movements, leaders, theories, so that future actors for social change can avoid the traps of the past. To use Karl Mannheim’s distinction, while ideology is the tendency of those in power to falsify, utopianism is the tendency of those out of power to distort. History can show us the manifestations of the latter as well as the former.
History should put us on guard against the tendency of revolutionaries to devour their followers along with their professed principles. We need to remind ourselves of the failure of the American revolutionaries to eliminate slavery, despite the pretensions of the Declaration of Independence, and the failure of the new republic to deal justly with the Whiskey Rebels in Pennsylvania despite the fact a revolution had been fought against unjust taxes. Similarly, we need to recall the cry of protest against the French Revolution, in its moment of triumph, by Jacques Roux and the poor of Gravillers, protesting against profiteering, or by Jean Varlet, declaring: “Despotism has passed from the palace of the kings to the circle of a committee.”* Revolutionaries, without dimming their enthusiasm for change, should read Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, with its account of the paranoid cruelties of Stalin.
The point is not to turn us away from social movements but into critical participants in them, by showing us how easy it is for rebels to depart from their own claims. For instance, it might make us aware of our own tendencies—enlightened though we are—to be paternal to the aggrieved to read the speech of the black abolitionist Theodore S. Wright, at the 1837 Utica convention of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Wright criticized “the spirit of the slaver” among white Abolitionists. Or we might read the reply of Henry Highland Garnet in 1843 to the white Abolitionist lady who rebuked him for his militancy:11
You say I have received “bad counsel.” You are not the only person who has told your humble servant that his humble productions have been produced by the “counsel” of some Anglo-Saxon. I have expected no more from ignorant slaveholders and their apologists, but I really looked for better things from Mrs. Maria W. Chapman, anti-slavery poetess and editor pro tern of the Boston Liberator …
The history of radical movements can make us watchful for narcissistic arrogance, the blind idolization of leaders, the substitution of dogma for a careful look at the environment, the lure of compromise when leaders of a movement hobnob too frequently with those in power. For anyone joyful over the election of socialists to office in a capitalist state, the recounting by Robert Michels of the history of the German Social Democratic Party is enlightening. Michels shows how parliamentary power can be corrupting, because radicals elected to office become separated from the rank and file of their own movement, and are invested with a prestige which makes it more difficult to criticize their actions.12
During the discussions in the Reichstag concerning the miners’ strike in the basin of the Ruhr (1905), the deputy Hue spoke of the maximum program of the party as “utopian,” and in the socialist press there was manifested no single symptom of revolt. On the first occasion on which the party departed from its principle of unconditional opposition to all military expenditure, contenting itself with simple abstention when the first credit of 1,500,000 marks was voted for the war against the Hereros, this remarkable innovation, which in every other socialist party would have unquestionably evoked a storm from one section of the members … aroused among the German socialists no more than a few dispersed and timid protests.
Such searching histories of radical movements can deter the tendency to make absolutes of those instruments—party, leaders, platforms—which should be constantly subject to examination.
That revolutionaries themselves are burdened by tradition, and cannot completely break from thinking in old ways, was seen by Marx in the remarkable passage opening The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language …
How to use the past to change the world, and yet not be encumbered by it—both skills can be sharpened by a judicious culling of past experience. But the delicate balance between them cannot come from historical data alone—only from a clearly focused vision of the human ends which history should serve.
History is not inevitably useful. It can bind us or free us. It can destroy compassion by showing us the world through the eyes of the comfortable (“the slaves are happy, just listen to them”—leading to “the poor are content, just look at them”). It can oppress any resolve to act by mountains of trivia, by diverting us into intellectual games, by pretentious “interpretations” which spur contemplation rather than action, by limiting our vision to an endless story of disaster and thus promoting cynical withdrawal, by befogging us with the encyclopedic eclecticism of the standard textbook.
But history can untie our minds, our bodies, our disposition to move—to engage life rather than contemplating it as an outsider. It can do this by widening our view to include the silent voices of the past, so that we look behind the silence of the present. It can illustrate the foolishness of depending on others to solve the problems of the world—whether the state, the church, or other self-proclaimed benefactors. It can reveal how ideas are stuffed into us by the powers of our time, and so lead us to stretch our minds beyond what is given. It can inspire us by recalling those few moments in the past when men did behave like human beings, to prove it is possible. And it can sharpen our critical faculties so that even while we act, we think about the dangers created by our own desperation.
These criteria I have discussed are not conclusive. They are a rough guide. I assume that history is not a well-ordered city (despite the neat stacks of the library) but a jungle. I would be foolish to claim my guidance is infallible. The only thing I am really sure of is that we who plunge into the jungle need to think about what we are doing, because there is somewhere we want to go.
Somehow, the notion of American uniqueness persists. It is “God’s Country and Mine,” Jacques Barzun has said.1 There is a common belief that our country has from birth been favored, by Providence or by Circumstance, in being unencumbered with harsh class lines, with solidified privilege, with a stubborn aristocracy, with a mass of illiterate peasantry, with all those things that plagued Europe until the dawn of modern times. A naked continent, rare idealism and courage among settlers weeded out by hardship and three thousand miles of ocean, the equalitarian demands of the frontier—these combined, we are often told, for a physically crude but socially immaculate conception.
Our birth, therefore, was of a new civilization, truly new, not a copy of the Old World. In Tocqueville’s words, we were “born free.”
A Whig preacher named Calvin Colton in 1844 summed up a belief about America that still represents the dominant self-image: 2
Ours is a country where men start from an humble origin … and where they can attain to the most elevated positions, or acquire a large amount of wealth, according to the pursuits they elect for themselves. No exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment of estates, no civil or political disqualifications stand in their path, but one has as good