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In This Issue
This issue contains an American Historical Association Presidential Address, three articles, and a review essay. The presidential address reexamines the French Revolution as a seemingly paradoxical source of both democracy and totalitarianism. The articles analyze an individual exemplar of the Weberian Protestant ethic, state toleration of Muslims in nineteenth-century Russia, and the story of one couple's experiences crossing the color line. The review essay returns to the subject of the French Revolution in a critique of reigning historiographical orthodoxies. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.
Presidential Address
Lynn Hunt uses her
Presidential Address to confront the now-classic question, how could
the French Revolution be the source of both democracy and "totalitarianism"?
She focuses on an aspect that has not often been analyzed in the two
centuries of often acrimonious dispute about the Revolution of 1789:
the experience of time. Contemporaries experienced events as unfolding
in a kind of temporal hothouse; this sense of compression of time ultimately
opened the way to a different approach toward the future, that is, the
conviction that human will could remake society. New attitudes toward
the past, present, and future proved essential to both democracy and
government by terror. She also relates the experience of time to one
of the most momentous consequences of the French Revolution, an increased
attention to "the social," the notion that society has its own laws
of operation open to human understanding and therefore to human intervention.
The explosion of new plays, novels, and every manner of visual imagery
helped instill this self-conscious awareness of social roles and patterns.
Hunt's address demonstrates the insights possible by subjecting seemingly
well-understood events to new forms of analysis.
Articles
Margaret C. Jacob and Matthew Kadane
examine Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis in light of the evidence
presented in the 14,000-page spiritual diary of a Leeds clothier, Joseph
Ryder (1695–1768), about whom Weber (or anyone else in the last
seventy-five years) had no apparent knowledge. While they acknowledge
that there is much in Weber's thesis that needs modification, Jacob
and Kadane contend that the remarkable correspondence between Weber's
prototypical early Calvinist capitalist and the psychological self-portrait
that Ryder created speaks to the ongoing insights of Weber's thesis.
Ryder, like the Weberian archetype, saw his diligence in his religious
and vocational calling as possible evidence of his soul's salvation.
Nevertheless, he fretted that his worldly successes would distract him
from religious duties and convictions and lead to his damnation. Ryder's
lifelong attempt to navigate through success and excess never gave him
a lasting sense of comfort. Instead, he experienced with deep ambivalence
and anguish the slow process of decriminalizing material acquisition
for its own sake that was in motion in his economically dynamic corner
of Britain. Ryder's reluctance to accept fully the capitalist spirit
is particularly significant because it points to the ways in which the
practice and ideas of his religion shaped his behavior in the material
world. It reminds us of Weber's exemplary balancing of ideas alongside
the material as forces of historical change. Ryder was undoubtedly somewhat
unique in keeping such a massive diary, but Jacob and Kadane argue that,
in the economic heart of the very society that introduced industrialization
to the rest of the world, ambivalence toward the capitalist spirit was
more common than many historians have supposed. In doing so, they reveal
the analytical possibilities of bringing a cultural approach to old
problems of religious and economic history.
Robert Crews analyzes the place of Islam in the Russian Empire. He argues for a reconsideration of the nineteenth-century tsarist regime as a confessional state, whose understanding of toleration committed officials to act as the patrons and police of Islam and other non-Orthodox Christian traditions. Crews contends that this new instrumentality of imperial rule forged alliances between officials seeking religious support for imperial policies and spokesmen for novel notions of religious "orthodoxy." Despite the opposition of the Orthodox Church, the regime became an arbiter of contests over authority and interpretation within the non-Orthodox traditions. In Islam, Russian officials saw a valuable source of order and discipline. Analyzing court records, petitions, denunciations, and various Muslim sources, Crews maintains that Muslims, too, saw tsarist institutions as potential assets in struggles with co-religionists over the meaning and realization of God's law. He challenges the view that Muslims maintained their faith against, or outside, the institutional framework of the empire and shows instead how clerics and laypeople solicited state intervention against other Muslim opponents in defense of competing understandings of the tradition. Rooted in a shared language of sin and divine punishment, such relations of interdependence between Muslims and their Russian rulers linked dynamic processes of community formation to tsarist state-building. Crews argues that the adjudication of intraconfessional conflicts persisted as a singularly important vehicle for the extension of state power into local life, integrating and subordinating Muslim subjects but, paradoxically, also making the Orthodox tsar a guardian of Islamic "orthodoxy" in the everyday administration of the empire. His persuasive analysis is thus a compelling example of the importance of bringing the state back into the historical analysis of subjects such as religion.
Martha Hodes argues that the malleable nature of racial classification can work not only to diminish the power of racism but also to invigorate it. Focusing on transnational and local arenas, she explores the life of a white, working-class New England widow who married a well-to-do African Caribbean sea captain just after the Civil War. Juxtaposing U.S. and West Indian racial structures, Hodes complicates the idea of a binary U.S. system based solely on ancestry. Distinguishing between the abstraction of "whiteness" and the day-to-day gendered privileges of white womanhood, she reveals the ways in which Eunice Connolly's local status suffered by virtue of her proximity to Irish and African-American laboring women; marriage to a man of color only further degraded her. For the sea captain, the various ways in which white New Englanders perceived his color, class, and nationality served by turns to elevate and debase his neighborhood status. When the couple settled in a community of former slaves in the West Indies, however, Eunice Connolly's neighbors understood her to be an elite woman of color, permitting her to partake of the privileges of respectable womanhood that had eluded her in the United States. Through a story of the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, Hodes illuminates the ways in which historical actors can experience the fluidity of racial categorization between and within racial systems and challenges assumptions about the ameliorative qualities of racial mutability. And in doing so, she establishes the unique power of narrative to explain critical issues such as the development of racial, gender, and class identities.
Review Essay
Rebecca L. Spang's cogent and provocative essay suggests that the rhetoric
of a bitter struggle between Marxists, Revisionists, and Post-Revisionists
in the historiography of the French Revolution has obscured the extent
to which a much grander historical narrative, about the shape and timing
of "modern" life, has remained largely unchallenged for the past seventy
years. Despite intellectual upheavals within the field, for most historians
"modernity" still begins with the French Revolution. Repeated claims about
methodological innovation and paradigm shifts may have energized the field,
but they have also made it difficult to see just how much the "new" cultural
interpretations owe to older social ones. Examining a number of recent
books, she finds that attempts to demonstrate the emergence of revolutionary
political culture from various strands of Late Enlightenment thought have
been only partially effective. For if the social interpretation of the
causes of the French Revolution, caricatured and rejected by cultural
historians, left revolutionaries no option other than the mechanical expression
of their class interests, the current mode of discursive analysis allows
them little more individual agency. She calls attention to an implicit
but rarely acknowledged "psychological turn" within studies of the revolution,
and suggests that historians need to engage with this thematic more directly.
In the absence of any way to explain how certain discourses, ideas, or
texts become especially meaningful to people, the so-called cultural interpretation
has compensated for its narrowness of focus with the vocabulary of madness.
Spang's cogent and provocative review essay thus critiques the status
quo from a conceptual vantage point outside the existing literature in
a way that makes it a signal contribution not only to our understanding
of the revolution itself but also of larger trends in contemporary historiography.
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