one. The
86 Chris Johns and Rob Russell, ‘Germany’s Forgotten Genocide: The Lasting Effects of the German
Colonial project in Namibia’, New Histories (online), 4/5 (10 May 2013); Jasmin Rietdorf, ‘Tracing
Marks of German Colonialism in the Cities of Berlin and Windhoek’ (Berlin: Entwicklungspolitisches
Bildungs-und Informationszentrum, 2010), available at http://www.epiz-berlin.de.
87 Quote and contextualization in Tom Bentley, Empires of Remorse: Narrative, Postcolonialism and
Apologies for Colonial Atrocity (London: Routledge, 2015), ch. 3, which also examines the self-serving,
circumscribed nature of the apology that did materialize. On some of the associated legal arguments,
see also Catherine Lu, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017), 122.
new monument was dedicated to the victims of German rule in Namibia—though

the appropriate noun ‘genocide’ was not employed, merely ‘colonial war’.88
With statues like that of Robert Clive, ‘Clive of India’, adorning Whitehall and
that of Cecil Rhodes, Oxford University, a good question would be: why does our
civic landscape give the impression that ‘we’ are the opposite of ashamed of what
the likes of Clive did? Destroying these statues is not the only alternative. Like
Confederate flags and busts of Stalin they are a species of sociohistorical evidence,
so destroying them would be like burning records in an archive. (Admittedly one
only needs so many duplicates of a record . . .) They need not even be removed
from public space, merely relocated within it—away from parks and pantheons
and universities and city halls and into museums, though this does not mean
museums dedicated to the lifetimes of those whom the statues honoured. These
statues belong in an exhibit of cultural anthropology reflecting on the most recent
time in the relevant culture at which it was deemed acceptable to have them
standing proudly outside museums.
History, as a form of ‘openness to other human beings’,89 must have as its
accompaniment more than just the capacity to discover, in the words of the
German historian of classical antiquity Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831),
what ‘even the greatest and highest spirits of our human race’ do not understand,
namely ‘how their eyes only acquired by chance the way in which they see’.90
Genuine openness must imply the preparedness, the imperative under some cir-
cumstances, to try to change one’s own way of seeing. That claim does not contra-
dict this book’s argument about the irrelevance of relativism and the limits of
tolerance when contemplating the foreign country of the past; it is a corollary of
the argument. One cannot disengage the moral faculties in the study of history,
and one should not aspire to.
88 Rietdorf, ‘Tracing Marks’, 3.

89 François Bédarida, ‘The Modern Historian’s Dilemma: Conflicting Pressures from Science and
Society’, Economic History Review, ns 40 (1987), 335–48, here 343.
90 Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten über Barthold Georg Niebuhr, ii (Hamburg: Perthes, 1838), 480.
Bibliography
Newspapers, Journals, and Official Records

Acta Classica
Against the Current
Ajatus
American Anthropologist
American Foreign Policy Interests
American Historical Review
American Journal of Sociology
American Quarterly
American Scholar
American Sociological Review
Ancient Society
Armenian Review
Asian Journal of Social Science
The Atlantic
British Journal of Educational Studies
Central European History
Christian Century
Columbia Law Review
Common Knowledge
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Critical Inquiry
Critical Quarterly
Daily Mail
Daily Telegraph
Diplomacy and Statecraft
Dissent
Economic History Review
Economy and Society
Emotion Review
Ethics
Ethics, Policy and Environment
Exchange
Gender and History
Georgetown Law Journal
The Guardian
Hansard
Harvard Law Review
Historical Journal
Historisch-politische Zeitschrift
History
292 Bibliography
History and Theory

History of European Ideas
History of Philosophy Quarterly
History Workshop Journal
Human Studies
Humanity
Independent
International Politics
Jewish Quarterly Review
Journal of Advanced Nursing
Journal of Applied Philosophy
Journal of British Studies
Journal of Corporate Law Studies
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
Journal of Genocide Research
Journal of the History of Ideas
Journal of Literary Theory Online
Journal of Peace Research
Journal of Philosophy
Journal of Political Power
Le Débat
London Review of Books
Maynooth Review
Michigan Law Review
Midland History
Modern Intellectual History
Modern Law Review
The Nation
Nations and Nationalism
New Centennial Review
New German Critique
New Histories
New York Times Magazine
Philosophical Review
Philosophical Perspectives
Philosophical Quarterly
Philosophical Studies
Philosophiques
Philosophy and Public Affairs
Philosophy and Social Criticism
Philosophy Today
Political Theory
Praxis International
Quaderni storici
Religion and Human Rights
Res Publica
Reviews in American History
Revue de métaphysique et de morale
San Diego Law Review
Bibliography 293
Science
Security Studies
Slavic Review
Sunday Times
Theory and Society
The Times
Toronto Globe and Mail
Traditio
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
University of Chicago Record
Viator
Washington Post
William and Mary Quarterly
Yale French Studies
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung
Online Sources
Boghossian, Paul, ‘Relativism about Morality’, online at http://as.nyu.edu/content/
dam/nyu-as/asSilverDialogues/documents/PBoghossian-RelAboutNorm-final-Silver
Dialogues%20v3.pdf.
Boghossian, Paul, ‘Should We Be Relativists about Morality?’, online at https://cpb-us-e1.
wpmucdn.com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/1/1221/files/2016/09/BoghossianPublicHandout-
1kxhlx0.pdf.
Howard, John, ‘The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values which Guide the Federal
Government’: https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10171.
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/.
http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/.
Mansfield, Lord, 1772 judgment, Somerset v Stewart case, 98 ER 499:
http://www.commonlii.org/int/cases/EngR/1772/57.pdf.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/.
YouGov poll on British attitudes towards empire: http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/
document/6quatmbimd/Internal_Results_140725_Commonwealth_Empire-W.pdf.
Zunjic, Bob, ‘The Sermon on the Mount: an outline’: http://jakavonyte-philosophy.yolasite.
com/resources/Zujnic%20on%20Sermon%20on%20the%20Mount.pdf.
Books
Acton, Lord John, Historical Essays & Studies (London: Macmillan, 1908).
Acton, Lord John, Lectures on Modern History (London: Fontana, 1960).
Alexander, W. M., Johann Georg Hamann, Philosophy and Faith (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1966).
Allison, Henry E., Lessing and the Enlightenment (New York: SUNY, 2018).
Althusser, Louis, For Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
Althusser, Louis, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, vol. i (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1994).
Althusser, Louis, and Balibar, Étienne, Reading Capital, pt 2 (London: New Left Books,
1970).
294 Bibliography
Alvarado, Ruben, Common Law and Natural Rights (Aalten: Wordbridge, 2009).
Anderson, Perry, The Indian Ideology (London: Verso, 2013).
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007).
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York:
Norton, 2010).
Applebaum, Arthur Isak, Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and
Professional Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (Raleigh, NC: Hayes Barton Press, 2006).
Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
Aristotle, Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thompson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2010).
Attwood, Bain, and Foster, S. G. (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience,
(Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003).
Augustine of Hippo, The Works of Aurelius Augustine: A New Translation, ed. Marcus
Dods, vol. v (Edinburgh: Clark, 1872).
Augustine of Hippo, City of God, ed. David Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works, ed. Philip Schaff (Woodstock,
ON: Devoted, 2017).
Austin, James, The Tower of Babel in Genesis (Bloomington, IN: Westbow, 2012).
Backus, Irena, Leibniz: Protestant Theologian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Bayles, Michael D. (ed.), Contemporary Utilitarianism (New York: Anchor, 1968).
Beiser, Frederick C., The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
Benedict, Ruth, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston:
Mariner, 2005).
Benedict, Ruth, and Weltfish, Gene, The Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs
Committee, 1943).
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968).
Bentley, Michael, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian
Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Bentley, Tom, Empires of Remorse: Narrative, Postcolonialism and Apologies for Colonial
Atrocity (London: Routledge, 2015).
Berger, Adolf (ed.) Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook
Exchange, 2004).
Berlin, Isaiah, Historical Inevitability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Berman, Harold J., Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Berman, Harold J., Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the
Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003).
Bertagnolli, Paul, Prometheus in Music: Representations of Myth in the Romantic Era
(London: Routledge, 2007).
Betteridge, Tom, Literature and Politics in the Tudor Reformation (Manchester: Manchester
Betz, John R., After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Chichester:
Blackwell, 2012).
Bibliography 295
Biess, Frank, Roseman, Mark, and Schissler, Hanna (eds), Conflict, Catastrophe, and
Continuity (New York: Berghahn, 2007).
Bishop, Robert C., Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
Blight, David W., Race and Reunion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001).
Bloch, Ernst, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Zurich: Oprecht and Helbling, 1935).
Bloch, Ernst, Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Bloch, Marc, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1953).
Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society (London: Routledge, 1989).
Bloxham, Donald, The Great Game of Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Bloxham, Donald, Why History? A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Bödeker, Hans Erich, Reill, Peter Hanns, and Schlumbohm, Jürgen (eds), Wissenschaft als
kulturelle Praxis, 1750–1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999).
Bodin, Jean, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (New York: Octagon, 1945).
Bolingbroke, Lord Henry St John, Letters on the Study and Use of History (London:
T. Cadell, 1779).
Bourdieu, Pierre, Practical Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Wacquant, Loïc J. D., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge:
Polity, 1992).
Bowie, Norman E., and Simon, Robert L., The Individual and the Political Order (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
Briggs, Charles F., The Body Broken: Medieval Europe, 1300–1520 (London: Routledge
2011).
Brooker, Peter, Gąsiorek, Andrzej, Longworth, Deborah, and Thacker, Andrew (eds), The
Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Brown, Norman O., Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1991).
Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution
in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1993).
Browning, Christopher, with Matthäus, Jürgen, The Origins of the Final Solution (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
Bryant, Michael, A World History of War Crimes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Buber, Martin, I and Thou (Mansfield, CT: Martino, 2010).
Bull, Hedley, and Watson, Adam (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985).
Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin, 2004).
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the French Revolution, ed. W. Alison Phillips and Catherine
Beatrice Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912).
Burke, Raymond, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Butterfield, Herbert, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949).
Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965).
Buzan, Barry, Wæver, Oly, and Wilde, Jaap de, Security: A New Framework for Analysis
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Cahill, Edward, Liberty of the Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2012).
Cahn, Steven M. (ed.), Classics of Western Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990).
Calvin, Jean, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Woodstock, ON: Devoted, 2016).
Card, Claudia, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge
296 Bibliography
Carlyle, Thomas, Heroes and Hero-Worship, Past and Present (London: Ward, Lock and co.,
1892).
Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1988).
Chambers, Clarke A., Seedtime of Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1963).
Chaturvedi, Vinayak (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso,
2012).
Chibber, Vivek, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013).
Chung, Paul S., The Hermeneutical Self and an Ethical Difference: Intercivilizational
Engagement (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2012).
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Cato: or, An Essay on Old-Age (London: J. Dodsley, 1773).
Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio, Politics and Uncertainty (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998).
Clark, Linda (ed.), The Fifteenth Century, v. Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation
in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005).
Coady, C. A. J., Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010).
Coleman, Janet, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2005).
Collingwood, R. G., An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Commager, H. S., The Search for a Usable Past (New York: Knopf, 1967).
Confino, Alon, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 83–96.
Connelly, Mark, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II
(London: Tauris, 2001).
Connor, Robert, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Cooper, John W., Panentheism—The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker, 2006).
Corradetti, Claudio, Relativism and Human Rights: A Theory of Pluralistic Universalism
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2009).
Crick, Bernard, In Defence of Politics (London: Penguin, 1964).
Croce, Benedetto, History as the Story of Liberty (Chicago: Regnery, 1970).
Crofts, Penny, Wickedness and Crime: Laws of Homicide and Malice (London: Routledge,
2013).
Crossley, Ceri, French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians,
Quinet, Michelet (London: Routledge, 1993).
Crowe, Michael Bertram, The Changing Profile of The Natural Law (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1977).
Davies, Brian, and Stump, Eleonore (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
Bibliography 297
De Mauro, Tullio, and Formigari, Lia (eds), Leibniz, Humboldt and the Origins of
Comparativism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990).
Del Lucchese, Fillipo, Frosini, Fabio, and Morfino, Vittorio. (eds) The Radical Machiavelli:
Politics, Philosophy, and Language (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Derrida, Jacques, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2005).
Descheemaeker, Eric, and Scott, Helen (eds) Iniuria and the Common Law (Oxford: Hart,
2014).
Dickson, Gwen Griffith, Johann Georg Hamman’s Relational Metacriticism (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1995).
Diefenbach, Katja, Ferris, Sara R., Kirn, Gal, and Thomas, Peter D. (eds), Encountering
Althusser (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Dierken, Jörg, Selbstbewusstsein individueller Freiheit: Religionstheoretische Erkundungen in
protestantischer Perspektive (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005).
Di Leo, Jeffrey R. (ed.), Federman’s Fictions (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2011).
Dilley, Roy (ed.), Context and Social Anthropology (New York: Berghahn, 1999).
Dilthey, Wilhelm, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed.
Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Dobson, R. B. (ed.) The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970).
Donagan, Alan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Donnelly, Jack, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
Dower, John, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon,
1986).
Drapkin, Israel, Crime and Punishment in the Ancient World (Lexington, KY: Lexington
Books, 1989).
Duara, Prasenjit, Murthy, Viren, and Sartori, Andrew (eds), A Companion to Global
Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014).
Durkheim, Émile, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1953).
Eaglestone, Robert, Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (London: Icon, 2001).
Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004).
Edwards, Mark U., Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics 1531–1546 (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2004).
Eggert, Wolfgang, and Pätzold, Barbara, Wir-Gefühl und Regnum Saxonum bei frühmitte-
lalterlichen Geschichtsschreibern (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984).
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and English, Deirdre, Witches, Midwives and Nurses (New York:
Feminist Press, 2010).
Ellingson, Mark, The Richness of Augustine (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,
2005).
Elton, G. R., The Practice of History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1987).
Erler, Don, Lone Star State of Mind (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002).
Essen, Gesa von, and Turk, Horst (eds), Unerledigte Geschichten: Der literarische Umgang
mit Nationalität und Internationalität (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000).
Evans, Richard J., In Defense of History (New York: Norton, 1999).
Farmer, Sharon, and Rosenwein, Barbara H. (eds), Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts:
Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
298 Bibliography
Fasolt, Constantin, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Fawtier, Robert, The Capetian Kings of France (London: Macmillan, 1960).
Ferguson, Niall (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador,
1997).
Ferguson, Niall, Empire (London: Penguin, 2004).
Ferguson, Niall, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London: Penguin, 2009).
Fettweis, Christopher J., The Pathologies of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
Firth, Raymond, Elements of Social Organisation (London: Watts, 1963).
Fleischacker, Samuel, Integrity and Moral Relativism (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
Foucault, Michel, Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Harvester Press, 1980).
Foucault, Michel, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press,
1997).
Fowler, Loretta, Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History,
Freire, Paolo, Pedagogy of Hope (London: Continuum, 1998).
Frey, R. G., and Morris, C. W. (eds), Violence, Terrorism and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge
Friedell, Egon, A Cultural History of the Modern Age, ii. Baroque, Rococo and Enlightenment
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009).
Friedlander, Saul, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper
and Row, 1984).
Friedlander, Saul, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945
(London: Harper Collins, 2007).
Fulda, Daniel, Wissenschaft aus Kunst: Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen
Geschichtsschreibung, 1760–1860 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996).
Fuller, Steve, The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies (New York: Routledge,
2006).
Gaddis, John Lewis, The Landscape of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Gerald of Wales, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Topography of Ireland (Cambridge, Ontario: In
Parentheses, 2000).
Gewirth, Alan, Self-Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).
Ginzburg, Carlo, The Judge and the Historian (London: Verso, 2002).
Gipper, Helmut, and Schmitter, Peter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im
Zeitalter der Romantik (Tübingen: Narr, 1979).
Golding, Sue, Gramsci’s Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).
Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Gordley, James, The Jurists: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Gottlieb, Erika, The Orwell Conundrum: A Cry of Despair or Faith in the Spirit of Man?
(Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992).
Grattan, Michelle (ed.), Reconciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation (Melbourne:
Black Inc., 2000).
Bibliography 299
Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Guevara Jnr, Nick J., West Point, Bataan, and Beyond: Santiago Guevara and the War in the
Philippines (Silver Spring, MD: Garfield Street Publishing, 2016).
Gunther, Michael M., Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
Gutting, Gary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge
Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1990).
Haberski Jr, Raymond, and Hartman, Andrew (eds), American Labyrinth: Intellectual
History for Complicated Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).
Hacker, Paul, The Ego in Faith: Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religion
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970).
Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
Hague, William, William Wilberforce, The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
(London: Harper Perennial, 2008).
Haikola, Lauri, Gesetz und Evangelium bei Matthias Flacius Illyricus: Eine Untersuchung
zur Lutherischen Theologie vor der Konkordienformel (Lund: Gleerup, 1952).
Hampson, Norman, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin, 1990).
Haslam, Jonathan, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London: Verso, 1999).
Hastings, Max, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–1945 (London: Harper Perennial,
2008).
Hayek, F. A., The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).
Hayes, Peter (ed.) Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).
Haynes, Kenneth, Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
Haynes, Stephen R., Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).
Hearn, Jonathan, Theorizing Power (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012).
Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).
Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967).
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Herskovits, Melville J., Cultural Relativism (New York: Random House, 1972).
Herwig, Holger, The German Naval Officer Corps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
Hill, Christopher, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (London: Penguin, 1969).
Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin, 1991).
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Moral Imagination: From Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).
Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism
Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943).
Hobart, Mark, and Taylor, Robert H. (eds) Context, Meaning and Power in Southeast Asia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
Hobsbawm, Eric, Age of Extremes (London: Joseph, 1994).
Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Pan Macmillan, 1999).
300 Bibliography
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil

Society, 1840–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Hopkins, Jasper, A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1978).
Hopkins, Jasper, Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei and Cribratio Alkorani: Translation and
Analysis (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1994).
Horsman, Reginald, The Origins of Indian Removal, 1815–1824 (East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State University Press, 1969).
Houlgate, Stephen, and Baur, Michael (eds) A Companion to Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2016).
Howe, Anthony, and Morgan, Simon (eds) Rethinking Nineteenth Century Liberalism
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Hruschka, Joachim, Kant und der Rechtsstaat: Und andere Essays zu Kants Rechtslehre und
Ethik (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2015).
Hughes, Philip, History of the Church, vol. iii (London: Sheed and Ward, 1947).
Hughes, Richard A., Pro-Justice Ethics (New York: Lang, 2009).
Hull, David L., and Ruse, Michael (eds), Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology
Hunt, Lynn (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
Iggers, George, The German Conception of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2012).
Ignatieff, Michael, Blood and Belonging (London: Vintage, 1994).
Ignatieff, Michael, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton
Jahanbegloo, Ramin, Gadflies in the Public Space: A Socratic Legacy of Philosophical Dissent
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017).
Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1983).
Jenkins, Keith, Re-Thinking History (London: Routledge, 2003).
Johnson, Chalmers, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York:
Henry Holt, 2001).
Johnson, Paul, Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge:
Johnston, William M., The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff,
1968).
Jones, Dan, The Plantagenets (London: Harper, 2013).
Kant, Immanuel, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings
Kant, Immanuel, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge:
Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
Kapuściński, Ryszard, The Other (London: Verso, 2008).
Kennedy, Paul, and Nicholls, Anthony (eds), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in
Britain and Germany Before 1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981).
Kenny, Anthony, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010).
Kenny, Anthony, and Kenny, Charles, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility (Exeter:
Imprint Academic, 2006).
Khong, Yuen Foong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam
Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Bibliography 301
Kierkegaard, Søren, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton

Kitson Clark, George, The Critical Historian (London: The History Book Club, 1968).
Klein, Laurence E. (ed.), Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
Kleist, E. E., Judging Appearances: A Phenomenological Study of the Kantian sensus com-
munis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012).
Knowles, David, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (Baltimore: Helican, 1962).
Koelb, Clayton, The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy and the Theory of Life in
Europe’s Romantic Age (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008).
Kow, Simon, China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).
Kozicki, Henry (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
1998).
Krimmer, Elisabeth, and Simpson, Patricia Anne (eds), Religion, Reason, and Culture in the
Age of Goethe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013).
Lang, Berel, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2003).
Latinovic, Vladimir, Mannion, Gerrard, and Welle, Jason (eds), Catholicism Engaging
Other Faiths (Cham: Springer, 2018).
Lawson, Tom, The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism
(Martlesham: Boydell, 2006).
le Bon, Gustave, The Psychology of Revolution (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision Publications,
2010).
Leavitt, John, Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought (Cambridge
Lee, Steven Hugh, Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vietnam and the Origins of the Cold War in
Asia, 1949–1954 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995).
Leerssen, Joep, and Rigney, Ann, Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
Lefever, Ernest, Ethics and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Living Age Books,
1959).
Leff, Gordon, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1975).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Œuvres de Leibniz, ed. M. A. Jacques (Paris: Charpentier, 1846).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology, trans.
George R. Montgomery (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005).
Leiter, Brian, and Rosen, Michael (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Lenin, V. I., Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947).
Lessing, Theodor, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (Munich: Beck, 1921).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Raw and the Cooked (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
Levin, David, History as Romantic Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959).
Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
Levy, Ariel, Female Chauvinist Pigs (New York: Free Press, 2006).
Loewen, Harry, Luther and the Radicals (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,
2010).
London, Louise, Whitehall and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Loughlin, Martin, Foundations of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1964).
302 Bibliography
Lu, Catherine, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge

Lukes, Steven, Moral Relativism (New York: Picador, 2008).
Luther, Martin, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Lafayette, IN: Sovereign
Grace, 2001).
Luxemburg, Rosa, Prison Letters to Sophie Liebknecht (London: Independent Labour Party,
1972).
Lynch, Joseph H., and Adamo, Phillip C., The Medieval Church (London: Routledge, 2014).
MacCormick, Neil, Practical Reason in Law and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
McDonald, Christie, and Hoffmann, Stanley (eds), Rousseau and Freedom (Cambridge:
McInerny, Ralph, A History of Western Philosophy from St. Augustine to Ockham (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963).
McIntire, C. T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004).
Macintyre, Stuart, and Clark, Anna, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 2004).
Mack, Michael, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and
German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Mack, Michael, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 2010).
McMahon, Robert J., The Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
McManus, Edgar J., Law and Liberty in Early New England (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993).
Macmurray, John, Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1995).
Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
Mäkinen, Virpi (ed.), Lutheran Reformation and the Law (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
Makkreel, Rudolf A., Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton
Malinowski, Bronisław, Argonauts of the West Pacific (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1922).
Mann, Michael, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
Marenbon, John, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
Marincola, John, Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd, and Maciver, Calum Alasdair (eds), Greek
Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History without Historians
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
Martucci, Roberto, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita, 1855–1864 (Florence: Sansoni, 1999).
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—Selected Works in Three
Volumes, vol. i (Moscow: Progress, 1966).
Masters, Roger D., The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968).
Mastnak, Tomaž, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political
Order (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
Mays, Michael, The Cultures of Irish Nationalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
Bibliography 303
Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Mearsheimer, John J., The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
Melvin, Mungo, Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
2010).
Menzler-Trott, Eckart, Gentzens Problem: Mathematische Logik im nationalsozialistischen
Deutschland (Basel: Springer, 2001).
Merquior, José Guilherme, Michel Foucault (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
Meyerhoff, Hans (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time (New York: Anchor, 1959).
Milbank, John, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation
of the People (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013).
Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy, vol. i (London: Parker, 1848).
Miller, Alexander, Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).
Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
Mommsen, Hans (ed.), The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
Montmarquet, James A., Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).
Moore, R. I., The Formation of a Persecuting Society (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Morera, Esteve, Gramsci’s Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (Abingdon: Routledge,
1990).
Morton, Michael, Herder and the Poetics of Thought (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1989).
Mudge, Jean McClure (ed.), Mr Emerson’s Revolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers,
2015).
Mulligan, William, The Great War for Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
Murray, Alexander, Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church (Oxford: Oxford
Myers, Ella, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2013).
Nagel, Thomas, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Neuhouser, Frederick, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015).
Niebuhr, B. G., Lebensnachrichten über Barthold Georg Niebuhr, vol. ii (Hamburg: Perthes,
1838).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1980).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge:
Nisbet, Hugh Barr, Herder and Scientific Thought (Cambridge: The Modern Humanities
Research Association, 1970).
Nisbet, Hugh Barr, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought (Oxford:
Nolte, Ernst, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1987).
Norrie, Alan, Crime, Reason and History: A Critical Introduction to Criminal Law
Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962).
Olzak, Susan, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford.
304 Bibliography
Orwell, George, Critical Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946).

Orwell, George, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, ed. George Packer (Boston:
Mariner, 2009).
Parker, John, and Reid, Richard (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Parker, Robert, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991).
Patterson, David, Genocide in Jewish Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012).
Perkins, Franklin, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, American Negro Slavery (New York: Appleton and Company,
1918).
Pinkard, Terry, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge:
Pippin, Robert B., Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
Plamenatz, John, Man and Society, vol. i (London: Longmans, 1969).
Plekhanov, Georgi, The Role of the Individual in History (London: Camelot Press, 1950).
Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Penguin, 1979).
Popper, Karl Raimund, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. ii (London: Routledge,
2003).
Powell, Thomas, The Persistence of Racism in America (Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams,
1993).
Praeg, Leonhard, The Geometry of Violence: Africa, Girard, Modernity (Stellenbosch: SUN,
2007).
Pyrhönen, Heta, Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Issues in the Detective Story
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
Qvortrup, Mads, The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Manchester:
Rand, Ayn, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964).
Rand, Ayn, The Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. Leonard Peikoff (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1999).
Ranke, Leopold von, Weltgeschichte, ed. Alfred Dove and Georg Winter, vol. ix, pt II
(Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1888).
Ranke, Leopold von, Aus Werke und Nachlass, vol. ii, ed. Theodor Schieder and Helmut
Berding (Munich: Oldenbourg 1971).
Ranke, Leopold von, Aus Werke und Nachlass, vol. iv, ed. V. Dotterweich and W. P. Fuchs
(Munich: Oldenbourg 1975).
Ranke, Leopold von, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of
History, ed. Roger Wines (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981).
Reardon, Bernard M. G., Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Recchia, Stefano, and Urbinati, Nadia (eds), A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe
Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations
Reichertz, Jo, and Schneider, Manfred (eds) Sozialgeschichte des Geständnisses: Zum
Wandel der Geständniskultur (Wiesbaden: VS, 2007).
Bibliography 305
Rescher, Nicholas, G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

1991).
Riedenauer, Markus, Pluralität und Rationalität: Die Herausforderung der Vernunft durch
religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt nach Nikolaus Cusanus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007).
Rieff, David, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies (New Haven: Yale
Rigby, S. H., English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Manchester:
Rist, John M., Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition
Roberts, Charlotte, Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
Roberts, David D., Nothing But History: Reconstruction and Extremity After Metaphysics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
Robinson, Ronald, and Gallagher, John, with Denny, Alice, Africa and the Victorians: The
Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961).
Roller, Matthew B., Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian
Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Roper, Lyndal, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London: Bodley Head, 2016).
Rorty, Richard, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and the Discourses (London: Dent and Sons,
1973).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2013).
Rubin, Edward L., Soul, Self, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Rubinoff, Lionel, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics: A Study in the Philosophy of
Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970).
Rubinstein, William D., The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved
More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 2000).
Rublack, Ulinka (ed.), A Concise Companion to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
Runciman, W. G., A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
Rüsen, Jörn, Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit. Grundzüge einer Historik II: Die Prinzipien
der historischen Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986).
Russell, James C., The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical
Approach to Religious Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Sahlins, Marshall, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1948).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. John Kulka (New Haven: Yake
Schaff, Philip, History of the Christian Church, vol. viii (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969).
Schwab, Gail M., and Jeanneny, John R. (eds), The French Revolution of 1789 and Its Impact
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995).
Scott, James Brown, Law, the State, and the International Community (Clark, NJ: Lawbook
Exchange, 2003).
306 Bibliography
Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985).
Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Sellars, Kirsten, ‘Crimes Against Peace’ and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
Sewell, William G., Logics of History: Social History and Social Transformation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Shafer-Landau, Russ, Ethical Theory: An Anthology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Shapiro, Harry L. (ed.), Man, Culture, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press,
1960).
Shell, Susan Meld, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009).
Shoemaker, Karl, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 450–1500 (New York: Fordham
Shriver, Donald W., Honest Patriots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Sigurdson, Richard Franklin, Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004).
Sikka, Sonia, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism
Slymovics, Susan (ed.), Clifford Geertz in Morocco (London: Routledge, 2013).
Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (6th edn, London: Cadell, 1790).
Smith, D. Livingstone, The Most Dangerous Animal (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007).
Smith, Helmut Walser, The Continuities of German History (Cambridge: Cambridge
Smucker, Donovan E., Origins of Walter Rauschenbuch’s Social Ethics (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1994).
Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: The
Bodley Head, 2010).
Southern, R. W., History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern, ed. R. J. Bartlett
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Sparling, Robert Alan, Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2011).
Stern, Fritz (ed.), The Varieties of History (New York: Meridian, 1956).
Stocking, George W. Jnr. (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian
Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996).
Strohm, Paul, Conscience: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
Strozier, Robert M., Foucault, Subjectivity and Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2002).
Stuart, Matthew (ed.), A Companion to Locke (Oxford: Blackwell, 2016).
Stubbs, William, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, vol.
iii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890).
Sullivan, Shannon, and Tuana, Nancy (eds) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany,
NY: SUNY, 2007).
Sumner, W. G., Folkways (New York: Dover Publications, 1959).
Sutcliffe, Adam, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Swain, Harriet (ed.), Big Questions in History (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).
Bibliography 307
Teherani-Krönner, Parto (ed.), Humanökologie und Kulturökologie: Grundlagen · Ansätze ·

Praxis (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992).
Tentler, Thomas N., Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton
Terezakis, Katie, The Immanent Word: the Turn to Language in German Philosophy,
1759–1801 (London: Routledge, 2007).
Terrier, Jean, Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–1950
(Leiden: Brill, 2011).
Thibodeaux, Jennifer D. (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).
Thomas, Peter D., The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden:
Brill, 2009).
Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Pelican,
1968).
Tillich, Paul, The Protestant Era (London: Nisbet, 1955).
Tillich, Paul, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Touchstone, 1968).
Tillinghast, Pardon E., The Specious Past (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1972).
Tirman, John, The Deaths of Others: the Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (New York:
Tong, Yanqi, and Lei, Shaohua, Social Protest in Contemporary China, 2003–2010:
Transitional Pains and Regime Legitimacy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).
Tooke, Joan D., The Just War in Aquinas and Grotius (London: SPCK, 1965).
Topping, Richard R., and Vissers, John A. (eds), Calvin@500: Theology, History and Practice
(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011).
Toulmin, Stephen, The Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1950).
Toynbee, Arnold, Greek Historical Thought (New York: Mentor Books, 1952).
Treitschke, Heinrich von, Politics, vol. i (New York: MacMillan, 1916).
Tucker, Aviezer (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography
(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
Tugene, Georges, L’Image de la nation anglaise dans l’Histoire ecclésiastique de Bède le
Vénérable (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001).
Tuninga, Matthew J., Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church:
Christ’s Two Kingdoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Tutino, Stefania, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Ungern-Sternberg, Jürgen von, and Ungern-Sternberg, Wolfgang von, Der Aufruf ‘An die
Kulturwelt!’ (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996).
Vaihinger, Hans, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (Lepizig: Feliz Meiner, 1922).
van Gelderen, Martin, and Skinner, Quentin (eds) Republicanism, i. Republicanism and
Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002).
van Liere, Frans, An Introduction to the Medieval Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014).
van Peursen, C. A., Leibniz (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).
Vaughan, Charles Edwyn, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After
Rousseau (1925; New York: Russell & Russell, 1960).
Veeser, H. Aram (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, 1989).
Veldhuis, Henri, Ein versiegeltes Buch: Der Naturbegriff in der Theologie J. G. Hamanns
(1730–1788) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994).
308 Bibliography
Velleman, J. David, Foundations for Moral Relativism (Cambridge: Open Book, 2015).
Vermeulen, Hans F., Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German
Enlightenment (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
Waelkens, Laurent, Amne adverso: Roman Legal Heritage in European Culture (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2015).
Walter, Natasha, Living Dolls (London: Virago, 2010).
Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979).
Weber, Eugen, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).
Weber, Max, Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).
Weber, Max, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre ed. Johannes Winckelmann
(Tübingen: Mohr, 1985).
Weber, Max, Max Weber: Schriften 1894–1922, ed. Dirk Kaesler (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner,
2002).
Wehofsits, Anna, Anthropologie und Moral: Affekte, Leidenschaften und Mitgefühl in Kants
Ethik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
Weitz, Eric, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009),
Westad, Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
Williams, Bernard, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton
Williams, Bernard, In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005).
Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006).
Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Wong, David B., Natural Moralities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Wood, Andy, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge:
Wood, Andy, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
Wormald, Patrick, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West (London: Hambledon, 1999).
Zagorin, Perez, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton
Zamora, Daniel (ed.), Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
Zecha, Gerhard, and Weingartner, Paul (eds), Conscience: An Interdisciplinary View
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987).
Zhang, Longxi, From Comparison to World Literature (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2015).
Zinn, Howard, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (London: Routledge,
2003).
Zoller, Elizabeth, Introduction to Public Law: A Comparative Perspective (Leiden: Martinus
Nijhoff, 2008).
Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Abelard, Peter 150–2, 174–5 Bruno, Giordano 178–9

absolutism 62–4, 68, 160, 187–8, 218–19, 269 Buber, Martin 167–8
Acton, Lord John 116 Burckhardt, Jacob 175–7, 205–6, 217–18, 224–5,
Agathias of Myrina 109–10 227–9, 232, 246–7, 273
Alderman, Geoffrey 116–17, 120, 133–4, 266, Burke, Edmund 57–9, 72, 228–9
270, 286 Butterfield, Herbert 3, 8, 11, 71–2, 83–4, 134–5,
Alexander, Michelle 285 175, 236–7, 272, 279
Althusser, Louis 230–2 Buzan, Barry 224–5
anachronism 3–4, 7–8, 77–8, 93, 116–17, 268–9,
272, 285–6 Calvin, Jean 155–60, 162–3
Anerkennung 188–9, 222–3 Card, Claudia 134–5
Ankersmit, Frank 271 Carlyle, Thomas 116
Annales 21–2, 266 Carr, E. H. 66, 116
Aquinas, Thomas 83–4, 152–4, 234 Castellio, Sebastian 159
Arendt, Hannah 119 cause (causa) 2, 30–9 passim, 41–2, 47, 58, 80–1,
Aristotle 139, 150–1, 173–4, 221–2 84, 104, 109, 112–13, 125, 179–80,
Augustine of Hippo 33–4, 138, 142–4, 149–51, 217–18, 254–5
153–4, 156–9, 166, 194–5 causation 10, 23, 30–9 passim, 80–1, 90, 250,
autarkeia 175 254–5
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 43–4
Bachelard, Gaston 218–19 Chatterjee, Partha 43–4
Balibar, Étienne 230–1 Chibber, Vivek 43–4
Balzac, Honoré 169 chronocentrism 235–6, 269
Barth, Karl 203 Cicero 33, 137
Bartov, Omer 258–9 Clay, Henry 192
Bauer, Otto 198–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 196–7, 263
Bayle, Pierre 178, 186 collectivism 204–5, 281
Bede 263 Collingwood, R. G. 8, 110–11, 236–7, 261, 271–2
Benedict, Ruth 131–3, 136–7, 145, 216–17, Commager, H. S. 2–3, 10
243–5 Condorcet, Nicolas de 8, 235–6
Benjamin, Walter 255 Confino, Alon 41–2
Bergen, Doris 259–60 Connor, Walter Robert 97–8
Best, Werner 70–1 Conrad, Joseph 277
Beevor, Anthony 267 Conscience 133, 137, 152, 156–8, 173–4
Biggar, Nigel 4–5 conscientia 137, 152, 159, 164–5
Bloch, Ernst 165–6, 215, 230–1, 287 synderesis 152, 164–5
Bloch, Marc 2–3, 10, 18–22, 27, 36, 39, 50, 71–2, syneidêsis 137, 152
78–9, 81, 89, 146 see also forum internum/conscientiae
and mentalité 21, 27, 215 conscientia, see conscience
Boas, Franz 131–2 consequentialism 63–4, 68, 243
Bodin, Jean 160, 232 constructivism, International Relations theory
Bolingbroke, Viscount Henry St John 236–7 of 69, 72–3
Bourdieu, Pierre 123, 136–7 constructivism, social/cultural 245–6
310 Index
context 3–4, 11–14, 16–18, 30–52 passim, 58 forum internum/conscientiae 151–2, 165–6, 185,
contextualization 3–4, 8–14, 17, 18–30 passim, 197–8, 211–12
39–52 passim, 55–60, 72, 87, 93–4, 102, Foucault, Michel 47, 117–21, 123, 206, 214,
112–13, 128–30, 207, 219–20, 234, 249, 218–23, 233
261, 271–2, 286–7 Freud, Sigmund 40, 165, 205–6, 230–1
see also decontextualization Friedlander, Saul 51–2, 260, 276
Cooper, Frederick 256
counterfactual History 78–80, 85–6, 272–3, 275 Gaddis, John Lewis 79
Crofts, Penny 148–9 Gallagher, John 22–7, 50, 105
Crowley, Robert 49–50 Galtung, Johan 58–9
crypto-normativity 117–20, 128–9 Garbarini, Alexandra 258–9
cultural turn 16–17, 40–1 Geertz, Clifford 41–2, 45, 131–2, 181–2, 216–18,
Cusanus, Nicholas 131, 178–9 228–9, 232, 236
Geist 133–4, 176, 183–4, 189, 193–4, 215,
Darwinism 69–70, 108, 117, 192–3, 195, 245–6 227–8, 243
decontextualization 74–6, 140–1 Gerald of Wales 232
de Valera, Éamon 175 Gesinnungsethik 165–6
deontology 63–4, 243 Gewirth, Alan 221–2
Derrida, Jacques 216–17 Gibbon, Edward 96–7, 134–5
Descartes, René 154, 188–9, 236–7 Giddens, Anthony 36
determinism 11, 17–18, 32–8, 161–2, 230–1 Ginzburg, Carlo 18–19, 89
teleological determinism 33–5, 37–8 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de 69–70
mechanistic determinism 35, 37–8 Goethe 176–7, 181–2
Dilthey, Wilhelm 110–11, 135–6, 216–17 Gramsci, Antonio 120–1, 124–5, 230–2, 287
discourse, Foucault’s concept of, see Foucault, Gratian 143–4, 147, 150–1, 157–8, 166
Michel Grayling, Anthony 267, 269
Droysen, Gustav 130, 194–5, 218–19 Grotius, Hugo 160–1
Duns Scotus 150, 153–4, 158 Grundtvig, Bishop N.F.S. 193–4
Durkheim, Émile 21–2, 90, 114–15 Gunther, Michael M. 260
Eaglestone, Robert 240–1, 255 Hamann, Johann Georg 181–4, 201–2, 215–16
Edele, Mark 279–80 Hamilton, Bernard 21–2
Elton, Geoffrey 86 Hampson, Norman 286–7
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 165, 167–8, 175–7, Harman, Gilbert 238–9
208–9 Harnack, Adolf 203
Engels, Friedrich 192–3 Hastings, Max 263–4, 266–70, 281
epochalism 235–6 Hayek, Friedrich 122
Erklären 215 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 164–7, 176–7,
ethnocentrism 16–17, 235–6, 251–2, 269 184, 187–8, 194–5, 208
Evans, Richard 2–3, 10–12, 76, 80, 82, 89, 94–6, Hegelian speculative philosophy of
100, 236–7 history 255
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 216–17 hegemony 120–1, 124–5, 273–4
Heidegger, Martin 110–11
Fasolt, Constantin 3–4 Hénaff, Marcel 215–16
Febvre, Lucien 36 Herbert, Christopher 216–17
Felman, Shoshana 255 Herder, Johann Gottfried 131–2, 164, 176–7,
Ferguson, Niall 272–3 183–5, 187–9, 194, 198–9, 201–4,
Ferro, Marc 270 214–18, 228–9, 243, 245–6
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 164–7, 173–4, 182–3, hermeneutics 107–11, 156, 215–17, 237
187–9, 196–7, 204, 222–3, 227–8 heroic realism 61, 69–72, 85, 227
formalism, ethical 164–5 see also realism, International Relations
formalism of structuralist theory 215–16 theory of
forum externum 151–2, 165–6, 211–12 Herskovits, M. J. 240–1
Index 311
Hill, Christopher 122 Kitson Clark, George 89, 91–2, 94–5, 104–5,
historicism (Historismus) 8–9, 16–17, 40–3, 128, 134–5
131–2, 184–5, 191–2, 218–19, 268–9 Kraft 183–4, 193–4
German historicism 16–17, 194–5 Kuhn, Thomas 218–19
see also neo-historicism
historicity 262, 268–9, 271, 277 Lang, Berel 51–2
historicization 8–9, 21–2, 128–9, 277 Le Bon, Gustav 104–5, 260
Historische Zeitschrift 57 Lee, Stephen Hugh 109
Hobart, Mark 106 legitimacy 64, 113–26 passim, 128–9, 178, 191,
Hobbes, Thomas 159–63, 166, 170–1, 177–8, 237 193–4, 205, 288–9
Homer 139–41 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 131–3, 160–1, 178–86,
Horseman, Reginald 50–1 196, 205–6, 208, 215–18, 224–6, 232, 243
Howard, Michael 277 Monadology 178–80
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 184 Lenin, V. I. 32–3, 116
Hume, David 164 Lesser, Alexander 233
Hutcheson, Francis 160–1 Lessing, Theodor 272–3
Levin, David 168–9
idealism 40–1, 65–6, 215 Levinas, Emmanuel 139, 222–3, 255
Identity History 14–15 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 132–3, 215–16
and genealogy 262–5, 273–4 Levy, Ariel 171
and analogy 262, 264–5 liberalism, International Relations theory
and metonymy 262, 264–5 of 65–6, 68–9,
incommensurability 242–5 liberalism, philosophical and political 129–30,
individualism 130, 132–3, 140, 148–9, 163, 168, 173–4, 176–7, 204, 213–14, 221–2
168–74, 175–208 passim, 209, 214, liberalism, social 223
218–22, 282 List, Friedrich 191–2
internalism 109–11, 127–34 passim, 138, 140–1, Locke, John 160–1, 173–4, 181, 186, 204, 237
148–9, 158–9, 163–4, 185, 208, 215–16, Lombard, Peter 152
225, 230 Luther, Martin 131–2, 145, 154–60, 164, 166–7,
see also Monadological thought 173–4, 179–83, 195, 197, 203
internalization 140–1, 154
International Relations (IR) theory 64–9, Machiavelli, Niccolò 62–4
210, 226 Malinowski, Bronislaw 104–5
see also constructivism, International Marx, Karl 32–3, 59–60, 117–18, 168–9, 187,
Relations theory of 189, 198, 205–6, 218–19, 230
see also liberalism, International relations Marxism 33–4, 40–1, 117, 120–1, 165–6, 192–3,
theory of 198, 217–18, 221, 230–1, 273–4
see also realism, International Relations vulgar Marxism 117–18
theory of Matt, Susan J. 110–11
Mazzini, Giuseppe 193–4, 205
Jameson, Fredric 128 Mbembe, Achille 279
Jenkins, Keith 240–1 McMahon, Robert J. 108–9, 113
Joachim of Fiore 155 Mead, Margaret 131–2
John of Salisbury 129–31 Meinecke, Friedrich 9–10, 69–70, 95–6, 98, 195
Melvin, Mungo 77–8
Kant, Immanuel 32, 61–2, 106–7, 138, 150, Michelet, Jules 196–7, 200
163–7, 182–3, 187–9, 207, 215–16, Mill, John Stuart 173–4, 221, 283–6
242, 260 Mommsen, Theodor 88–9
Kantianism 61–4, 129, 170, 181–2, 215–16, monadological thought 131–3, 175–234 passim,
239–40 243, 246–7, 275–6, 281
Kertész, Imre 45, 47 see also Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm,
Khong, Yuen Foong 264 Montaigne, Michel de 47
Kierkegaard, Søren 158–9, 197, 203, 271 Montesquieu 46, 113, 186, 194, 228–31
312 Index
Montmarquet, James A. 52 Polybius 102–4

moral contextualization 8, 11–13, 51–2, 72, 87, Popper, Karl 116
93–4, 112–13, 261 Porter, Bernard 5–8
moral luck 81–2, 207 postcolonialism 43–4, 236, 256–7, 279
moral objectivism 239–40, 243–6 postmodernism 218–19, 222–3, 230–1, 240–1,
see also realism, moral 245–6
moral positivism 116–17 post-nationalism 221–2
moral ‘relational’ thought, see relational moral Prakash, Gyan 256–7
thought Protestantism 161–2, 167–9
moral relativism, see relativism Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 106
moral responsibility 31, 109 prudence 83–4
moralism 10, 15, 61, 65–6, 69, 74–6, 85, 171 Pufendorf. Samuel 160–2, 177–8, 194–5
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 279
Morgenthau, Hans 61–2, 64–6 Rand, Ayn 169–70
Murdock, George Peter 232 Ranke, Leopold von 8–9, 40–1, 115, 128, 184–5,
Musson, Anthony 114–15 194–5, 218–19, 234–6
realism, International Relations theory of 65–9,
Naipaul, V. S. 279 72–3
Nancy, Jean-Luc 233 see also heroic realism
nationalism 129–30, 169, 193–4, 196–204, realism, literary 97–8
208–25 passim realism, metaphysical/theological 153–4, 159,
civic nationalism 193–4, 197–200, 204 165, 182–3
ethnic nationalism 193–4, 198–9, 204 realism, moral 65–6, 239–40, 243–4
constitutional nationalism 193, 204 relational moral thought 134, 225, 230, 233–4,
Imagined Communities and 270 249–50, 262
neo-historicism 40–1, 45, 55–6, 128, 218–20, relativism, cultural and moral 13–15, 128,
266–7, 269, 278, 286–7 213–16, 226–7, 234–49 passim, 262,
see also historicism 269, 289
neo-liberalism 220–3 cultural relativism 13, 133, 186, 202, 208,
neoplatonism 160–1, 167–8, 178–80, 182–5, 214–16, 226–30
194–5 see also monadological thought
Newton, Isaac 178 moral and cultural relativism distinguished 8,
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 289 243–5
Nietzsche, Friedrich 40, 123, 135–6, 165–6, moral relativism 8–14, 54–5, 128, 133–4,
169–70, 234 238–50, 289
Nolte, Ernst 108, 260 descriptive moral relativism 238
nominalism 153–4, 156, 159, 161–2, 165–7, meta-ethical (moral) relativism 238–40,
239–40 246–7
naïve (moral) relativism 240
Oakeshott, Michael 2–3, 89 normative relativism 240
Ormrod, W. M. 114–15 relativism of distance 248–50, 269–70
Orwell, George 52–4, 58–9, 102–3 vulgar moral relativism 240
Overbeck, Franz 197, 203 Renan, Ernest 193–4, 270
reparations 284–5
Parsons, Talcott 47 Richards, Robert A. 96–7
particularism 191–2, 200, 213–15, 241 Rickert, Heinrich 88
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell 258 Rigby, Steve 92–4
Phylarcus 102–3 Roberts, Andrew 272
physis 143–4, 154 Robespierre 19, 140, 186–7
Plato 129–30, 137, 141–2, 153–4, 188–9, 222–3 Robinson, Ronald 22–7, 50, 105
Platonism 221 Romanticism 40–1, 58, 166–9
see also neoplatonism Rorty, Richard 236
Plekhanov, Georgi 33–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 136–7, 161–4, 187–8,
pneuma 133–4, 143–4, 154, 165–6, 184 194, 199, 202–4
Index 313
Rubin, Edward L. 221–2 Sumner, W. G. 114–15, 120, 123

Rubinstein, William D. 85–6 Sybel, Heinrich von 57
Runciman, W. G. 101–2 synderesis, see conscience
syneidêsis, see conscience
sacro egoismo 175, 203
Sahlins, Marshal 40–1, 131–2, 214–15 Taine, Hippolyte 114–15
Said, Edward 43–4, 279 Tardío, Manuel Alvarez 56–7
Salisbury, Lord Robert Cecil 73, 277 Thompson, E. P. 170, 252–3, 272–3
Sartre, Jean-Paul 51–4, 221 Thucydides 66, 97–8
Scheler, Max 170–1, 195 tolerance 15, 234–49 passim, 289
Schell, Jonathan 97–8, 102–4 Tolstoy, Leo 35–6, 104–5
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 181–2 Tolstoy, Nikolai 53–4
Schopenhauer, Arthur 165–6 Toulmin, Stephen 123–4
Scott, James C. 119–20 Treitschke, Heinrich von 69–70, 88–9, 195, 200
Seneca 137, 174–5 Trevelyan, G. M. 88–9
Sewell, William H. Jr. 16 Tyndale, William 173–4
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 160–2, 164, 168–9
Shaw, George Bernard 196–7 universalism 16–17, 181–2, 187–8, 191–2, 200,
Shorter, Edward 121 213–15, 236, 241, 245–6
Smiles, Samuel 168 universitas 131, 156, 282–3
Smith, Adam 48, 140–1, 190, 192–3, 223
Snyder, Timothy 27–31, 39, 54–5 Verstehen 215
socialitas 160–1, 177–8 Volksgeist 133–4, 176
Socrates 137 Voltaire 8, 168–9, 208, 235–6
Sorokin, Pitrim 232
Southern, R. J. W. 110–11 Walter, Natasha 171
Spengler, Oswald 228–9 Weber, Max 74, 88–90, 165–6, 205
Spinoza, Baruch 37, 237 Westermarck, Edvard 129, 195
Stiglitz, Joseph 211 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey 99
stoic tradition 33, 137, 141–2, 145, 165–6, White, Hayden 240–1
174–5 William of Ockham 153–4, 156, 163–4
Stone, Dan 128 Williams, Bernard 248–50
Strohm, Paul 170–1 Wolf, Eric 231–3
structuralism 16–17, 90, 123, 215–17, 220–1, Wood, Andy 122
229–31, 233 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 257–8
anthropological structuralism 215–17
Stubbs, William 156 Younge, Gary 274
Subaltern Studies 252–3
subjectivism 150–1, 154, 171, 173–4 Zeitgeist 176
Suetonius 134–5 Zetkin, Klara 34

BLOXHAM History and Morality 2020

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

BLOXHAM History and Morality 2020

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

BLOXHAM History and Morality 2020

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

History and Morality

History and Morality

Part 1. Contemplating Historical Actors in Context 16

1 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 291.

whippets in a meadow on a Sunday afternoon’.6 In somewhat higher diction the

made below by the investigation of different, sometimes competing, sorts of

risk being misconstrued as representative of Oxford scholarship [sic]. For many

sense that contemporary inequalities in access to and experience at our university

We welcome continued, open, critical engagement in the ongoing reassessment

16 https://bernardjporter.com/2018/01/04/oxford-and-the-ethics-of-empire/ and Guy Adams,

19 Max Hastings, ‘High-Handed Moral Condemnation’, Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2006.

20 https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/04/imperial-blame/. For a discussion on pride and shame,

1. In many historical explanations, as in the First World War case, attributions

With a mind to the political ramifications of scholarship, while many histor-

Whatever Meinecke had in mind, if surreptitiousness needs to be challenged

Part 1 tackles the historian’s signature practice of contextualization head-on,

29 Evans, Defence, 44–5. 30 Evans, ‘What Is History?’, 5.

31 I hold judgementalism to stand in relation to judgement much as moralism does to morality.

As against ethnocentrism, the historian’s default mode today does include a

sense of ‘influence’ as opposed to the stronger sense of ‘determination’. In the

In sentence C, Bloch retreats from sentences A and B, which he sees as forming

5 Bloch cited in Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, 15.

8 Bloch, Feudal Society, 318–19, 349–51. 9 Bloch, Feudal Society, 411.

scholarship has illustrated how later depictions of chivalric knighthood obscured

sociologist Émile Durkheim—a significant influence on the Annales school of

suffused with a vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness, if with every

14 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 1–3.

18 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 4–5.

19 Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 4.

suffused with a vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness, if with every

the actions of Ukrainian nationalists, by which he means circumstance from

24 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 208.

resettlement scheme (for intermigration of Poles and Ukrainians across new

Cause and Context in Historical Explanation

27 Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, 212–13.

about what I am going to do is true in virtue of my later action.’33 The prophecy

evidence is true of historical actors themselves, whether, individuals, organiza-

Different Sorts of Context

Contexts are manifold, so ‘contextualization’ can mean very different things.

criticizes a local administrator of whom he has read denouncing a colleague to

intelligibly . . . described.’48 This is another false dichotomy of cause and context.

48 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 14.

commonalities in mental functioning wherever we find them. Papuans envy,

Kertész’s baker returns to mind legion beneficiaries and accomplices in sun-

61 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 98.

order to maintain social capital. It is scarcely beyond human intelligence to discern

commonwealth, perhaps because of his recently rather unfashionable view that

Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed

The thinking characteristic of virtue epistemology also works well in highlight-

constantly issue to the world when it might be convenient to abrogate responsi-

category of revolutionary ideological actors. Hitler felt himself intervening in the

a historical periodical, not an antiquarian or political one. On the one hand, it is

Any rejoinder to these partisan cultural contextualizations ought not go to the

Political Morality and Special Roles

89 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (London: Continuum, 1998), 108.

93 Walzer, ‘Dirty Hands’.

not altogether rare in International Relations—‘IR’—debates.) Let us say that

Forms of Realism developed in recent decades do tend to claim to be purely

The IR theory of Constructivism comes in to criticize the sharpness of the

As to ‘greatness’ as a value, ponder the pseudo-moral calculus hinged around the