The Bookshelf: On the Necessity and Pitfalls of Anachronisms
Fifteen years ago, my prolific friend Carl Trueman published a little book titled Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, concisely addressing such topics as oversimplification, confusion of categories, the distinction between neutrality and objectivity, reification of concepts or abstractions especially as though they had agency, and anachronism. As Trueman remarks, “All history is going to be anachronistic in one sense, because all history is written with the benefit of hindsight.” Nevertheless, the imposition of present-day ideas about the past (let alone about our own present situation) on thinkers and actors of the past can lead us astray in our effort to understand them.
The present moment in historical writing—or in historiographical writing, the historian’s study of his own craft’s practitioners—seems to be one of keen attention to such problems. In my own study of American constitutional law, I’ve long been interested in anachronisms myself. It is important for my students to know, for instance, that the power we routinely call “judicial review” did not acquire that name until the twentieth century, though the practice we so denominate had existed and been discussed from the republic’s earliest years. And it’s strangely interesting that no justice of the Supreme Court ever used the word “federalism” as a description of the relation between the national and state governments before 1939, though that relationship was constantly a matter for adjudication since the founding.
So I have been strongly drawn to pick up several recent books of history and historiography that tackle anachronisms and reifications, because such clarifying works can keep us from making facile conclusions about the past—and about its effect on the present. I have not in every case read these books in their entirety—some are in my current stack of “in progress” reading—but here is a preliminary report.
The first such book is Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism, published in 2018. There has been no shortage of books on “liberalism” in recent years—pro and con, “neo” and “post”—and Rosenblatt’s work is in certain ways a useful corrective to some of the less historically careful works on the subject. Students of history and political philosophy commonly speak of classical liberalism, Lockean liberalism, Anglo-American liberalism, and so on. But Rosenblatt observes that while liberal in English and its equivalents in other languages have centuries of use, liberalism dates from “around 1811,” and its origin was in French political life after the Revolution of 1789. At first, in fact, the term was pejorative, used by the adversaries of liberal political principles as a label for an ideology they scorned. But those so labeled, such as Benjamin Constant, soon adopted it as a description of the set of ideas to which they were attached: in Rosenblatt’s account, “the rule of law and civil equality, constitutional and representative government, and a number of rights, primary among which were freedom of the press and freedom of religion.”
More or less contemporaneous with the noun liberalism is liberal as a noun rather than an adjective, meaning a partisan of the “ism,” of liberal doctrines. It is only the adjective that has a long history predating all this, and during most of that history the adjective liberal described a character trait or virtue. The “liberal man” in classical antiquity, observed Leo Strauss in 1959, “gives gladly of his own in the right circumstances because it is noble to do so, and not from calculation.” His is the virtue of liberality, the openhanded generosity of the good citizen of means, never mean or miserly. How the virtue of being liberal evolved into a politics that is liberal, peopled by liberals espousing liberalism, is an interesting tale.
Rosenblatt knows this tale, and she recounts it well and concisely in her opening chapter, “What It Meant to Be Liberal from Cicero to Lafayette.” But this points up the first of two misleading characteristics of her book, one fairly trivial and the other more serious. The first and less serious one is that her book’s full title, including its subtitle, is The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. But by her own account, there simply is no liberalism until the generation following the French Revolution, so there cannot be any in ancient Rome, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or even the American founding. “France invented liberalism in the early years of the nineteenth century,” she tells us unequivocally in her introduction. That is a problem inhering only in her book’s subtitle, which may have been negotiated with her publisher; yet it promises something the book itself betrays.
The second and more serious problem is that by insisting so strenuously (despite that subtitle!) that liberalism, liberals, and liberal politics are altogether the outgrowth of events and ideas in continental Europe, principally France, and that it is anachronistic to claim that they appeared earlier anywhere else, Rosenblatt permits mere nomenclature to imprison her intellectual history. What came to be called liberalism has a rich history for centuries before the “ism” made its appearance, and she has largely binned it and hauled it to the curb. The American founders espoused a politics of liberty (liber being the Latin root of liberal and liberty alike), and while they make a brief appearance in Rosenblatt’s opening chapter, she hardly does justice to their well-known devotion to all the features of liberalism that she considers central to it: the rule of law, equality, republicanism, constitutionalism, and rights.
And it’s not just the American founders who are slighted. John Locke gets a cursory treatment, Montesquieu is barely mentioned, and Lincoln gets a few pages’ treatment entirely in terms of his relation to contemporaneous European liberals. But the historical struggles from which modern free societies emerged—dating back to 1215 if we give the nod to Magna Carta, or even earlier if we wish to trace “liberal” ideas such as the freedom of the conscience or the separation of spiritual and temporal power—all these are truly lost in Rosenblatt’s “Lost History.” And in her account, liberalism only “becomes” American in the twentieth century, under the aegis of the Progressives.
It is unfair to criticize a book for not doing what one wishes it did. So let me be clear. Rosenblatt does provide a rich and instructive history of continental European liberalism in the nineteenth century; that is her true subject, and it may be fair to say it is one that is “lost history” for many Anglo-American readers. But not only do Rosenblatt’s title and subtitle claim too much. In her insistence that any characterization of pre-1800 political ideas as liberalism is anachronistic, her book’s thesis is literally correct but conceptually obscurantist. We do well to learn when certain words and usages were coined, and to bear those linguistic histories in mind. But I would no more fault a writer for referring to “Lockean liberalism” than I would punish a student for referring to the Supreme Court’s understanding of “federalism” in 1873.
I have similar misgivings about J. C. D. Clark’s ambitious 2024 book The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History. Clark is even more keen to sniff out anachronisms than is Rosenblatt, and his claim is much grander. For him, “the Enlightenment,” especially with its definite article, is not just a word or phrase missing from the vocabulary of the period we habitually call by that name. It is, he tells us on the first page of his preface, “a concept that with its current meanings was unknown in the eighteenth century.” He insists that his book “does not engage in a wrangle about words,” yet inasmuch as the use of the words the Enlightenment is heavily contested throughout this work, the reader may be forgiven for thinking that phrase and concept are inseparable in Clark’s argument.
Some of the air may seem to go out of Clark’s balloon on the first page of his introduction, which opens by stating, “In the English-speaking world, during the long eighteenth century, ‘enlightenment’ was everywhere but ‘the Enlightenment’ was nowhere.” But the immediate sequel tells us that these are “not synonyms,” and that “enlightenment,” the phenomenon or experience of being enlightened, had to be reified in order to become the Enlightenment as a movement, cause, or mode of thought. In this respect the term was “hardly used in the English-speaking world before the mid twentieth century.”
Not content with complicating the historiography of the Enlightenment, Clark remarks in passing on other terms that do not belong to the vocabularies of the periods they describe but are coinages of later ages looking backward, such as “the Scientific Revolution,” “feudalism,” “the Renaissance,” even “the Reformation.” Even “modernity,” Clark rightly observes, is a term fraught with difficulty. If it is a period, when did it begin? If it is a mode of thought, or a cluster of new ideas, how was it—by those who were the first “moderns”—defined against something “ancient” that came before? And did those who stood at the beginning of modernity, whenever that was, know they stood there?
As a historiographical provocation, I think, Clark’s book is most welcome. He shows us that the Enlightenment originated in the German expression die Aufklärung; the German language, of course, capitalizes all nouns and assigns them genders that inflect their definite articles, but there is no necessity for translators always to carry over the article and mark off the thing with a “the,” much less to capitalize the noun. Yet the influence of nineteenth-century German intellectual historians’ writing of such phenomena as “the French Enlightenment” (die französische Aufklärung) eventually had its effect in English-language accounts as well. I particularly applaud Clark’s pointing out that, if the Enlightenment was not a coherent, unitary thing in the experience of those living in the period we so denominate, then it could scarcely be an actor in history with agency, doing things and serving as the cause of various effects. It is even a dubious proposition, he argues, to refer to an “Enlightenment project,” an expression he traces to Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 After Virtue, and no earlier.
There are real riches in Clark’s study, as there are in Rosenblatt’s. But if his aim is not simply that we begin using the Enlightenment more carefully, without reification and attributions of agency, but that we stop using the expression altogether, it’s hard to see that happening. Historians—and the rest of us—have acquired the habit of periodizing: classical antiquity, late antiquity, the early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, early modernity, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the nuclear age. We barely know how to talk of our history without such (invariably soft) period markers. Clark himself unself-consciously refers to the “long eighteenth century,” conventionally dated from the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. It makes sense as both a political and an intellectual period; why not, in its midst, “the Enlightenment”? It did nothing, but human beings did and said some mighty interesting things then. Given different national experiences, it may indeed make sense to speak of the French, the British, and even the American Enlightenments, as Gertrude Himmelfarb did—just as Carlos Eire speaks of different times, places, and churches with multiple Reformations.
A final book worth considering in this vein, which I’ve only just begun to read but find rewarding so far, is The West: The History of an Idea, by Georgios Varouxakis. Like Clark, he finds the definite article a significant conceptual marker. The West began long ago as a merely geographical reference, then became a historical one. But: “‘The West’ as a potential political entity based on civilisational commonality is a modern idea that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century,” in the thought of Auguste Comte. Unlike Clark and Rosenblatt, Varouxakis is less concerned with identifying and banishing anachronisms than with tracing the great variety of uses of his titular phrase over time. An East–West dichotomy supplanted an older North–South one; the West also overlapped with and diverged from Europe and Christendom. And is Greece part of the West? Were Russia and other Slavic lands in or out? When former colonies of European powers became significant in their own right, were they included in the West? How about allies in the geographic East such as Japan and South Korea—are they Western now?
Refreshingly—and in a spirit compatible with an ambitious new “History of the Western Tradition,” Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins’s The Golden Thread—Varouxakis does not want to deconstruct the West as an expression or a concept, much less to condemn the civilization so named. He wants his readers to be aware of where the concept comes from, how it has had successive “deposits” of fresh meaning over time, and—as I read him so far—how open “Western culture” or “civilization” is to still more refreshment of its meaning.
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