Computer games & history

The American Historical Review is now taking an interest in games. In the most recent issue, Andrew Denning provides “an autoethnographic journey through recent presentations of the Nazi era in video games” (182). This essay, together with a three-review subsection on Assassin’s Creed games, might be taken as an official entrance of historical game studies into the profession. The attention is merited, but the questions asked, it seems to me, are not always the right ones.

Andrew Chapman, who is among the scholars who has done the most to constitute historical game studies into a field, last month posted an introductory essay for the new Historical Games Network. Historical truth will be the theme for this forum’s opening quarter. One point of Chapman’s short text is to re-assert the usefulness of the fundamental observation made by defenders of postmodernism in history – and Chapman looks here especially to Alan Munslow and Robert Rosenstone and Rethinking History – that, minimally, history is not just facts. Indeed not! As Chapman points out, this is an old observation. Arguably it has by now been so fully assimilated into professional historical practice that what is interesting is not whether or not scholars acknowledge the existence of something other than facts, but what exactly they think that other stuff is. Chapman here focuses on the point that any plausible notion of historical truth admits at least a place for fiction. This opens the way to discussing games, which must be, in some sense, fictions. Now, Chapman is in this instance simply putting in a plea for scholars to take seriously the fact that “these games are still out there doing some kind of work in the world by communicating through historical imagery, narratives and ideas.” Very few people, at this point, would disagree. But – should the games “out there” be hunted down and brought to justice for their historical crimes? Or should we be glad they are out in the world? Are they doing work we historians cannot or will not do? Perhaps the AHR can help us decide.  

 

Denning’s main object is the new Wolfenstein games, reboots of the OG FPS, which now are set in an alternate future-past in which the Nazis won. Why exactly games are so interested in these alternative future-pasts – famous other examples include the Bioshock and Fallout series – is worth considering under the rubric of postmodernism and the historical transformation it names. In any case, Denning notes—as Eugen Pfister for instance has as well—that Wolfenstein manages to have much more to say about the Holocaust than WW2 games like Call of Duty that might otherwise be thought to be much more “realistic,” a descriptor that here is genuinely obscene. For Denning it is not really the plot of Wolfenstein that does interesting historical work (so much for the narrative turn of historiography). It is rather what we might call the game’s worldbuilding. Perhaps we need to pervert the Barthesian reality effect into a historiographic effect to name this. That in the game’s world the Nazis found eager allies in the KKK, for instance, implies an important historical point about the nature of white supremacy in the USA. But of course the game also reproduces fairly appalling stereotypes, from the sexually deviant SS-Woman all the way to affirming the existence of globe-spanning ancient Jewish conspiracies (189). If reality effects work on any reader, the historiography effect requires a historian to interpret it, to guide the player as to which vulgarization and brutality ought to be taken seriously, and which not.

 

The Nazis of course are a privileged object. Denning, whose footnotes indeed contain a whole syllabus in historical game studies, is right to point out the dangers here. “The mechanics of video games, the details of alternate history, and the obsessions of popular history reinforce one another. The public fascination with these subjects, and the public’s desire to comprehend the minutiae of military uniforms, the atrocities in prisoner-of-war camps, and the intimate details of history’s heroes and villains, can teeter on the edge of fetishization” (192). What would be a critical, rather than a fetishistic, gamic representation of National Socialism? Denning’s goal is to point to moments of such critique in Wolfenstein, but it’s difficult to know how to achieve this in a more durable way. Certainly it does not have to do with the energy invested in the simulation. Arguably developers of games like Call of Duty shy away from complex depictions of Nazis precisely because the meaning of the game is not in the developer’s hands. It is in fact extremely difficult – and perhaps Wolfenstein succeeds in this? – to build a game involving Nazis that cannot be repurposed into something pro-Nazi. The tortured history of Hearts of Iron modding communities suggests that this is the case.

 

Denning grasps the basic problem here, which throws us back to a form of historical thinking that is modernist rather than postmodernist. The historical realities to which games refer, Denning writes, are

 

always already politicized when the public encounters the subject in publications and classrooms…Video games are forms of digital history and public history…that shape public understanding before and oftentimes in lieu of our [historians’] input. If we criticize video games for placing entertainment and aesthetics over analysis and significance, we ignore an influential medium in the creation of public knowledge of the past and perpetuate a false division between (serious) work and (juvenile) play (196).

 

Denning wants historians to embrace the pedagogical possibilities afforded by the play of these games – experiences that, at least properly framed, lead to good questions about the historical past. Denning of course does not in fact wish to reject the distinction between serious work and juvenile play – the Geertzian references are not really helpful:  

 

It is not our task to separate serious historical work from frivolous historical play; our task is instead to explore the potential of deep play while encouraging the critical thinking and analytical tools that will inspire broad play…When students play with history through the eyes of first-person avatars and interact with virtual historical worlds, they build knowledge through experience and share their creations with one another and the world. Recognizing the potential of historical play, let’s join in the fun (198).

 

Indeed rather than censoriously rejecting frivolity, let us encourage broadness rather than narrowness and deepness rather than shallowness. Well, sure. Still the point here is that historical pedagogy will be successful when students get a critical distance from their games, are able to pause and analyze the cultural logics in which they are so eagerly immersing themselves. This is a worthy goal, and it should of course be pursued in terms of games as well as movies, television, media in general. But what is the specificity here of the game? It seems to me no more plausible that historians will be able to go meet the youth—or, really, just people in general—where they are in this than in any other case.

 

It is worth paying attention at least to the ways digital games shape memory and historical consciousness. That is a minimal position. Constitutively, indeed, games are fictional. Since they require the agency of the player, they cannot be a mimetic representation of a past that we perhaps admit is, even if unavailable, in itself fixed.

 

But of course our evidence of the past is not fixed. This is Abe Gibson’s concern in a May 17th column in Perspectives about the “deepfake” phenomenon. It is getting easier to manipulate images, and that means that the vast numbers of ‘historical’ images online are suspect not only because of context collapse. This is of course also not a totally new thing, but the ease with which it can be done is new. DeepNostalgia allows you to animate, in a limited way, a still photograph. Is this a charming gimmick? Does anyone actually want to see their dead grandmother re-animated in this way? Sometimes digital manipulation of photographs or old images leads to no more than an amusing embarrassment; but also in more insidious forms they can be a profound moral violation. Gibson admits the usefulness of these in enlivening history – movement, we learn, even uncanny, is life – but puts such fakes rather in the context of other dangerous falsifications, for instance the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  

 

Surely very few people, when they are playing a game, think they are seeing real footage for instance of Ronald Reagan giving a black ops hit squad “whatever they want” to “take out” a terrorist, however realistically the Gipper is animated. Some of the pleasure of the thing is in the conscious mixture of historical (real) footage of the politician and this fictional (false) animation. But, just as surely, whatever the politics of the game, for many more people, this little snippet of historicity contributes to what we might call the Reagan myth. He was just the sort of strong president who would have ordered the hard choice made, we can imagine. We are very much on the unstable terrain of the sense of things that people get from their exposure to contemporary media. Here we have the kind of thing that worries Gibson – not, perhaps, a weirdly animated photograph of Lenin belting out a Britney Spears hits from the late 1990s, but what about politician of your choice with Jeffrey Epstein? Or, in one of Gibson’s examples, a video of Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a dipshit? Any such image or set of images can be debunked, but that takes time and investment. The damage will already be done. Truth decay, as Gibson writes, will already have taken place. Gibson does not sound very confident that the historical profession has any real response to such deepfakes. He even suggests a return to a sort of authority of archival experience; it is hard to believe that this time, on this occasion, after everything, expertise will save us.  

 

Together with Denning’s longer essay the AHR has a section of three short reviews of Assassin’s Creed games. The review editor justifies this in terms of public perception and understanding of history – “For good or for ill, many young people receive their initial impression of historical epochs, characters, and events in this visually compelling ludic format, and historians should pay attention to these virtual renderings of the past” (214). That is, this is where the undergraduates are getting their ideas about history, so we should know about it. As Michael Hattem writes about AC:III, the game “must be understood as an expression of popular culture and as a product of the cultural memory of the Revolution.” On this basis, Hattem seems pleased that the game does not take sides in the American Revolution – avoiding a good vs evil representation of the conflict, and that the game represents the everyday experience of common people (through architecture and NPCs, mainly). Thus, “the game reflects the historiographical efforts of the New Left, neo-Progressive, and more recent “inclusion school” historians not only in its depiction but in its foregrounding of the racial and ethnic diversity of the colonies in this period.” Ultimately, for Hattem, the game brings “the spirit of recent academic scholarship” the “collective memory” of the Revolution in a way much superior to Hamilton. We are in the presence again of a historiography effect.

 

There is however an interpretive divergence between Hattem and Julien Bazile’s review of Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. Hattem reads the conflicting personal motivations of the main character, Conner, as a historiographic intervention, writing that they give the game “a greater degree of contingency than one might expect in a game about a historical event for which the outcome is known.” For Bazile, in contrast, because of “the fundamentally interactive nature of the video game medium, the character design cannot give the player anybody else to control but a hero.” That a hero should have conflicted motives is not especially interesting – what matters is rather that, almost by generic necessity, an individual agent is setting events in motion.

 

Many commentators have noted that Freedom Cry at least puts the player into the shoes – let us not raise too many questions by saying the skin! – of a subaltern figure. (Especially useful here is Alyssa Sepinwall’s discussion of the game alongside earlier games thematizing slave resistance designed by Muriel Tramis and written by Patrick Chamoiseau). Yet the subaltern playable in Assassin’s Creed is exceptional:

 

Freedom Cry’s history is one of touristic exploration punctuated by bursts of violent liberation. The game strongly suggests that Adéwalé’s commitment to the Maroons led him to plant the seeds of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), the first largely successful slave revolution. That is to say, without the protagonist—and through him, the player’s—intervention, there wouldn’t be a savior enabling the insurgents to make history by giving birth to the first Black republic. While being a beautifully crafted and engaging game, Freedom Cry is also a great example of the historiographical implications of video game design. In the writing of history, whether in academia or in video games, the risk of colonialism remains real.

 

Games, it has recently been argued, essentially involve shaping agency, staging specific kinds of agency. There has been a temptation in historical game studies – going back it seems to me to Uricchio’s classic article on this subject – to conflate player agency and the idea of the contingent or indeterminate or unknowable in history. This I think is the result of too narrow a reading of the claim that history is narrative. The logic goes like this: if history is narrative and games are sort of narratives that nonetheless demand the agency of the player, then games are historical narratives that foreground contingency within limits, undecidability, and so on. Yet this cuts both ways! We have Hattem praising contingency in the US case for very much the same reason that Bazile warns of subtle colonialism, through the agency of the player, in the Haitian one. We are back to the “always already political” observation Denning made about representations of Nazis in games.

 

The issue is neither novel nor pedagogical. History is political because it is about who we are. Hence the anxieties over multiplicity, instability, contingency. So the interesting question is not whether or not games can be used in the classroom or have cultural significance – of course sometimes yes in both cases – but rather, as has been asked many times of other forms of historical representation, what kinds of politics do they allow? If games work in the medium of agency, and if historical games are necessarily political ones, then what kinds of collective action, what modes of living together, are games capable of helping us to imagine? What possibilities do games foreclose? What new subjects do they allow us to become? 

Reading Péguy

Some people—even Anglophones—do still read Charles Péguy. Even write about him. Antoine Compagnon champions him, which is perhaps enough to locate Péguy in the contemporary field. Although see here. And why people do not read him is perhaps obvious. He’s so Catholic, a mystical nationalist—practically a fascist, it will be said, or a reactionary or conservative antimodernist, others will say. Then there is also the prose itself, the form, the problematic of argument and engagement, which is what most interests me here. When we say “the prose itself,” though, maybe the most serious problem has already been dodged. Péguy is above all a writer among other writers, a person among others in a certain place and time, intensely of his own place and time, wanting more than anything, I think, to make his own writing of and for his place and time.

I’m looking at Péguy at this particular moment because I have been running across (to me) surprising references to Péguy in the interwar. Walter Benjamin admired and read Péguy. Just after the First World War. Lines from Péguy serve as a mutually-recognizable badge of Frenchness in Marc Bloch’s narrative of French collapse in the next war, Étrange défait. At much he same moment as Bloch was writing, Aimé Césaire adopted and adapted Péguy in his own journal, Tropiques, under the Vichy-aligned government in Martinique. The appearance of Péguy in Tropiques is sometimes waved off as a sop to the censors, who were likely to find that poet more congenial than some others. But Péguy was, of course, much more than a poet, and it seems to me that one place to begin is by assigning the same weight that he did to the Cahiers de la quainzaine—certainly this aspect of Péguy’s life is relevant to any consideration of what Césaire was up to with the Tropiques. So here too we come back to the point that Péguy—in strong distinction from, for instance, Proust—is difficult to read disconnected from a worldly project, given flesh, as it were, in the Cahiers.

Thinking about all these things, I’ve picked up Notre jeunesse. Together with some of the poems and, perhaps, l’Argent, this is Péguy’s best known and most read work. Few and far between are the historians writing about the Dreyfus Affair who can resist Péguy’s distinction between mystique and politique, or his dictum that the former inevitably is consumed by the latter—to which I’ll return below. But the text itself is a great deal more than that, about 250 pages in a modern edition (I’ve been reading and marking up an old edition in the idées-nrf Gallimard series).

In general terms, we can characterize the text—and I think it is better to call it a text than a book—as belonging to the genre of post-Dreyfus score-settling. It is an explicit response to Daniel Halévy’s Apologie pour notre passé (Péguy doesn’t feel he has anything to apologize for), and the triptych is filled out by Sorel’s Mes raisons du syndicalisme—all three are from 1909-10. Péguy is also concerned to defend himself—to differentiate himself—from the younger intellectuals around the Action français. Jean Variot is just one acquaintance who is called out to by name in the text. It is easy to poke fun at the act of voting, at the “formalité grotesque, universellement menteuse” that is the modern election

Et vous avec le droit de le dire. Mais des hommes ont vécu, des hommes sans nombre, des héros, des martyrs, et je dirai des saints, -- et quant je dis des saints je sais peut-être ce que je dis, -- des hommes ont vécu sans nombre, héroïquement, saintement, des hommes ont souffert, des hommes sont morts, tout un peuple a vécu pour que le dernier des imbéciles aujourd’hui air le droit d’accomplir cette formalité truqué. Ce fut un terrible, un laborieux, un redoubtable enfantement. Ce ne fut pas toujours du dernier grotesque. Et des peuples autour de nous, des peuples entiers, des races travaillent du même enfantement douloureaux, travaillent et luttent pour obtenir cette formalité dérisoire. Ces élections sont dérisoire. Mais il y a eu un temps, mon cher Variot, un temps héroïque où les malades et les mourants se faisaient porter dans des chaises pour aller déposer leur bulletin dans l’urne. Déposer son bulletin dans l’urne, cette expression vous paraît aujourd’hui du dernier grotesque. Elle a été préparée par un siècle d’héroïsme. Et je dirai du plus français. (29-30)

This chunk of text, less than a whole paragraph, which I already feel to have cut off before the main thought really got out, is a fine taste of Péguy’s prose. It is, I want to say, oratorical, as though it is a formal address that simply goes on for days. Péguy wants to defend the republican tradition, but he wants to defend it in its heroism. Indeed the above passage comes just before the famous sentences on mystique and politique, the most famous of which—“Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique”—is worth putting into its context:

Vous [Variot] nous parlez de la dégradation républicaine, c’est-à-dire, proprement, de la dégradation de la mystique républicaine en politique républicaine. N’y a-t-il pas eu, n’y a-t-il pas d’autres dégradations. Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique. Tout commence par la mystique, par une mystique, par sa (propre) mystique et tout finit par de la politique. (31)

The point, Péguy goes in to say, is not that a particular politique has triumphed, but rather to figure out how what is essential to each particular mystique may be preserved from generalized politicization (not his word).

Péguy repeats many times that “we are heroes” (cf 190). The first person plural here mostly refers to the subscribers to the Cahiers (although see p 99 for Louis Louis-Dreyfus unsubscribing himself). The Affair itself as a mystique was “une culmination, un recoupement en culmination de trois mysticismes au moins: juif, chrétien, français” (73). And he goes on, in one of many extraordinary statements about the “cahiers”:

Je suis en mesure d’affirmer que tous les mystiques dreyfusistes sont demeurés mystiques, sont demeurés dreyfusistes, sont demeurés les mains pures. Je le sais, j’en ai la liste aux cahiers. Je veux dire que tout ce qu’il y avait de mystique, de fidèle, de croyant dans le dreyfisisme c’est réfugié, s’est recueilli aux cahiers, dès le principe et toujours... (73-74)

But the real hero of the text is certainly Bernard Lazare. And the villain, the perfect embodiment of politique, is Jean Jaurès. I do not want to try to untangle the relations and events involved here—the apparent betrayals, the hysterical fidelities, all that. There are a number of monumental studies on the Cahiers to consult, and many involved, after Péguy’s death in the war, wrote about their relationship with him (Romain Rolland, for instance, and Daniel Halévy). But if we must set out a social location, this is it: on the outside, happily on the outside. 

Péguy is, certainly, vocally anti-modern, and against what he identifies as modernisme in the Church, a tendency he defines, I get the sense, much more loosely and broadly than is usually done, as the mechanism that transforms mystique into politique within christianity. His socialism, too, is anti-modern, siding we might say with William Morris rather than Edward Bellamy (156, 167)--although he knew more than a little about Marx and German socialism, having learned both from Sorel and Charles Andler. And this critique of modernity is one route by which he attacks the Action français. They are decidedly modern, decidedly intellectualist, precisely what they claim to attack (193-4). And, more generally, “Les antisemites sont beacoup trop moderne” (209). The antisemites, Péguy goes on to say, don’t even know Jews. The divide between the wealthy and the poor is so great, that any difference in general between Jews and non-Jews is immaterial beside it. In particular the antisemites, at least their propagandists, are themselves wealthy and imagine all Jews to also be wealthy. “Nous qui sommes pauvres, comme par hasard nous connaissons un très grand nombre des Juifs pauvres, et même misérables” (205). The betrayals of the Dreyfus Affair have ruined an number of these lives. And, with Bernard Lazare, Péguy has learned to read the news, to read about pogroms in the east, to read about refugees betrayed by various states. Jaurès is here the great betrayer (with Hervé as a sort of familiar). Again I don’t want to go into the details of this, but will rather point to the extraordinary five pages in which Péguy, having laid out his attacks on the socialist leader, ventriloquizes Jaurès’ response: “Jaurès ici intervient, au débat, et se défend. Si je reste avec Hervé, dit-il, dans le même parti, si j’y suis resté...” (182-186).

Péguy is where we should look, his writing is what we should understand, if we want to understand what it is to take public language as morally serious. Péguy really believes in the moral consequences of public speech, of logical failures, of one’s alliances, their purity. More than that, the torrential quality of his writing, its constant repetitions and self-references, perform a sense of the weight of the act. I don’t know if there is an archive, if there are manuscripts for Péguy’s writing. But it is hard to imagine that these sentences were re-written many times. They are too earnest in their translation of the act of intelligence itself, of esprit made physical in the text. The final pages assert that the only motive for “our” action—and here, finally, we get a definition of sorts for mystique—is the pursuit of freedom, especially freedom of conscience or mind. Péguy then considers the AF’s orthography, for instance, mocking the republic by referring to Respubliquains. Péguy rejects this, for a number of reasons but especially because, “on ne refonde aucune culture sur la dérision et la dérision et le sarcasme et l’injure sont des barbarie. Ils sont même des barbarismes. On ne fonde, on ne refonde, on ne restaure, on resititue rien sur la dérision” (251-252). Finally, Péguy recounts Variot, or some other AF cadre, asserting during one of the famous Thursdays that “Nous serions prêts à mourir pour le roi, pour le rétablisement de notre roi”—this, he says, is something. And it merited a response from another, Michel Arnauld, who “interrompit, conclut presque brusquement: Tout cela c’est très bien parce qu’ils ne sont qu’une menace imprécise et théorique. Mais le jour où ils deviendraient une menace réelle ils verraient ce que nous sommes encore capables de faire pour la République, tout le monde comprit qu’enfin on venait de dire quelque chose” (254).

Much could be said about the distinctions Péguy draws, the theory of moral force that he elaborates, his understanding of the Third Republic, the kind of socialism, the kind of nationalism, that he unfolds in these pages. His approach to antisemitism, his way of thinking about Jewishness and Frenchness I think would be especially interesting to untangle. Certainly his own death—shot in the forehead in September 1914—gives a certain taste to the above declaration (which might as well be Péguy’s own) of willingness to die for the Republic in 1910. It seems to me, though that it is not so much the death as the desire “enfin...de dire quelque chose” that should really draw our attention today. The emphasis should be on the dire, and we should understand, like Péguy, that one cannot speak except among other people. So, finally, I want to try to think through Péguy about public speech, public thought, and the conflation of—overlap between—speech and action in what is taken to be a defective or failing democratic society. Much separates us from Péguy, but not perhaps as much as we would like.

French Liberalism, Historiography New and Old

In this month’s Modern Intellectual History is a review essay from Michael Behrent on the recent historiography of French liberalism. This is a service to the profession: describing, evaluating, condensing, and extrapolating from a substantial body of recent work. The historiography of French liberalism has often in the past generation looked in two directions. First, it argued against the idea of its own Sonderweg vis-à-vis English liberalism, supposedly the ideal-type. Second it had to grapple with liberalism’s relation to republicanism, which is of course an older and, especially in France, more significant political idiom. As for the first, it seems that even American historians are finally ready to stop regarding continental Europe as presenting various detours from the one true path hewn by the UK. As for the second, Behrent suggests that it is the very illiberalism of much of French political culture that makes French liberals in particular so interesting.

Rather than summarizing Behrent’s summaries, I want to extract the broader perspective taken, he argues, by this new historiography. The landmarks in the background here include François Furet, Lucien Jaume, and Pierre Rosanvallon. The works at issue include (but are not limited to) the Geenens and Rosenblatt edited volume, Aurelian Craiutu’s multivolume project on moderation, Helena Rosenblatt and Steven Vincent’s different approaches to Benjamin Constant, and Emmanuelle Paulet-Grandguillot on the legacies of Rousseau in Sismondi and Constant—indeed the central figure here is very much Constant, not, say, Tocqueville. Behrent writes that “these works endeavor not so much to return French political thought to some indefinable liberal fold as to show that understanding how liberals contended with the peculiarities of French history can enrich and broaden our understanding of liberalism—to see it not merely as a doctrine, but as an emotional and moral disposition, a form of political judgment, and a specific political style” (449). According to Behrent, this recent scholarship seeks “to probe some of the constitutive dilemmas of liberal thought from a historically informed perspective.”

In that spirit, he offers three broad questions. Let me take them out of order. Behrent’s final question: “can the history of French liberalism—and liberalism tout court—be approached as a history of emotions, sentiments, and passions?” (476). My own tendency here would be to reframe this question as one about the liberal subject (reading Gossman’s wonderful Basel book has pushed me to think more widely about this). This is a little like Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion that at the heart of all political theories there is a theory of the human being, an anthropology. Asking after that leads in the direction of intellectual history rather than a sort of prosopo-psycho-biography of elites. But certainly the point, Constant’s point, that we are impassioned subjects but that we are nonetheless free is a relevant one that gets at some fundamental questions—are we free in our reason, or in our passion (Adolphe)? To whom would that distinction even make sense? Is that distinction, in fact, central to freedom as an idea in the modern world? Or only the European 19th century? Here is a historical question! 

Behrent’s first question concerns—following Bobbio’s famous analysis—the relationship between liberalism and democracy. These books “lend credence to the view that liberalism’s pedigree is largely independent of democracy’s—or, to the extent that they are related, liberalism must be seen as a reaction to the problems democracy raises” (473). Ultimately, with Spitz, Behrent wants to see in French liberalism an axiomatic democracy. Thus “liberalism has a democratic lining,” because without genuine democracy, individual freedom is empty. This is after all partly Constant’s argument in the famous essay on the liberty of the ancients and moderns—you must have both of these, even if you cannot expect or compel all moderns to be politically involved as all citizens were in the ancient world. But it is also—and here I would push back against Behrent’s characterization—especially in the French case very much about the Republic. Spitz, certainly, sees it in this way. Without the political action of the Republic, no liberalism. This is compatible with a much more negative view of liberalism than Behrent really allows into court, for instance Domenico Losurdo’s, in which cutting out a portion of the population as less-than-equal is essential to liberalism’s assertion of individual rights. Is talk of democracy supposed to preclude that reading? I don’t think it can. Behrent also points—this is the middle question—to the hoary opposition of of political to economic liberalisms. I have been convinced by J.T. Levy (and Marx!) that this is not a useful way of dividing the field, and it’s true that in France it is an especially muddy distinction. The economic, especially, was always on its face political (all the way back to Turgot’s ill-fated attempts at market liberalization).

Let me turn now to a venerable history of nineteenth century French political thought, one written by the British historian Roger Soltau (about whom I know very little, in fact). All proportion maintained, his view of French liberalism is an interesting contrast with the one in Behrent’s review essay. In his chapters on the end-of-century crisis of liberalism, he argues that, indeed, liberals ceased to defend any kind of meaningful “philosophy of freedom,” and hence had no real politics. They sank to defending bourgeois (not middle class) interests. This was indeed a relation of opposition, rather than necessity, between liberalism and democracy—the latter was certain to bring socialism, after all. So this was a problem, but there were also two areas of fundamental bad faith (not Soltau’s term) for French liberals—questions in which the bourgeoisie wasn’t even able to think clearly about its own interests. Soltau looks to one of the most unrepentant “economic” liberals of the age, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, to show how even the liberals were blinded by nationalism. In the name of national defense, the state had to be allowed anything. Similarly, beholden perhaps too much to the Republic, liberals were unwilling to challenge frankly illiberal anticlerical policies. As Soltau puts it, “If modern French Liberalism has proved so weak both before Jacobinism and Traditionalism...it is surely because its freedom of judgment was inhibited, as it were, on...the position of the Church in France and that of France in Europe” (304). The religious question at issue here isn't the same as it was for Constant--and the reflexive nationalism is also not the same as Jennifer Pitts' Turn to Empire (although neither is without relation). It is the freedom of judgment—the courage of thought—that he sees on the part of Charles Renouvier on both these issues that most impresses Soltau. Renouvier the neo-Kantian is, indeed, the only living representative of “the philosophy of freedom” that he sees in later 19th century France.

Why go back to a book written perhaps ninety years ago? (Other than, as in this case, almost pure serendipity?). For one thing because it seems to me that, although we may disagree about many of Soltau’s judgments, it would still be worth thinking about French liberalism and anticlericalism and nationalism—the places where, “its freedom of judgment was inhibited,” which are often telling. For another because, if we can see in Behrent’s analysis the pervasive influence of Furet, in Soltau we see (very much on the surface) that of Henry Michel, a historian of French political thought and a great advocate of Renouvier. And we can see Soltau working, as it were alongside another interwar historian of liberalism, Guido de Ruggiero (who looked to Croce's idealist liberalism). The latter, like Soltau, believed that, for complicated reasons, on a European level toward the end of the 19th century liberalism had ceased to be a genuine philosophy of freedom and had become merely the ideological cover of an increasingly unhappy bourgeoisie. This is no longer a popular opinion--why not? Both Soltau and Ruggiero were manifestly looking over their shoulders (Ruggiero literally) at fascists and “Bolshevists.” Historians of liberalism today ought to think hard about their—our—own investment in the object (whatever that object turns out to be).

Rancière & La parole ouvrière

In 1976 Jacques Rancière published (together with Alain Faure) a collection of texts by workers from between 1830 and 1851 under the title La Parole ouvrière. His short introduction to this collection, appearing as it does well before La nuit des prolétaires, his own thèse on the same material, is a good (and concise!) starting place for understanding what Rancière is up to in this early post-Althusserian phase of his thinking. I would describe this introduction as working on two levels at once: the first and most fully-stated is a methodological and historiographical argument with a certain kind of social history; the second is an intervention into what we can, problematically, call ‘post-Marxist’ theory. Neither intervention is without ambiguity.

           

In returning to the archive of “la parole ouvrière” between the revolution of 1830 and the coup of 1851, Rancière is, he says, above all not looking for an origin story. He wants to avoid the teleological story of a working class that is at the beginnings of what we all know will eventually be its self-consciousness as “proletarian.” But of course we are in the presence of growing class-consciousness. The specificity of this experience of class-consciousness in this moment for Rancière is that “La prise de parole qu’ils [les ouvrières] effectuent constitue elle-même un élément décisif de cette expérience” (10). This new accession into la parole was a claim to full humanity on the part of the workers. To be more than arms or rifles, but not because they are strong, because they are just as able to speak truth and justice as anyone. This was never separate from other forms of struggle (18-19). But there was nonetheless something particular about the claim to speech: “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. La parole fonde un droit que la violence ne saurait se donner à elle-même.” For this, education, and self-education, was required because it was clear that violence would be met with greater counter-violence and experience taught the likelyhood of political betrayal. “Entre la violence suspendue et la servilité refusée, ce dialogue nouveau avec la bourgeoisie exprime un idéal qui est moins de prendre la place des maîtres que de les réduire à leur rôle de marchands ou de prêteurs, d’avoir avec eux ce que Grignon appelle des ‘rapports d’indépendance et d’égalité’” (13). Or, differently put, “Le désir d’être reconnus communique avec le refus d’être méprisés. La volonté de convaincre de son droit engage la résolution de le défendre par les armes” (14). This was a dialogue with the bourgeoisie, and that is what gave it a class character.

This class character has, Rancière says, been challenged or missed by scholars who can see nothing but ideological domination in the adoption by the proletarians of the language of the bourgeoisie. What else but ideological domination could be indicated by claims to the same humanity as the bourgeoise? Claims to respectability and the like? This is to read badly, according to Rancière. The proletarian takes the language of the bourgeoisie literally, turns it against itself, denies to the bourgeois the exclusive right to determine the meaning of this language. “C’est aux ouvriers seuls qu’il revient de nommer leur situation et leur révolte” (16). Rancière pushes especially heavily on the use and reuse of the term “esclave.” The workers are not slaves. They refuse to be slaves. They are quick to feel that they have been called slaves. They refuse to be treated as slaves—and so we have a journal called “Spartacus” Because the workers are “Les Spartacus qui ne veulent pas qu’on les traite d’esclaves prennent les armes” (16). It is difficult, given the state of scholarship today, to read these lines without wanting some reference to the fact that contemporaneous with these exchanges during the Second Republic there is debate on and then the abolition of slavery in the Antilles. But Rancière doesn’t mention this. He is interested, rather in the “sourd travail de réappropriation des institutions, des pratiques et des mots” (18) undertaken by the proletarians. He is interested, that is, in the question “Que se passe-t-il quand la classe qui est dépossédée également des moyens de la production intellectuelle s’efforce de prendre la parole pour s’identifier?” (19).

In historiographic terms, Rancière is calling for a history of “la pensée ouvrière qui occupe cette place demeurée pratiquement vide entre les histoires des doctrines sociales qui nous résument Marx, Fourier ou Proudhon, et les chroniques de la vie ouvrière qui nous deecrivent l’horreur des caves de Lille...” (21). This, let us remember, was written in 1976. We are here after EP Thompson, but in the midst of the ascendency of social history. We are ready for the turn to cultural history that, in this labor-history context, we can associate with Joan Scott, Bill Reddy, Bill Sewell, and others. (Indeed, although I’m not going to try to reconstruct it here, Rancière took part in face-to-face debates with anglophone historians, I’m thinking, if I remember correctly, of a 1983 conference reproduced as Work in France eds Kaplan and Koepp, 1986). It would be interesting to explore the difference between the account of political practice through experience that Rancière suggests here, or even more so his later interventions into arguments about political subjectivity and Joan Scott’s famous anti-“evidence of experience” argument. The two after all both come from French working-class history. Here Rancière is of course aiming at something much more historically specific: “il faudrait étudier comment l’expérience quotidienne de l’exploitation et de l’oppression trouve à se systématiser en empruntant des mots ou des raisonnements au discours d’un haut, comment des idées deviennent des forces matérielles, comment des plans de réorganisation sociale sont mis en oeuvre à l’échelle d’un atelier, d’une corporation, d’un quartier...” (21).

Here, though, we turn to the second, and less fully-articulated point that Rancière wants to make in this particular text. Taking a step back from the argument he has been making, he ventriloquizes a counter-argument: you will say that all of this history is really the past, “songeries d’artisans englouties en pratique par la grande industrie et anéanties en théories par le marxisme” (21-22). Now, there is a kind of social or cultural history that would pause here and say—but all utopias, all ruptures, all possibilities unrealized, are worth recovering. This is one of the great tasks of the historian: to rescue, to paraphrase Thompson, voices from the enormous condescension of posterity. But that is not what Rancière goes on to say. He turns, rather, to Marx. And he introduces two rather surprising (1976!) mechanisms into his narrative to do so: contemporaneity and choice. He writes, “L’idée de la révolution prolétarienne est inexorablement contemporaine des discours de cette avant-garde ouvrière qui pense et agit non pour préparer un futur où les prolétaires recueilleraient l’héritage d’une grande industrie capitaliste formée par la dépossession de leur travail et de leur intelligence, mais pour arrêter le mécanisme de cette dépossession” (22). These soon-to-be obsolete artisans saw themselves to be presented with a choice between two possible futures, “celui de l’organisation capitaliste qui, dans chaque métier, annonce, à travers la réorganisation du procès de travail, l’exacerbation de la concurrance entre les bras ouvriers ou le renforcement de la discipline de l’atelier, l’instauration d’un esclavage nouveau; ou celui de l’association ‘libre et volontaires’ des travailleurs. C’est dans le sentiment de ce choix que se forme l’idée de l’émancipation ouvrière sur laquelle viendra se greffer la théorie de la révolution prolétarienne : non à partir de la conscience des prolétaires formés à ‘l’école de la fabrique’ mais à partir du point de vue de ceux qui entendent refuser cette école” (23).

Marx could abuse Proudhon for his theoretical incompetence. He could struggle to assert that utopian socialism was past, that his own socialism was scientific. But between this science and the political dream of emancipation there was a gap and “ce décalage se trouve d’entrée de jeu au coeur de la problématique marxienne.” (Is this still an Althusserian reading of Marx? But historicized differently?) Marx “n’a pas pu penser le but à atteindre dans d’autres termes que ceux de ces ‘artisans’: communisme, émancipation des travailleurs, abolition du salariat, libre association des travailleurs. It s’est efforcé de penser avec plus de riguer la nécessité du renversement du pouvoir et les conditions de ce renversement,” along with his political economy, but “il ne pouvait se représenter l’avenir communiste autrement que ne le fait en 1850 le mécanicien Drevet: monde d’ateliers sociaux et de magasins coopératifs où, dans l’égalité de tous devant le travail et le loisir, des travailleurs librement associés régaleraient leur production sur les besoins désormais connus et reconnus de leur frères.” 23-24.

But this does not mean—as for instance is suggested by the recent Sperber biography, as well as the grand narrative of bourgeois life outlined by Jerrold Seigel—that Marx is himself somehow surpassed by subsequent social-economic history. Rather, “la mise en place de ce réseau de mots et d’images où la pensée de Marx prend ses repères peut aussi être le point de départ d’une réflexion matérailiste sur l’histoire des transformations du marxisme” (24).  Rancière, much like Antonio Labriola in the 1890s, asks that we return to the moment at which Marx’s thought was constituted in order to understand it and further the project of emancipation. Although perhaps I am reading Rancière as more sympathetic to Marx than he really is?

To close this rapid overview of a single, now-ancient, text I want to present a methodological-political anxiety. I worry that the intellectual historical call to be open to the demands of the texts we encounter—dialogic, but also for instance the way Gordon frames it—makes it difficult for intellectual historians to make the kind of move that Rancière does. How can we not, if we begin by trying to allow Marx to speak directly to us, fail to read him against these worker-philosophers in just the way he wants us to? Rancière wants, we might say, to use the context of Marx to make Marx’s thinking alive in the present. But this is not the message I get from Gordon. Rancière uses the notion of historical choice—two choices, a moment of clear decision creating a rupture in imaginative futures—to insist that the workers of the 1840s, rather than the theorists, remain contemporary to the idea of revolution. This, it seems to me, requires a set of absolutely contemporary commitments (for Rancière we can say, to equality) that are simply not available to the historian. Or, if they are so available, it is at just the cost that Lilti, contra Gordon, says—we won’t be doing history any longer, but rather politics, because it seems to me that there is nothing else that a claim about contemporaneity can ultimately mean. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and this is to some degree what Gordon (et al, he’s getting unfairly abused here, see also Jay and LaCapra) wants. But with that come responsibilities and obligations that have nothing to do with professional historical training or practice. That would be militant history. That would be history that begins with a choice in the present imagined in the same way that Rancière claims works in the 1840s began with a choice. Evidently this is a problem of long standing. My worry, I suppose, is really the idea that intellectual historians (rather than, say, historians of social movements who are in many ways better equipped for this) should be particularly obliged to confront this problem of contemporaneity. Surely it is for us to ask, rather, why there could be a choice of that kind at all, in the particular moment that it seemed to present itself? There’s a problem of recursion here, of course, and the inevitability of making a choice at the beginning of subject-matter. But, then, if you begin by saying that you are an intellectual historian, probably you have already made a choice against, at the least, the equality with which Rancière begins—a choice for Marx and not the proletarians?