Robert Gildea: Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Originally published in Law and Liberty, February 29, 2016.

 

To this day, every major political grouping in France offers its own account of the opposition the country mounted against the Germans in World War II, leaving it to historians to sort things out. Robert Gildea has produced a well-researched and balanced book on the subject, guiding readers through the factional snags.

Moral and political fragmentation in fact is the major theme here. As conflict with Nazi Germany loomed, the French were horrified at the prospect of another Great War, and unnerved to the point of military paralysis. So factionalized was the society that it found no unity even against the aggressor. Insofar as most French citizens agreed on anything, it was that their hero of the earlier conflagration, Marshall Philippe Pétain, was right to counsel surrender. In 1940, they gave peace with the Nazis a chance—under their direct rule in the north, under the collaborationist government at Vichy in the south.

Nuclei of resistance to the occupier formed at once, but, as Gildea shows, with little strength or cohesiveness. Except for Charles de Gaulle, recently made a general, no member of the last Cabinet of the Third Republic continued the fight. The handful of parliamentarians who wanted to start a government-in-exile were arrested by the Vichyites in Casablanca, released, and placed under surveillance. Some French communists went underground but they were in the minority–the party line was to take no stand against Hitler, who was in a non-aggression pact with Josef Stalin until Hitler broke it by invading Russia in June 1941.

Most of France’s North African colonies sided with Vichy—recall Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca—and although sub-Saharan France saw strong pockets of resistance (for black Africans, a new order founded upon Aryan triumphalism looked even worse than French colonialism), how would those colonies be organized as effective fighting units against the German military machine? General de Gaulle made his famous appeal for unity from his exile in London. Few in France heard it; fewer still heeded it, even among the isolated resisters.

Although throughout the conflict, the resisters’ numbers grew, the schisms among them continued even as Allied forces gathered, took the war to the enemy in multiple fronts, and weakened the Nazi grip on France. De Gaulle and his “Free France” (later “Fighting France”) organization eventually dominated the field, but the political splinter groups frustrated him then and after the war, and the story of the Resistance itself became a matter of contention in the political fights to come.

Into this historiographic free-for-all wades Gildea, who teaches modern history at Oxford. He holds decidedly Laborite political convictions—at one point he pauses to regret that the French missed their chance, in the aftermath of the war, to form a new Popular Front coalition of social democrats and communists, which might have made for “a French-style Labour Party.” But he is too much the historian to give himself over to partisanship. This even-handed book leavens its social and political analyses with stories gleaned from the archival and oral-history sources he so evidently loves.

When honest academic historians sift through competing partisan narratives, trying to figure out what really happened, they sometimes miss what those narrative are aimed at: not historical accuracy but myth-making, and often of an honorable kind. De Gaulle, for example, wrote his War Memoirs (1955) not as history in the academic sense but as a political testament, a means of unifying the French along the lines of a stable republican regime animated by renewed patriotism.

One of my favorites among the many remarkable persons Gildea describes is the French woman résistante who, upon being asked by one of her astonished Nazi captors, why she had taken up arms against the Reich, answered “Quite simply colonel, because the men had dropped theirs.” The men needed to recover from their humiliation after the war if they were once again to become citizens. De Gaulle understood that, too. While carefully separating the poetic from the prosaic, he is a historian who never forgets the indispensable political and therefore human need for poetry. When he quotes de Gaulle’s ringing celebration, in a liberated Paris in 1945, of “One France, the true France, eternal France,” Gildea observes the exaggeration while showing his readers the need for it.

Small in number, resisters nonetheless came from every one of the factions—Left and Right, soldiers and civilians, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant (the word “Resistance” itself alluded to Protestant resistance to Catholics during the sectarian civil wars of the seventeenth century), and atheistic. Gildea takes care to show how women proved crucial to the Resistance, not so much as combatants but in the dangerous tasks of carrying messages and sheltering fugitives—crimes punishable by prison or death. He also gives full credit to foreign combatants, including veteran from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and the many courageous and resourceful Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe who found shelter in Vichyite southern France until late 1942, when the Nazis elbowed aside the French collaborationists and assumed direct rule as in the north.

The fundamental split that emerged, once the defeat of the Nazis and the collaborators was assured (and de Gaulle knew it was, early, telling Churchill so on the day after Pearl Harbor), was between the French republicans, led by the exiled de Gaulle—initially from London, then from Algiers—and the communists. For a short time, these two Resistance wings allied, thanks to the work of one of the really great men the war brought forward, Jean Moulin.

A prefect before the war, displaced by the Vichyites, Moulin (1899-1943) found his way to London and met de Gaulle in October 1941. De Gaulle needed someone to bring the several Resistance organizations together under Free French coordination, and in Moulin he found someone with the courage, organizational savvy, and persuasive powers to do that. Moulin returned to France, where he made contact with key leaders of all factions, many of whom spun their own mythologies, most of them featuring inflated estimates of the number of men they commanded. Through Moulin, de Gaulle hoped to persuade the communist and also the romantic-revolutionary republican factions to delay their quixotic guerrilla actions and await the Allied landing, still two years away. By the beginning of 1943, Moulin had managed to get them all to agree to this, more or less.

This astonishing achievement was almost immediately imperiled by Moulin’s capture, torture, and death at the hands of the Gestapo. (Two decades later, André Malraux said, “He revealed not a single secret—he who knew them all.”) But before he died, Moulin established the innocuously titled Committee for General Studies, eventually headed by Michel Debré, who went on to write the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958. What the Committee ‘studied’ was the identities of non-communist French men and women who were qualified to assume the functions of government as soon as the Allies drove out the Nazis. Immediate rule of France by well-vetted Frenchmen would prove indispensable to reestablishing French republicanism because the only well-organized force in what remained of French civil society was the French Communist Party, whose chairman, Maurice Thorez, was spending the war in Moscow, where he received his instructions for the postwar struggle.

For their part, the communists never fully recovered from the infamy of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but it must be noted that many exhibited great courage once they focused on the real enemy. Their own myth, Gildea observes, amounted to an atheist’s version of Christian martyrdom. This never quite convinced most Frenchmen, many of whom suffered the reprisals that followed communist heroics. But there can be no doubt that communists exhibited valor equal to any other group that fought the occupiers.

Meanwhile, in Washington, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull detested de Gaulle, supposing him to be a would-be Bonaparte intent on founding a dictatorship. Fortunately, the wiser heads of Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower prevailed.  The Americans let de Gaulle deal with the communists, the more idealistic but none-too-well-organized republican résistants, and the Vichyites, as U. S., British, Polish, and some French troops (most of them not civilian résistants but men battle-hardened in North Africa) rolled up the Germans on the Western Front, while the Red Army, along with Poles under the command of Soviet officers, closed in from the east.

Gildea handles a substantial mass of facts and competing stories with the deft and practiced touch of a master of the historical craft. The story he tells is far more complex than the one I’ve told here, and he unfolds it with seasoned aplomb. Of course no review should be without its cavils, and mine is that he doesn’t do full justice to de Gaulle’s intention. It is not true that “the only ambition of de Gaulle was to strengthen the state and to secure his leadership role within it.” That was half of the goal, and only the first half. It makes him sound too much like the Bonapartist bogey imagined by FDR, even though Gildea himself disputes FDR’s more sinister interpretation. De Gaulle was equally concerned to restore French republicanism, if in new form.

Since at least the early 1930s, when he had lobbied the French Assembly for support of his plans for mobile army forces to supplement the passive defenses afforded by the Maginot Line fortifications, de Gaulle had witnessed the chaos, even imbecility, of parliamentary politics in France. Without shading into Bonapartism, he understood the need to establish an independently elected executive. This was especially important in the countries of Europe, where troops could pour across a national border faster than any parliament in an invaded country could act. De Gaulle had longed for such a regime change in the interwar years, and he dedicated his remaining life to founding and perpetuating a French republicanism that could defend itself.

Among the stories told about the Resistance, Gildea seem to favor the more recently told ones: those that lend themselves to a feminist emphasis on “highlighting a devotion to others rather than to their own glory’; those that show Jews as both victims and résistants; and those celebrating the rescuers who sheltered all types of résistants, a perilous thing to do. What he terms the “humanitarian narrative,” I observe, fits better into today’s demi-regime of the European Union, and better into his own democratic socialism, than into what he calls “the Gaullist myth of national liberation.” It better fits the EU than “the communist myth of popular insurrection,” too. Socialism in our day is more likely to come in on a blitzkrieg of bureaucratic paperwork in the name of just this sort of soft humanitarianism.

One may prefer the tougher and more forthrightly political myth of Gaullism, as I do. Robert Gildea is nonetheless right to think that all of these stories bring facts to the table, and to give to every résistant some portion of the honors distributed here.

 

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Thucydides on Politics: Back to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

 

The reader may safely ignore the sinking feeling he may get upon reading the subtitle. Although Hawthorn offers a few pages on contemporary international politics, he has written no tendentious, ‘lessons-from-Thucydides’ screed. Much more ambitiously, and fortified by careful study of the text, he sets out to be Thucydides’ Thucydides, tracing the historian’s narrative, probing, judging, guessing, arguing with other scholars and with Thucydides himself, always illuminating. Like his philosophic mentor, Bernard Williams, Hawthorn displays a resolutely English intelligence, venturing no grand theories but bringing out defensible arguments from sensible consideration of details mastered. The result is that rarity, a readable commentary on a classic book, teaching readers how better to think about politics and war in and among communities that seek, somehow, to rule themselves.

What makes politics difficult is the number and complexity of the causes that operate in human life. Explicitly, Thucydides attributes the Pelopponesian War to one main geopolitical cause: Spartans’ fear of the rise of the Athenian empire, backed by its navy. He makes another cause visible, slightly beneath the surface: Two distinct regimes, one oligarchic, the other democratic, distrust one another, each concerned that the other might aid the partisans of its domestic regime rivals. Hawthorn proceeds with caution, however, as Thucydides’ book “has never been easy to read”; a “possession for all time,” its author calls it, but not easily owned by any reader, now or in antiquity.

“Its subject though is clear. It is politics: men (all men) seeking power over others using it to pursue ends that are sometimes clear, sometimes not, never being sure what the outcomes will be.” Thucydides “allows one to see that politics is rarely admirable but always unavoidable, owes less to reason than we might suppose and allows no practical, moral or constitutional closure”; on the other hand, “at no point can it be said that character does not matter.” Contingencies dominate politics and war, and character matters very much indeed if there are no comforting ‘iron laws of History’ to put one’s trust in.

In writing his history, Thucydides’ intention “was almost the opposite of that of his most prominent predecessor, Herodotus,” who seeks to preserve the memory of “the great and wondrous achievements displayed by the Greeks and the barbarians, and especially their reasons for fighting each other,” in the Persian War. In writing what he calls his “inquiry,” Thucydides aims not so much as remembrance as usefulness; the usefulness of his narrative derives from its truthfulness, to the historian’s careful measuring of “the distances between what was thought and said and what transpired.” What is more, “Logoi, the accounts people give, their analysis, reflection, calculation and debate, are [themselves] important erga, things done, political acts to be seen as such in the light of others.” Hobbes understood this, remarking that Thucydides’ way of writing “secretly instruct[s] the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.” He meant that in presenting both the arguments and the actions, the speeches and the deeds, of the principal statesmen on both sides of the conflict, Thucydides impels his reader toward figuring out the truth of the matter for himself, and so to fortify himself, to take possession of this possession for all time. And given the permanence of human nature and the political life natural to human beings, what has happened in the Peloponnese in the fifth century B.C. “can be expected to happen again or some time in the future,” in “much the same ways,” as Thucydides himself remarks. His alert readers will have readied themselves for that likelihood. Histories too are both logoi and erga.

Thucydides begins his account of the second Peloponnesian War before the first war, which began in 460. After two invasions of Greece by the Persian Empire, repelled by Greek victories at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, Athens formed the Delian League as what we would now call a deterrent against any subsequent Persian ambitions and a defense in case those ambitions re-ignited. The League became the foundation of their own empire, itself founded on the navy it built in defense against the Persians. The Spartans didn’t join the League, their long-term commitment to any alliance effectively prevented by the prospect of a rebellion of the helot class at home. When the Spartans first asked for, and then declined Athenian assistance in putting down such a revolt in the nearby polis at Messenia, the offended Athenians ended the alliance with Sparta; “an open difference first emerged,” Thucydides writes, between the two regimes. The first war lasted from 460 to 445, ending in a treaty which was supposed to last for thirty years. According to its terms, “Sparta was to retain its allies in the Peloponnese and Boeotia and also Megara, all of which were to be self-governing, so long as they did not move to what by this time was coming to be called ‘democracy.'”

The second war began in 431. The worrisome naval dominance of Athens spurred the Spartans to action, but “there was no ultimate necessity to this,” inasmuch as the Athenian navy might not have been built up at all, absent the Persian threat of two generations earlier. Athens engaged in no provocations under the terms of the treaty. “The Spartans would not appear to have had anything, as he puts it, that they could no longer bear; anything material to fear.” Why, then, did it happen?

Distinguishing between aitia (the unspoken but real reason for an action) and prophesis (the reason spoken publicly), Thucydides identifies the Spartans’ fear as the “truest” but least openly stated motive for fighting the second war. Other, publicly stated but subsidiary arguments were the arguments of their allies, especially the Corinthians, who disputed quarreled with Athens and one of its allies over influence in a couple of poleis in the 430s, disputes fueled by the Corinthians’ “pride or honor.” For their part, in the course of these quarrels events took the Athenians “further than they appear to have wanted to go,” as an intendedly deterrent show of naval force escalated. Thucydides and Hawthorn concur that the Athenians were at least “in the right by the terms of the thirty-ear peace” in acting to defend one of its allies against Sparta’s ally, the Corinthians, angered at “the repeated indifference” of Athens and its ally “to their standing and honor as a serious power,” and also somewhat ashamed at “having so openly to depend on Sparta,” a dependence belying their claim to be such a power. But “the true reasons” for the war lay in Sparta.

Sparta’s king, Archidamos, a man “with a reputation for intelligence and moderation,” cautioned that Sparta lacked the naval resources to fight Athens successfully at this time. He called for patient war preparation and an effort at finding more allies. Knowing the character of the Spartan regime, a timocracy or rule of the honorable, he urged them against feeling shame at such a slow and cautious policy, appealing to the honor victory will bring, and observing that the victorious polis “will be the one trained in the hardest schools of necessity.” He lost the rhetorical battle in the assembly of timocrats to an ephor who called decisiveness the “true prudence,’ claiming that the gods were on the side of Sparta and its allies—a ‘prudentialism’ that actually played the Spartans’ love of honor. Nonetheless, in action as distinguished from argument, Sparta sent three separate delegations to Athens, offering peace. It was Pericles, who had established himself as de facto monarch over the Athenian democracy, who persuaded his countrymen to reject the peace offers, correctly observing that Sparta was ill-prepared for war. “A majority of Athenian citizens appear to have been pleased to face war,” as “they believed they had the edge.” We must conclude, then, that “the true reasons” for the war did not lie in Sparta, at least not exclusively. Thucydides and Hawthorn leave this point for the reader to figure out.

Pericles placed his bet on Athenian sea power, demonstrating it by a couple of minor naval operations against poleis the Corinthians had seized from local rulers. It was in the first winter of the war that Pericles delivered his funeral oration praising soldiers fallen that summer in skirmishes, an oration directed at Athenian farmers forced into the city by the Spartan threat and at Athenians displeased at his reluctance to prosecute the war more vigorously. He needed to make both groups more ardent lovers of the Athenian polis, and he did so by an appeal to the kind of honor that fits the regime of democracy, consisting of pride in material strength; the glory of the fallen; the virtues of democracy itself, including law-abidingness and private freedom; courage in foreign policy; and finally by appealing to a sort of prudence congenial to democracy, Athens’ policy of making friends by conferring favors, not receiving them—a practice that weakens one’s friends. The refutation of Pericles came not in words, of which he was the master, but nature, in the form of a plague, which made death inglorious. Pericles nonetheless mounted two expeditions the following summer; “perhaps he simply wanted to get as many soldiers and sailors out of the city he could afford to,” or (again, perhaps) “he was putting on a show to distract discontent.” In any event, he deflected blame from himself, delivering still another speech appealing now to fear: Though self-governing within, Athens acts the tyrant with foreigners; like all tyrants, they may have been wrong to take power but would imperil themselves by letting it go. He ends with an invocation of the glory of Athens, but only as a coda to a grimmer message.

This means that Pericles’ de facto monarchy still rested on the democracy. Pericles “was fighting for his political life.” And he did so successfully, thanks to his extraordinary strengths of character and intelligence in “direct[ing] and where necessary distract[ing] the citizens and control[ling] them.” “No other leader after Pericles managed to dominate the city for so long,” as “they were lesser men.”  The later, famously disastrous, expedition to Sicily, an unnecessary and separate war that was “a mistake to have thought of fighting.” Even this was not enough to bring defeat in the Peloponnesian War, which resulted by subsequent factional infighting. “The defeat was an avoidable disaster”; “Athens, it can be argued, could have won.”

At the beginning of the war, and for years thereafter, neither side could devise a sound strategy for sustaining an attack on the other. Insofar as Pericles arrived at a strategy, it was defensive—to exhaust the invading Spartans on land while commanding the seas. He had no idea as to how Athens might actually defeat Sparta or Corinth. Accordingly, Thucydides presents the several events of the first eighteen years of the war as illustrations of “the circumstance and experience of war in general and its attendant political complications” rather than elements of any grand plan. For example, the 429 Spartan expedition against Plataea, Athens’ ally, “reveals much about the lack of strategic thinking, the problems of distance between the cities and their commanders in the field, and above all, the dangers of relying on allies whose natural first interest was their own.” The Athenian statesmen faced similar imponderables. For himself and his readers, Thucydides evidently commends pondering imponderableness.

The speeches by Athenian statesmen Cleon and Diodotos on the question of whether to slaughter the Mytilenaeans for attempting to break their alliance with Athens and go over to the Spartans affords Thucydides the chance to examine political speech as action. The passions of fear, anger, and hope not only cause men to divide into political factions, they also “cause men to divide within themselves and slide into self-deception.” In their speeches, both statesmen “deliberat[e] on the politics of deliberation,” Cleon concluding that “the delights of oratory cancel common sense” and Diodotos maintaining that the “haste and high emotion” which saturate political debate, coupled with the audience’s assumption that every speaker advances his self-interest, making democratic Athens “the only city so clever that it is impossible to do good here openly and without deceit.” Getting down to reality, however, both men admit that the democracy does not and cannot rule foreign cities democratically; their dispute centers instead on how to conduct such rule under this circumstance. Cleon advocates slaughtering the Mytilenaeans in order to deter other cities from rebelling; Diodotos advocates sparing all but the ringleaders of the rebellion by pretending that most Mytilenaeans are not guilty and by fortifying the pro-Athenian Mytilene faction. “The difference between Cleon and Diodotos was merely that one was afraid of what might follow if Athens did not use extreme force, the other of what might follow if it did.” Sure enough, the Athenian assembly votes for Diodotos’ policy—but not for the prudent reason he had given. “This was war; ambitions were urgent, nerves were on edge and there was anger everywhere…. One can be struck less by the fact that speech was idle than by the fact that men in these circumstances gave time to it at all.” The war between the two alliances ignited civil wars—that is, regime wars—throughout Greece. In Thucydides’ words, “practically the whole Greek world was in turmoil as everywhere there were rival efforts by the leaders of the populace to bring in the Athenians and by the oligarchs to bring in the Spartans.” Atrocities ensued in this struggle for domination, as “reckless audacity,” “daring without logismos,” and the abandonment of moderation ruled men’s souls. Hawthorn supplements this analysis, writing that it was “the disruption of everyday relations” in wartime that made formerly political disputes so poisonous, converting political rivals into “enemies of an intensely personal kind.” “Civil strife inverts values and subverts the semantics of peace,” by which he means that such words as ‘sincerity’ and ‘moderation’ meet contemptuous dismissal, as men combine cynicism and indignation in a way not seen in normal circumstances. He rightly observes that Thucydides nonetheless does not “follow the mischievous sophists of his time” in denying truth altogether. Thucydides “grip on enduring truths of the human condition remains bleakly sure.”

By winter 424-423 the Spartans were “in despair,” the Athenians optimistic in light of what Thucydides calls “their current run of good luck.” He concurs with the Athenian statesmen (including Pericles and Diodotus) who understood that hope is “as dangerous, indeed, as despair.” The gods do not compel human beings to acts of folly, nor do “chains of antecedent causes” (what thinkers latterly call ‘History’). For him Ananke or necessity inheres in being bound by what one believes themselves “to be in their own or someone else’s eyes, compelled by the real or perceived power of others, and impelled by their own.” The now-careless Athenians and the now-hesitant Spartans played out this form of necessity in their conflict over the polis at Megara, on the isthmus connecting Attica to the Peloponnese—a ‘geopolitical chokepoint,’ as we now say. Megara has broken with Athens in 446, but in 424 democrats seized rule there; this notwithstanding, the popular party feared the Athenians, who were hardly ‘democratic’ in dealing with their allies. Athenian and Spartan troops confronted one another, Thucydides himself a commander of the Athenians, Brasidas the Spartan general. Brasidas is one of the few Spartan commanders Thucydides respects; he “could be diplomatic” and “he also moved with speed”—neither trait characteristically Spartan. Brasidas also understood supply chains, targeting the polis at Amphipolos, a major Athenian source for the timber they used for the masts their navy depended upon. Upon receiving a desperate call for assistance from the Athenian general stationed nearby, Thucydides had no way to respond in time. “Necessity now descended on Thucydides,” who went into exile for the next two decades. “Had he not,” Hawthorn remarks, “we might not have the text we do.” Meanwhile, the prudent Brasidas proved a mild conqueror, giving other members of the Athenian empire/alliance good reason to consider switching sides. In effect, Brasidas enacted the kind of proposal Diodotos had proposed to the Athenians themselves. But these poleis underestimated Athenian power and resolve, “preferr[ing] to make their judgments on the basis of wishful thinking rather than prudent foresight,” as Thucydides puts it.

This brings Hawthorn to consider the idea of ‘interest,’ for which no Greek word existed when Thucydides wrote. The Greeks thought rather in terms of a closely connected set of ideas: dunamis or physical power; arche or command; and cratos or rule. Taken together, they amount to aitia or ‘real interest,’ sometimes translated as ‘real reason’ or ‘real purpose,’ a translation Hawthorn rejects as a touch too rationalistic. “The power of Athens’ dominion or ’empire,’ the Athenians had explained in their speech at Sparta (to an audience that would surely have known), enabled them to allay their fears, maintain their honor and pursue their ‘self-interest’ in material gain.” Athenians and men generally must therefore understand where power was (in the authority of custom, law, office, sheer force, even “occasionally in the force of the better argument”), what to use it for (cementing unity at home and among allies, punishing, conquering, deterring, and how to deploy it (alone or in alliance with others). By the year 421, these complex considerations proved so entirely imponderable that both sides agreed to a truce. When it ended the following year, both Cleon and Brasidas were killed in battle, removing the two most effective pro-war statesmen from the principal contending poleis. Athens and Sparta settled on a peace treaty, but their allies, fearing hegemony over themselves would lock into place as a consequent, continued in their restiveness. “For most of the time, political entities in Greece were driven by the wish to rule themselves.” Such a necessity, and such an ‘interest,’ inheres not in the gods or in ‘History’ but in human nature.

“Political anxiety” and “radical uncertainty” ensued. “All believed that whatever their interests were—and to most, beyond their immediate security, these were not clear—they could not be assured of realizing these without an alliance with at least one other state; and then could not be assured that the alliance they made would not excite opposition from yet another and therefore undermine the purpose they had in making it.” Under such circumstances, no clear strategic thinking came forth, anywhere. Emotions ruled in place of either principled or prudential reasoning. However, Thucydides “nowhere indicates that he himself thought of the emotions, feelings, pathe or pathemata as a class,” neither using the word nor even using an especially rich set of words indicating the variety of emotions. He usually restricts himself to fear, hope, and anger, and inclines to conceive of a ‘tight fit’ between what we would analyze as motive (including emotions), intention, and action: “pre-volitional, pre-reflective commitments to one or another state of affairs, commitments that we can discover in what we and others think of how we and they act,” often covered by the Greek word, eros. Hawthorn doubts that these “commitments” “are those that we might feel now or even immediately grasp,” and gives the example of hubris. To us it suggests pride, especially pride flouting divine or human authority. “For fifth-century Greeks, by contrast, hubris was a deliberative act, the direct and amoral practice of demeaning others for the sheer pleasure of doing so.”

As seen, above all, in Alcibiades. “Driven by a restless desire for personal power,” “compulsively competitive and prone to jealousy,” supremely confident, “Alcibiades delights in not merely in defeating his rivals but in humiliating them.” The spirit of Alcibiades pervaded the Athenians generally in their dealings with the polis at Melos, a minor ally of Sparta. If the most celebrated speech in Thucydides remains Pericles’ funeral oration, a call for love of country, for taking ‘pride’ in being an Athenian in the praiseworthy sense we use the term today, the most infamous speech remains the Melian ‘dialogue’ of the year 416, goes far beyond the ‘foreign policy realism’ attributed to it by most scholars today. In fact no ‘realistic’ motive spurred the Athenians to take Melos; “it was not particularly rich” and “had little strategic significance.”  Rather, having lost on land to the Spartans at Mantinea, the Athenians wanted “to demonstrate their superiority in moving at sea” by acting and speaking in a manner “directly insulting to the Spartans.” When the Melians dared to reject the Athenians’ demand of unconditional, they were rewarded by the death of all their men and the enslavement of their women and children. Their ‘point’ (as we would say) was that Sparta could do nothing for them. “It was theater, the demonstration to others and oneself of one’s power to demean and an expression of pleasure in doing so.”

All this noticed, “Not everything in politics in war is necessity, interest, or the thrill of doing down opponents.” There is also “restlessness, a diffuse and unfocused disposition to find something to act against.” Hawthorn regards the Athenians’ ill-fated second expedition against Sicily in 415 as an instance of this; “most of them did not know quite what they had in mind.” Alcibiades fomented such mindlessness, making “his self-flattery theirs.” (“And they were enchanted.”) In the wake of the triumph at Melos, “Athenians were affirming to themselves what Athens could once again be”; they were making Athens great again, to adapt a phrase from the American scene. But in the event they “had propelled themselves to a distant venture the purposes of which had been poorly defined and for which, almost whatever they intended, their own resources were inadequate, local support lacking, the opposition formidable and their leadership uncertain. Only clever tactics and luck could redeem it.” They didn’t, and Alcibiades skipped over to the Spartan side, having decided that Athens must not be allowed to sin even once against demagoguery. And he gave his new sponsors good advice: Defeat the Athenian strategy (it turns out that he could discern one) of encircling Sparta by establishing a military foothold a few miles north of Athens. Meanwhile, in Sicily the Athenians lost and their generals executed. “For the first time, writes Thucydides… the Athenians had in Syracuse come up against a city like their own: a rich and democratically inclined place whose internal divisions they could not exploit.” That, but mostly ill fortune, caused their defeat and humiliation. Moderate General Nicias and vigorous, daring General Demosthenes’ virtues had served Athens well for a decade, but in the new circumstances they failed. Narrowly considered, Alcibiades was right to get out of town. After all, if Fortune’s wheel spun again, “he might return to lead it.”

The Athenian defeat clarified matters. The politics of the war became “simpler than before”:”The Athenians wanted to save themselves and what they could of their dominion, and the Peloponnesians and disaffected parties in Athens’ subject states wanted to end it.” Ever resilient, the Athenians gathered their wits and, for once, submitted to “good discipline in everything,” initially under a board of elders. It didn’t last, but the disaffection with democracy endured. Ever alert, Alcibiades saw that the Athenians might now be persuaded that they needed him, and let it be known that he would obligingly return if an oligarchy replaced the democracy.  The prominent general and politician Phrynicos prudently supposed that Alcibiades cared no more for oligarchy than for democracy, preferring himself to either, and that Athens’ restive allies didn’t care what the regime in Athens was, only that it oppressed them; in a rare, not to say unique event, Alcibiades found himself out-schemed and his return blocked. Nonetheless, in 411 the democracy collapsed, initially replaced by the oligarchic regime of “the 400” (which included Phrynicos), then by “the 5000,” a regime whose exact nature remains unclear (oligarchy? mixed regime?), but which did not include Phrynicos, who had been assassinated in the meantime. However they might be classified, the “new rulers in Athens believed that they faced a simple choice: Athens had either to get support and protection from Persia or to make a new peace and alliance with Sparta.”

Before the new regime could do much more than consolidate, Athens sustained another defeat, worse than the one in Sicily: the loss of Euboea, the breadbasket of their empire, located perilously close to the Piraeus itself. But the Spartans as usual exercised caution and didn’t go for the knockout. Alcibiades, who had defected from Sparta to Persia in 412 was reinstated as a general by the new regime at Athens, helped to organize defenses, and the war continued, although Alcibiades took care not to return to the city itself until 407. Thucydides abruptly ends his history with the events of 411; he died in 404. By then the Peloponnesian forces were about to win the war, having finally achieved superiority over the Athenians at sea—”an ironic end” for the ships-proud regime. Still, and as always, “Thucydides allows one to see” that “things could have gone differently until the very last days.” Reality may constrain, but events march forward in no inevitable course.

Hawthorn situates himself between the stance taken by Jacqueline de Romilly—that the statesmen Thucydides portrays acted according to rational strategies—and that of Hans-Peter Stahl, who claims that the Athenians and human beings generally act according to emotions defying rational understanding. He adopts instead Nietzsche’s view, that thought and action both “are guided by pre-rational commitments,” but that the combination of these three forces “explain what people make happen, which can sometimes be nothing.” Accordingly, Thucydides exhibits a preference for moderation in politics, a resolute search for the best evidence in uncovering what political men did and intended to do, not regardless of what they say but with the knowledge that what they say, however deceptive, itself constitutes a political fact.

War may be, as Thucydides writes, a violent master, but not an all-powerful one. Tyche or fate does not rule absolutely; the Athenians, for example “were not predetermined to be defeated in Sicily.” “Although all events have causes, these are many and varied, and they and their effects often occur in unexpected conjunctions with others… and except when subject to the unassailable power of another, and sometimes even when they are, people are not bound to act in just one way.”

For all of these reasons, “there can be no resolution” in political life “and, for reasons we may never know, Thucydides was saved from any temptation to arrive at one.” He may or may not have deliberately left his book unfinished, but it is right that he did.

 

 

 

Stephen Kotkin: Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

Originally published in Liberty and Law, December 29, 2014.

 

It wouldn’t be fair to have called Bolshevism the death of irony. But it did insist on its exile. In the fall of 1922, V. I. Lenin deported intellectuals—putting them on two vessels jocularly called the Philosophers’ Steamers—for exhibiting such suspicious traits as “knows a foreign language” and, yes, “uses irony.” those with opinions at actual variance with the new regime were interned in labor camps on an island near the White Se. The newly formed State Political Administration (GPU) saw to it that no creeping Socratism would shadow the prospect of radiant tomorrows opened by History’s proletarian vanguard.

As distinct from philosophy, ideology tolerates no questioners, only interrogators. And “ideology was Bolshevik identity,” writes Stephen Kotkin in the first volume of his biography of Stalin. “The documents, whether those made public at the time or kept secret, are absolutely saturated with Marxist-Leninist ways of thinking and vocabulary.” The fights for dominance by and within the Bolshevik Party centered on ideas, for it was ideas that “defin[ed] the revolution going forward” and, in so doing, formed the principal claims to rule in Soviet Russia.

Josef Stalin defeated Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and his other rivals in large measure by mastering Leninism, rather as a fundamentalist preacher asserts his authority by quoting Scripture. Although Lenin himself famously—if only allegedly—expressed deathbed doubts about Stalin’s fitness to be general secretary of the Bolshevik Party, [1] Stalin consolidated his position with the slogan, “Lenin has died—Leninism lives!” In Soviet Russia, the ‘ism’ mattered most.

A man born as Iosif “Soso” Jughashvili who rechristens himself “Stalin,” which means “Man of Steel,” does not likely appreciate irony, much. Born in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 and educated at an Eastern Orthodox theological seminary in nearby Tiflis, such a man would have been as unamused as Queen Victoria was so often reported to be, had he heard that the young American songwriter and pianist Oscar Levant, upon hearing of Stalin’s upbringing, dashed off a tune titled “A Slight Touch of Tiflis.” (A publisher deemed it “hilarious but unprintable” but, this being America, no one shipped Oscar off to the shores of Lake Huron.) The Tiflis scholar proved diligent, a good student and the lead tenor in the school choir, before meeting a Marxist militant who mentored him in dialectical materialism. “In Marxism he found his theory of everything” or, as the man himself soon would put it, “a complete worldview.”

The future Stalin claimed to have joined the Russian Communist Party in 1898—the year that Vladimir Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin, did—and yes, studied Machiavelli’s The Prince along with his Marx, Engels, and Renan while working part-time jobs by day and agitating for revolution at night. Lenin, eight years Stalin’s senior, quickly hit upon the political formula that would enable his brand of Marxism to rule a large swath of the earth: “a party of professional revolutionaries”—smaller, more disciplined than the more “inclusive” Mensheviks.

In the social and political chaos soon to come, fanatical discipline would carry the day, not coalition-building. For this criterion Stalin must have looked very good indeed to Lenin: a militant journalist and organizer, all-in for such criminal antics as a 1907 mail-coach heist that landed both men in exile. In 1912, when Lenin formed a 12-member Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he plucked Jughashvili from the dustbin—the younger man had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry, which was illegal in the forms in which he practiced it.” Kotkin suggests that Lenin appreciated his ally’s status as a then-rare representative of the Caucasus region of the empire. And Soso was grateful. Although, fortunately for himself, he “did little or nothing” for Lenin or the party during the Great War—consigned as he was to internal exile—he became deeply involved in internecine Bolshevik politics when it counted, in 1917 and thereafter, writing some 40 lead articles for the party newspaper, Pravda (or “Truth,” as its anti-ironist publishers called it), consistently taking Lenin’s side.

This volume shows how the Bolshevik Revolution could happen, and how Lenin but especially Stalin consolidated it. Russia’s czarist regime adapted badly to the ‘Tocquevillian’ dimension of modernity—the rise of the people to influence, against the landed aristocrats. The czars had enjoyed an unusual form of absolute monarchy. Unlike, say, the Bourbons, the Romanovs had never needed to contend with a really powerful aristocracy. As a result, Russian aristocrats at the turn of the twentieth century had even less experience in self-government than their French counterparts in 1789. Surprisingly, this absolutist regime had established a fairly weak state, with only four officials per 1,000 subjects in its sprawling domain. What is more, this was no modern, impersonal bureaucracy animated by the ‘science of administration,’ but an old-fashioned apparatus loyal to a person, the czar. In social-science terms, there was no regularization of rule; instead of a state-building monarchy, Russia had a state-limiting one. Because no one person could possibly rule a substantial modern bureaucracy, the czars didn’t want one. Neither did they seek the esteem which the more sensible European monarchs cultivated among their peoples.

Such latter-day reformers as Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin found their efforts undercut by Czar Nicholas II, who understood that “constitutional autocracy was self-defeating”—indeed self-contradictory. Even worse, the regime had no ideational framework to attract the increasingly demanding people. Kotkin observes that in Great Britain and Europe, liberalism preceded the “massified” politics of the twentieth century, whereas Russian Orthodox Christianity—which is about the closest Christianity gets to Nietzsche’s “Platonism for the people”—provided little practical guidance for popular self-government. When the war concentrated masses of young Russian men—previously scattered over a dozen or more time zones—into military organizations that occupied politically sensitive regions near the major cities; when those young men began to yearn for peace after months of getting battered by the Germans; and when not only the czars but the post-czarist Provisional Government (which did not spring from the lower orders but resulted from “a liberal coup”) persisted in fighting the Kaiser’s army, not only the two regimes but the state collapsed.

Amid the chaos, the Bolsheviks had no more popular support than anyone else, but at least they had something democratic-sounding to say in a country where socialism, not liberalism, had won the hearts and minds of just about everyone—including the peasants, attached to their local communes. Lenin and Stalin called for immediate peace and land ownership by peasants. They intended to revoke the latter slogan, but since communalism seemed close enough to communism for popular consumption, their pose worked. While Bolsheviks seized the cities and infiltrated the military, peasants seized the lands of the aristocrats—a vaster if not ultimately more consequential revolution. “Soon enough, the peasant revolution and Bolshevism would collide,” Kotkin writes. But soon was not now—it would arrive too late for the Bolsheviks’ enemies.

Kotkin adds that “Few thought this crazy putsch would last.” Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and their accomplices had no administrative experience, no real military experience, and no knowledge of finance or agriculture. Luckily for them they didn’t need a state, right away; pandemonium was more useful, and the Red Guards were really all they needed to seize state buildings. Bolsheviks did not initially need to win so much as they needed to make their enemies lose. In every case, they encountered rivals even more incompetent than themselves. The Russian-Romanov form of absolutist monarchy had done its work all too well, leaving the whole nation politically inept.

When they did turn to state-building, between 1918 and 1920, the new rulers founded something unique, and uniquely effective in the circumstances. American historians speak of the American state between the Jackson and McKinley administrations at ‘the regime of courts and parties’: the relatively small state apparatus was staffed by lawyers on the judicial side, party regulars on the administrative side. The move for reform consisted of replacing the partisans with professional technocrats—university-trained, tested, tenured. As for the Bolsheviks, they understood that they must deploy at least a modicum of administrative competence to run a state intended to remake human society. But they also needed politically correct ideologues to oversee that remaking. Stalin hit upon the answer: a mass part would provide personnel—the “commissars”—to supervise the technocrats, shadowing them to ensure that the Bolshevik project stayed on track.

The “theory of everything” required an all-encompassing state—even if it would eventually “wither away” after its work was accomplished, as Lenin confidently predicted. But no just any all-encompassing state would do. Stalin needed a state that combined minute, administrative management with the full rigor of ideological vigilance. Although it wouldn’t have been possible to “centralize the whole country himself,” he “could effectively centralize the bosses who were centralizing their own provinces,” bosses personally loyal to him because they owed their jobs to him, initially and on condition of his continuing satisfaction of their obedience. Trotsky did this in the Red Army, too, but Stalin was simply the more politically astute of the two. Comrade Lenin noticed, appointing the Man of Steel to be party secretary just as he, Lenin, was about to suffer the first in a series of incapacitating strokes.

The Georgian also found a solution to the new empire’s national problems: federalism. Stalin “developed the Bolshevik rationale for federalism,” a “way to bind the many peoples into a single integrated state.” Some respect for nationality was necessary because, at a minimum, Marxism-Leninism (like the Bible before it) needed to be translated into vernacular languages. Some degree of self-government made sense. But the party itself would remain strictly centralized an in line with the regime’s ideology. Both national-state and regional-state officials were under the eye, and the gun, of the party. And the party was ruled by its general secretary. To use the Hegelian-Marxist language, this synthesis of party government (with its personalism) and administrative science (with its impersonality, centralization, and federalism), kept the Bolsheviks in power for a long time. And Stalin—not Trotsky, not even Lenin—”emerged as the most significant figure in determining the structure of the Soviet state.”

Anything but the inevitable result of large historical forces (including the world war), the Soviet regime had depended upon the individuals who made it. In one of his many breathtaking but somehow true paradoxes, Kotkin calls Stalin both a sociopath—the very portrait of the paranoiac with real enemies—and “a people person”—the pol who never forgets a name, the tough boss who makes his immediate subordinates feel, to be sure, subordinate but not used or overlooked and who always works harder than anyone else in the office. It is hard to resist the thought that Stalin cared so much about his subordinates and his peoples as a whole that before he was done he murdered a substantial quantity of them. Coldly indifferent, he was not.

Finally, Stalin found a solution, at least in principle, to Russia’s persistent geopolitical problem: its situation on the eastern edge of the vast European Plain, where no real natural borders exist from the Atlantic to the Urals. He used the ideology of worldwide proletarian revolution to justify whatever territorial expansion made sense at the time. Insecure borders? Very well, did the “country of the revolution” not need to be defended? And did its defense not require, finally, the worldwide triumph of a proletariat animated by Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by its vanguard? Russian Orthodoxy was too specific ever to have made such a claim, but dialectical materialism was a universal principle; as the unity of theory and practice, could not the worldwide rule of the party be made real, someday? As prelude to this end, would the capitalists not fall once again to warring among themselves? Although the consummation devoutly to be wished never came, the threat of communist revolution, in the capitalist homeland and also their empires, would keep his enemies off balance for decades, long after his death.

Severe problems remained. By the second half of the 1920s, the United States produced one-third of global industrial output; for example, there were 20 million motorcars in American and 5,500 in the Soviet Union. Admittedly, mobility and independence were never Soviet ideals, but Stalin envied American industrial power nonetheless. He never quite saw that productivity also requires demand, markets—democracy not in the sense of egalitarianism but in the sense of letting people get what they want. Lenin and Stalin’s New Economic Policy, which loosened economic controls somewhat, worked somewhat, but left the regime with the questions of how to get back to the better, purer socialism Marxism required, and of how to bring the landowning peasants to heal.

By 1928, the last year covered in this book, Stalin had found a solution to the “peasant problem” that would turn singularly bloody. He would, in imitation of large-scale American agriculture, get rid of the small communes while at the same preventing private ownership of the resulting big tracts. Such a solution could only be effected by force. As Kotkin observes, “No one else in or near the Bolshevik leadership, Trotsky included, could have stayed the course on such a bloody social-engineering escapade on such a scale.” Falling behind the capitalists in industry and in agriculture, with an army and navy now incapable of fighting any major power, moving from one blunder to another in an attempt to manage the Chinese revolution with a rising Japan to the east and an increasingly worrisome Germany to the west, Stalin knew that one more shock might ruin everything.

But the shock that came saved everything. Stalin expected another intra-capitalist war, but what happened instead was the Great Depression. This cut capitalist productivity down, making the Soviet regime seem viable—perhaps even the solution to all human problems its founders claimed it to be. The 1930s proved a bonanza for the enemies of political and economic liberty, and Stalin shared in that most ominous form of the wealth of nations.

 

Note

1. Kotkin wonders if this fault-finding “Testament,” as it was soon called by Trotsky, came from Lenin or from his widow, whom Stalin had insulted.