Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Reflections on History WHEN Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian of art and culture, died in 1897, he left a series of classroom lecture notes that he considered un ready for book publication. It was only as he was dying that he gave permission to his heirs to bring them out if they saw fit. The notes were originally published in Ger many in 1905, but it was not until some forty years later, in the middle of a war against the very to talitarianism that Burckhardt had predicted, that the first English translation was made. The original American title, as of 1943, was Force and Freedom; Reinhold Niebuhr and others seized upon the book at once for its as toundingly accurate prophecies about the coming of the Goliath State. The odd thing was that Burckhardt, no Hegelian, did not believe in historical determinism. His fluid conception of history could have done wonders to counteract the Marxism and neo-Marxism that have bemused so many of our intel lectuals. But his influence has been limited, and his name has been pret ty much forgotten.

Now, as part of a program that is seeing many neglected classics re stored to contemporary use, the Lib erty Fund of Indianapolis has repub lished Force and Freedom as Reflec tions on History (Liberty Classics, 7440 North Shadeland, In dianapolis, Indiana 46250, 354 pages, $9.00 cloth; $4.00 paper), with a beautifully comprehensive in troduction by Gottfried Dietze. What immediately strikes the reader is that Burckhardt, a man of the nineteenth century, explains the 1980 headlines as no modern com189 190 THE FREEMAN March mentator has succeeded in doing. Take his discussion of Islam, for example. In the West, he. says, state and church have not fused into Hone oppressive whole." But in Islam the fusion took place. ~~The whole of cul ture," he wrote, Hwas dominated, shaped and colored by it. Islam has only one form of polity, of necessity despotic, the consummation of power, secular, priestly, and theo cratic .... This aridity, this dreary uniformity of Islam, which is so ter ribly limited on the religious side, probably did more harm than good to culture, if only because it ren dered the peoples affected by it quite incapable of going over to another culture."

If our editorialists had known about Burckhardt, they would not have been caught so short by the apparition of the Ayatollah Kho meini. And if our policy makers in Washington had absorbed some of Burckhardt's wisdom, they would never have been deluded into think ing that detente with a totalitarian power could ever come to anything. Consequences of Intervention: A Subtle Understanding Burckhardt did not believe in his torical ~~laws." But if nothing was fated, how could he have been such a good prophet? Only by a subtle un derstanding of the word ~~if." Des potism would result Hif" the State were to be permitted to absorb all the activities of men. But such ab sorption leads to stagnation and de cay. History, as Burckhardt ob served, is filled with overturns and interruptions. Great men can make a difference, for good or for ill. One whole chapter in Reflections on His tory is given over to a discussion of luck. It was lucky that the Greeks conquered Persia and the Romans Carthage, unlucky that Athens was defeated by Sparta. It was unlucky that Caesar was murdered before he had time to consolidate the Roman Empire into u an adequate political form." In the eighth century it was lucky that Europe held Islam at bay.

(Query: can we count on luck a sec ond time around?) Marx defined history as the his tory of class struggles. Burckhardt said Hnonsense" to Marx and to Marx's master Hegel. In Burckhardt's estimation, history was a result of the interaction of State, religion, and culture, and could take protean forms. Some times culture (as determined by so cial power) dominated the scene, sometimes it was religion. There could be totalitarianisms that were atheistic; on the other hand, there could be theocracies as despotic as any secular tyranny. The Criminality of Rulers Burckhardt regarded force as evil, but he had no illusions about its inevitable exercise. Great men were 1980 REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY 191 quite capable of great crimes in con solidating a state, and genius and madness often went together. A jus tification for the crimes of great men seemed to lie in the fact that by them Han end could be put to the crimes of countless others." ((The greatest example," said Burckhardt, ((is offered by the Roman Empire, inaugurated by the most frightful methods . . . and completed by the subjection of East and West in rivers of blood." The end result of Roman crimes was the Hcreation of a com mon world culture, which also made possible the spread of a world reli gion, both capable of being trans mitted to the Teutonic barbarians of the Volkerwanderung as the future bond of a new Europe."

But even though good may have come from the evil of Roman methods of conquest, Burckhardt re fused to condone violence. The re sults of violence could be overcome as men strove ((to tum· mere power into law and order." But not every destruction entails generation. Sometimes, so Burckhardt observed, «a people which has been too bru tally handled will never recover." Asia, so it appeared to Burckhardt, has been broken by the two periods of Mongol rule. The Plague of Centralization Burckhardt's ideal· civilization was one in which culture and religion established unseen· but effective boundaries which the State did not dare to pass. His own Switzerland was a case in point. As Gottfried Dietze points out in his introduction, Burckhardt was a product of the aristocratic Swiss city of Basel, which had somehow escaped the leveling and centralizing effects of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests.

Burckhardt admired the Germany of Goethe, a land of small prin cipalities and culture-loving courts. He considered Bismarck an evil ge nius, and regarded the Franco Prussian War as the beginning of the end of everything he had ad mired in the Germany where he had studied under Ranke. Since Ger many, under Bismarck, had taken politics as its principle, it would have, so Burckhardt said, to con tinue on that course. Dietze men tions a letter Burckhardt wrote to a friend during the Franco-Prussian War in which the prediction was made that the learned gentry of Germany would have a rude awak ening when they saw the spiritual sterility that would come with Prus sian centralization. The Italy that Burckhardt loved as a student and historian of art was pre-Garibaldi and pre-Cavour. After all, the Renaissance took place in small independent principalities and cities, not in a land that made ((unification" a virtue. Burckhardt stopped writing for publication 192 THE FREEMAN when it became apparent that the centralizers were going to win everywhere. He had enjoyed writing about Ubeautiful things" in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and The History of the Renaissance (1867). But after the Franco-Prussian War he became, as Ernst Cassirer said, a ~~pathologist"

of a civilization that he saw on the downgrade. It was because he felt he could no longer cheer his readers that he wanted his reflections on world history to remain unpub lished. He wanted his gloomy prog nostications to be limited to a re stricted audience. Luckily for us, he relented at the last. ® HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $3.00 Order from: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 30, NO.4 • APRIL 1980 Billboards, Freedom of Speech,·and Property Rights Fred Schnaubelt 195 Advertising concerns information essential to freedom in the marketplace. Saying NO to a Snow Job William J. Staley 200 This ski area operator rejects an appeal for disaster relief. The Psychology of Cultism Ben Barker 203 Ben Barker, M.D., examines the cultish aspects of medicine, as related to the decline of individualism and independence. Parent Power: Can It Help Public Education? Melvin D. Barger 210 Not managerial power but freedom of choice among competing schools is the key to improved education.