Undivided Past - David Cannadine (book review)

  BOOKSHELF

·       The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2013

First as Tragedy, Then as Cant

Is the great historian Edward Gibbon really more responsible for dividing the world by creed than the crusading Pope Urban II?

By DANIEL K. RICHTER

The Undivided Past

By David Cannadine
(Knopf, 340 pages, $26.95)

The introduction to David Cannadine's "The Undivided Past" brandishes dueling epigraphs from Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world . . . " proclaims the quotation from Mr. Bush. "It was 'us versus them.' " Mr. Clinton's words, by contrast, decry the compulsion to "believe our differences are more important than our common humanity." Mr. Cannadine clearly shuns Dubya in favor of Bubba, yet the aim of the British-bred, Cambridge-educated Princeton professor isn't to praise the culture wars but to bury them. For him, "the unrelenting insistence on seeing the world in Manichean terms," through the stark and erroneous "categories of 'us' and 'them,' " warps our view of both contemporary politics and the grand sweep of human history. The message of Mr. Cannadine's deeply humane yet ultimately frustrating book is that "the real world is not binary—except insofar as it is divided into those who insist that it is and those who know that it is not." A Manichaean view of history blinds us to the "range, complexity, and diversity of our multifarious and manifold identities."

Mr. Cannadine offers chapters on six us-versus-them definitions of identity that he finds especially pernicious: religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilization. Each chapter begins with contrasting epigraphs and then discusses one or two ur-texts that fixed a given dichotomy in the Western mind. The argument for the primacy of religious divisions in human history stems, for Mr. Cannadine, from the Gospel of Matthew, which divides humanity between the saved and the damned, and from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (1776-89), which highlights conflict between Paganism and Christianity. A more recent view—that it is secular nation-states rather than religions that sort the world into camps—finds its clearest expression in the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. The idea that class trumps all other identities, unsurprisingly, begins with Marx and Engels's "Communist Manifesto" (1848) and Engels's "The Condition of the Working Class in England" (1845).

Less predictably, "Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race" (1825), a proto-feminist tract by Irish polemicist William Thompson, takes the blame for dividing humanity by gender. Thompson's contemporaries, Scottish doctor Robert Knox and French demographer Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, do the same for skin color in their respective books "The Races of Men" (1850) and "Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races" (1853-1855). Finally, 18th-century British philosopher David Hartley's "Observations on Man" (1749), along with Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" again, plants seeds for the "clash of civilizations" model embraced by Samuel P. Huntington and George W. Bush.

Each chapter shows great learning and a remarkable talent for summarizing vast literatures. Each correctly insists that human beings resist intellectuals' efforts to sort them into simplistic categories. Five of the six chapters do grant that the original thinkers and their successors had a point; horrendous crimes have been committed in the name of the supremacy of religion or race, or the struggle between civilization and barbarism. Only in the section on class does Mr. Cannadine seem curiously unwilling to admit the possibility that Marx and Engels may have been on to something. Indeed, it is difficult to figure out whether Karl Marx or George W. Bush is the bigger villain in Mr. Cannadine's Manichaean hall of shame.

It is, however, precisely the lack of flesh-and-blood historical villains that makes "The Undivided Past" frustrating. Mr. Cannadine tells us that he wants to "investigate the most resonant forms of human solidarity as they have been invented and created, established and sustained, questioned and denied, fissured and broken across the centuries and around the world, and as they have defined the lives, engaged the emotions, and influenced the fates of countless millions of individuals." That long sentence, like many others in the book, begins in the passive voice. It assigns no human being clear responsibility for inventing those "forms of solidarity," and in fact turns the abstract solidarities themselves into the active force that "influenced the fates of countless individuals."

Throughout this book, words rather than deeds, high-flown ideas rather than gritty historical events, take center stage. Books often seem more important than bombs in chapters that barely mention politics, economics and power relationships among human beings. Is Edward Gibbon really more responsible for dividing the world by creed than the crusading Pope Urban II? Is Robert Knox more responsible for racism than the slave owners whose oppression his book justified? For that matter, is Samuel P. Huntington more responsible for the Iraq war than the second President Bush? And are a president's words about a world divided between us-and-them more important than his deeds in taking his nation to war?

Mr. Cannadine is certainly correct that the authors about whom he writes oversimplified the divisions they described. But the divisions those authors described were often real nonetheless. And the divisions were made real not so much by those who described them as by those who wielded the power to make them real. Mr. Cannadine admits that "categories of 'us' and 'them' . . . are held together not so much by shared self-awareness as by the exhortations of leaders, journalists, activists—and by some historians, too." Yet exhortations produce different results when pronounced by the powerful rather than the powerless; the color line that Robert Knox drew may have been the same one that W.E.B. DuBois evoked, but the two authors did so for very different purposes.

Mr. Cannadine has performed a service in reminding us that history is more complicated than white versus black, men versus women, or capitalists versus workers, and in insisting on "our shared humanity beyond our differences." To move beyond those differences, however, his readers may need to remember that the deeds of the powerful, as well as the ideas of the bookish, are what cleave humanity into us and them.

Mr. Richter teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania.

A version of this article appeared May 21, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: First as Tragedy, Then as Cant.