recent appraisal of A.J.P. Taylor by Paul Kennedy

[Doug Millison]

In the April 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Paul Kennedy offers an
assement of A.J.P. Taylor, -- it's largely positive, but ends on a sharply
critical note.  Read the whole article at
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/04/kennedy.htm and make up your own
mind.

Paul Kennedy:
"Taylor was familiar with many of the historians who had confronted this
problem of assigning causation-Gibbon <http://www.his.com/~z/gibho1.html>,
Burke <http://www.pagesz.net/~stevek/intellect/burke.html>, Carlyle
<http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/carlyle.htm>, Macaulay
<http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,50820+1+49622,00.html>,
Marx <http://www.pagesz.net/~stevek/intellect/marx.html> and Engels
<http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,33212+1+32642,00.html>,
Lewis Namier <http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/people/A0834786.html>-and
recognized, surely, how serious and tricky the issue is. But he declined to
advance any fully reasoned explication of where he came out on this problem,
or of whether his position changed over time. He will long be remembered for
his studies in diplomatic history, and even more so for his explosive work
on the origins of World War II. But this unorthodox contrarian will not
stand in the pantheon of those scholars, from Thucydides onward, who have
insisted that the historian's task is not only to retell what happened in
the past but also to try to explain why things happened the way they did.

"If that sounds like harsh criticism of a gifted scholar, it is doubly so
coming from this author's pen. During the first decade or so of my academic
life I was devoted to the Taylorian view of diplomatic and political
history. As an embarrassingly youthful twenty-year-old who had received a
book prize in history at the University of Newcastle during graduation in
1966, I chose to spend the money on Taylor's Mastery, Robinson and
Gallagher's Africa and the Victorians
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0333310063/theatlanticmonthA/>
(1961), and W. L. Langer's The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0394422147/theatlanticmonthA/>
(1935), perhaps the three classic texts of diplomatic history. It would be
many years before my reading of Braudel, Carr, Geoffrey Barraclough, William
McNeill
<http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0,5716,51043+1,00.html>, and
Eric Hobsbawm
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,425863,00.html> pushed me
to think of history in broader and more methodologically complex ways. This
is, for most of us, a natural progression. A doctorate compels most of us to
be detailed and narrow, and to carve out our own specialties, and tenure
committees rarely like boldness. Later, when our jobs are safe, we can be
synthetic, and generalize. But something in Taylor pushed him to become more
skeptical of searching for deeper meanings, and more persuaded that the
pennies added up to pounds.

"To those of us writing and teaching history today, the same weighty
challenge of assigning causation remains. The general reader and the college
student alike deserve to be stimulated and drawn into this unending
debate-unending because the serious study of humankind's story will always
need the particular and the general, the contingent and the profound.
Providing both is easier said than done. In fact, it has never been "done"
perfectly. Relating small details to large forces in history remains a
maddeningly chicken-and-egg, squaring-the-circle, hedgehog-and-fox exercise
that tests even the finest scholars, none of whom will get a straight A for
the effort. But to evade, as Taylor did, is no solution at all. The least we
can do is try."


Kennedy notes an issue regarding Taylor that would seem relevant to a
discussion of Pynchon, and GR especially, the issue of causation in history
that Kennedy notes in the pasage I quote above:

Kennedy:
Besides, Taylor's critics asserted, there was something both morally and
methodologically unsettling about his preference for the accident and the
contingent in history. If World War II was like an unintended road crash (an
analogy Taylor used), where was the place for blaming Hitler and his noxious
creed of racism and aggression? More important, where was the space for
profound forces and for overall trends? For the roles of ideology, domestic
politics, culture, national traditions and myths, and economic forces? Was
all of history a series of Jacques Tati-style accidents? This was the kernel
of the Oxford historian T. W. Mason's powerful attack on Taylor for
trivializing the innate evil and aggressiveness of National Socialism (and
thereby downplaying the likelihood, rather than the happenstance, of a
conflict with the democracies). 

"The only "solution" open to this regime of the structural tensions and
crises produced by dictatorship and rearmament was more dictatorship and
more rearmament, then expansion, then war and terror, then plunder and
enslavement ... A war for the plunder of manpower and materials lay square
in the dreadful logic of German economic development under National
Socialist rule." [NOTE: Kennedy is quoting Mason here]

In his reply Taylor conceded that he may not have emphasized the profound
forces, but he asserted that too many historians focused on those forces
because they didn't like to do the detailed work-add up the pennies, Taylor
advised, and they will soon become pounds; "I prefer detail to
generalisations"; and so on. This was not a persuasive reply. In fact, in
the context of the other historical debates that were raging at Oxford and
elsewhere in the 1960s, it seemed a breathtakingly banal attitude. These
were the years when Fernand Braudel's magnificent The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II was showing that history could
be understood at three separate but interconnected levels; when E. P.
Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class revolutionized
the writing of socio-political history; when Fritz Fischer's works on German
war aims in World War I sought to connect the deep social and economic
forces that were impelling expansion in Wilhelmine Germany with the high
policies being pursued by Berlin; when Arthur Marwick was developing the
study of "total war and social change." And here, on the other hand, was
Taylor, a sort of Athanasius contra Mundum, stating that he preferred
details to generalizations.