Jonathan Sumption

The French rarely read books by foreigners about their history. This is a pity, for their own historians have not always done the job well. The ideological fault-lines of French intellectual life have obstructed understanding of France’s 20th century. A francocentric view of the world has added to the problem. So, until recently, has the absence of the tradition of lacerating self-criticism and collective guilt common in the rest of Europe. Dreyfus, the fall of France, Vichy, Indo-China, the Algerian war, these are all difficult and delicate subjects in France. Things are beginning to improve, but much of the best work on the country’s modern history is still being written by Englishmen and Americans. Rod Kedward’s La Vie en Bleu is a case in point.

It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed rather elastic even at the time. Honest thinkers have had more difficulty in deciding what it means. At one extreme, it has its literal meaning: a system of government by the people. At the other, it has no meaning at all: just a hurrah word for whatever political arrangements the speaker admires, as in the expression ‘Democratic and Popular Republic of North Korea’.

It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not as odd as it seems now, after the passage of a decade and a half. Few of those present would have predicted that German unification would mark the beginning of a long period of relative economic decline, in which sclerotic institutions devised to achieve social cohesion and labour security after the second world war would undermine German competitiveness and push up its unemployment to levels not seen for half a century.

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each extra couple multiplies itself in turn; whereas food production can increase only arithmetically, and beyond a point not at all. Return to equilibrium is possible only through starvation or disease, provoked either by natural catastrophe or by wars over the scarce remaining resources. The resources of the earth have proved to be more elastic than Malthus foresaw. The mechanisms by which they may be exhausted are infinitely more complicated than he realised.

The crusades have had a bad press lately, for reasons which are not far to seek. They were characterised by the three things that the modern age has found most abhorrent about its own recent past: religious enthusiasm, racism and colonial settlement. More generally, they were inspired by a belief that there is a divine plan for the world, and that some people have been specially charged with executing it. This belief is not widely accepted today, outside the United States and parts of the Islamic Middle East. The 18th-century sceptic David Hume thought that the crusades were ‘the most signal and the most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Modern Europeans would add that they were wicked as well. One may wonder why it matters.

William Pitt the Younger always was the politician’s politician: an MP at 21, prime minister at 24 and dead at 46, with only two years out of office in between. Pitt dominated British politics for his entire adult life. He lived for the House of Commons and for the daily grind of government service. He was the greatest political orator of his day. Yet he had few recreations, and virtually no experience of the world. His friendships were distant. He wrote no intimate letters. He read little. He knew nothing of music or painting. He never loved any one. His was a life at once unfulfilled in private and triumphantly successful in public. One has heard of such people at Westminster today. But, on the whole, the 18th century could do better than that.

Timothy Garton Ash has become a bishop. In Free World, he has written something which is less a work of political analysis than an extended sermon about the value of political liberty and international co-operation between Western states. Of course, no one is against these admirable things, but they sometimes come at too high a price. Yet there is not much about the price in this worthy and rather parsonical volume, which manages to fill 250 pages while paying only the most perfunctory attention to the difficulties or the side-effects of our good intentions. The argument goes like this. Britain’s political classes are divided into two camps: the Europhiles and the Atlanticists. This is profoundly tragic and unnecessary.

Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of ‘obedience experiments’. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else’s orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially decent ‘subjects’ were persuaded to participate in what they believed to be experiments designed to establish the educational value of punishment. They were sat in a glass cubicle next to a room in which an actor pretended to go through a sequence of simple word tests.

To become a famous philosopher, as the French have discovered, you need an all-embracing theory. It does not have to be right, or even particularly well thought out, provided that it is interesting and admits of no exceptions. Michael Oakeshott, who died in 1990, was an academic political philosopher who passed much of his life repudiating all-embracing theories. As a result his fame was confined to a small number of admirers, and to those who attended his lectures at the London School of Economics, where he was for many years Professor of Political Science. If Oakeshott is coming back into fashion now, it is because he rejected two fundamental nostrums of modern politics, which have become more topical and controversial since his death.

The First Crusade is one of the great historical adventures. Whatever one may think of the consequences or the moral issues, the migration of perhaps 100,000 people across Europe and Asia Minor, and the conquest of a large part of the Middle East by the 20,000 or 30,000 survivors, all over the space of three years from 1096 to 1099, was an astonishing feat of endurance and martial skill. In their own time, the armies of the First Crusade created an ideology of holy warfare which retained its hold on European minds until the end of the 14th century, and arguably for 200 years beyond that. It also set standards of achievement for later generations which would never be attained again. The rest of crusading history is an almost continuous tale of retreat and withdrawal.

This book is an abridged version of one of the great works of modern classical scholarship, Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian war, which originally appeared between 1969 and 1987. This crisis in the affairs of the Greek world in the fifth century BC was seen, even at the time, as a turning point in human civilisation. Nearly half a century before, the Greeks had united against the great continental power of Persia. Led by Athens and Sparta, the two principal Greek powers, they had driven the fleets and armies of Xerxes from Europe and recovered control of their colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Now the Greeks turned against each other. The Persian war had been followed by a period of astonishing literary and artistic achievement.

Douglas Hurd’s political career ended only eight years ago, but it already seems to belong to another world. When he entered the House of Commons in 1974, at the age of 44, after a career in the diplomatic service, politics was still available as a second career. It had not yet been wholly professionalised. Overpowering ambition was not necessarily a qualification for the job. There was still a handful of fine political orators in the House, but Hurd felt no pressing need to add to their number. He was thoughtful without being original. He founded no movements. He joined no factions. He broke no moulds. Douglas Hurd built a distinguished career on being a competent man of business, decent, dependable and well-liked. He was dignified or aloof, depending on your point of view.

Religious tradition has defined human societies and shaped their habits of mind more strongly than any other factor. It still does, even in communities which have lost their collective belief in God. Indifference to formal creeds may be common to the governing elites of most countries, and in Europe to their electorates as well. Yet the world is still living with the consequences of centuries of mutual hostility and incomprehension among the three great monotheistic religions of the Mediterranean. The sudden birth of Islam and its rapid and violent spread through North Africa and the Middle East in the seventh century shattered the political and intellectual certainties of Europe more completely than the Germanic invaders of the Roman empire had ever done.

In life, it helps to be called Rothschild. Victor Rothschild discovered this well before he became associated in the public mind with think tanks and spycatchers. Visiting the United States as a 29-year-old Cambridge academic in 1939, he was received by President Roosevelt, as well as by the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary and the Director of the FBI. Although an MI5 officer of only middling rank, he entertained the prime minister to dinner in wartime in a private room at the Savoy Hotel. At a humbler level than this, he made it his business to know an astonishing range of civil servants and politicians, artists and writers, journalists, lawyers and academics.

The publication of this volume marks the completion of Joseph Frank's enormous biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a work which he has spent half a lifetime in writing. 'Monumental' is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank's is certainly that. The scale of the work is due mainly to the fact that it sets out to be not just a biography, but a work of literary criticism and a social and intellectual history of 19th-century Russia. This would be a marvellous achievement if it could be done. Dostoevsky's world is not easily accessible even to those who have read widely in its literature, and his ideas are certainly not self-explanatory. Dostoevsky was born in 1821 into a family that was legally classified as noble but would not have ranked as such by any other standard.