Books: Common Man’s Historian

CROSSROADS OF POWER (234 pp.)—Sir Lewis Namier—Macmillan ($5).

“Some political philosophers complain of a ‘tired lull’ and the absence at present of argument on general politics in this country.” wrote British Historian Lewis Namier before his death in 1960. “Practical solutions are sought for concrete problems, while programs and ideals are forgotten by both parties. But to me this attitude seems to betoken a greater national maturity, and I can only wish that it may long continue undisturbed by the workings of political philosophy.”

This was not the last gasp of a tired old man; it was the seasoned judgment of a historian who had seen what ideology can do. Namier felt that most ideologies were shams, and was prepared to prove it. This he did by writing detailed biographies of innumerable people to show that their motives were rarely the ones they professed. Namier’s history bulged with facts and figures and so many quotes that he often seems not to be writing at all but excerpting. Yet Namier revolutionized the writing of history and became in the eyes of his British colleagues the greatest historian of the century. “I worshiped him,” said Arnold Toynbee, whose own history is the exact opposite of Namier’s. “He was a big man with a big mind.”

Pleasures of Parliaments. In his greatest work, Namier demolished the long-accepted interpretation of 18th century English politics. Englishmen had been taught that the noble heroes of Parliament had battled wicked King George III to preserve English liberties. Namier sifted speeches of the period, records, diaries and letters. When he was stumped by the character of a Parliamentarian, he consulted a psychoanalyst. He finally gathered all his biographical sketches into two massive volumes, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution, which proved that there had been no ideological battle in 18th century England. Parliament was composed of various factions jockeying for power and looking out for their own interests; they were no more solicitous of English liberties than the King. Liberty was not won by a conscious effort; it was the product of evolutionary growth. “Men went into Parliament ‘to make a figure,’ ” writes Namier, “and no more dreamt of a seat in the House to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it; which is perfectly normal and in no way reprehensible.”

Just as Thucydides chose the Peloponnesian War, Namier took the 18th century as the text for all history—all his essays on the subject, some never published before, have now been collected in Crossroads of Power. In the first of these, he pleads for more study of the common men, who, he contends, shed more light than popular heroes on the life of the times. He proves his point with some engaging, subtle portraits. There was Daniel Pulteney, who went into Parliament to gain immunity from arrests for debts and stayed to poke fun at the pretensions of his fellow M.P.s. There was Charles Townshend, the erratic M.P. who did as much as anyone to precipitate the American Revolution, by imposing the onerous Townshend duties on the colonies. Namier traces his troubles to a tyrannical father: “A rebel towards his father and his political chiefs, he turned into a heavy father when acting for the mother country in relation to her offspring.” There was the compulsive traveler, John Byng, who complained about every place he visited because, basically, he did not like people. One day in 1789 when he was in a particularly bleak mood, he lambasted everything about England he could think of. Says Namier: “Had this been written about France in June 1789, how much would it have been quoted as remarkable prophecy, and an explanation of what followed.”

Love of Land. Namier loved England for its very lack of ideology. Born a Polish Jew—Bernstein-Namierowski—in turbulent Galicia, he longed for roots. He found them in England, where he went to study in 1908. Sad to say, he was never accepted as a teacher at Oxford because his overbearing personality offended the dons; he had to be content with the University of Manchester. Like another famous British Jew, Disraeli, Namier was accused of snobbery because of his weakness for aristocracy and great homes. But to Namier, as to Disraeli, these were symbols of a stable, successful society.

Namier was scathingly contemptuous of ideologies that aimlessly attacked tradition, and in a series of brilliant essays showed how easily they led to totalitarianism. “Liberty.” he wrote, “is the fruit of slow growth in a stable society.” Wars and revolutions that keep society in turmoil prevent liberty from taking root.

Namier has been charged with “taking the mind out of history” and with underrating the power of ideas. But this was a necessary corrective: before Namier, historians had been too prone to take men’s words at their face value.