Reviews--

The Road to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments, by Gertrude Himelfarb. Knopf. 284 pp., $25.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that: 

. . . the French Revolution which ended in disaster has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.

Once true, perhaps; no longer today. President Bush’s passion to universalize democracy as the surest way of creating world peace has made 1776 a symbol of hope that this passion might be realized in our lifetime. But a question remains: how did 1776, the annus mirabilis happen? How could the geographically separated colonists from Maine down to Georgia, a distance of some 2000 miles, have come up with similar liberating ideas, what Professor Himmelfarb calls the American Enlightenment?

Professor Himmelfarb, our premier practitioner in the history of ideas, has rescued the concept of the Enlightenment, a title usurped and monopolized by the French, as a movement of ideas that informed British and American intellectuals and opinion makers. She argues that there was an enormous difference between the French and British Enlightenments. In France, the Enlightenment was designed to discredit religion: “ecrasez l’infame,” Voltaire thundered (crush the infamy) referring to the Catholic Church. But in England and in the blossoming thirteen colonies the Enlightenment slogan was the Kantian, “aude sapere,” (dare to know). It was Kant who defined the Enlightenment as man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage, from a reluctance to use one’s own understanding without institutional guidance. Have the courage to use your own understanding is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers, however, went beyond Kant’s description. For them the animating spirit was the “politics of liberty” and their definition of “virtue,” writes Professor Himmelfarb was “the will and capacity to put the public interest over the private.” But their concept of liberty was attended by religious faith as Alexis de Tocqueville saw the new world:

Among us [France] I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom always moving in contrary directions. Here [U.S.] I found them united intimately with one another and they reigned together on the same soil. 

Professor Himmelfarb, who calls the Enlightenment the “Great Awakening” and sees the Revolution as the culmination of that Enlightenment, gives particular importance to the role of religion in the American experience: 

Even those of the Founders who were not devout believers, or those who were most wary of the government’s support of religion (Madison most notably) respected religion in general and the religious beliefs of their countrymen.

She cites the words of George Washington in favoring the public recognition and practice of religion while insisting on adherence to the principles of religious liberty and pluralism. He provided for government-paid military chaplains but specified that there should be chaplains for each denomination. 

Some historians have over-interpreted the separation of church and state doctrine, says Professor Himmelfarb. She points out that, however interpreted, the doctrine itself “did not signify the separation of church and society.” 

America was saddled with two problems which, brilliant statesmen though they were, the Founding Fathers were unable or, perhaps more correctly, were unwilling to solve: first, what to do about the Indians whose land the colonists coveted and second, what to do about slavery. Any attempted solution would have precluded creation of what Professor Seymour Lipset has correctly called “the first new nation.” As Ms. Himmelfarb writes: “It was on the issue of slavery that the politics of liberty dramatically clashed with the sociology of virtue.” This clash meant that a bloody civil war involving three million men of whom 600,000 soldiers on both sides died was inevitable, a war whose wounds lasted well into the 20th century.

Professor Himmelfarb’s hero is Adam Smith, political economist and moral philosopher and “it is this amalgam,” she writes:

. . . that characterized Britain then, as it does the United States today. Americans take for granted what Europeans regard as an inexplicable paradox: that the United States is the most capitalistic and at the same time the most moralistic of countries.
 

I want to say something special about this collection of masterful essays. As an admirer of Walter Bagehot, the 19th century publicist and his luminous prose, I see in Professor Himmelfarb a most worthy successor.

 --Arnold Beichman

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, by Andrew Bacevich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; 288 pp., $28.

Have Americans become uncharacteristically militaristic and imperial? Andrew Bacevich, West Point graduate, retired professional soldier, Vietnam veteran and currently a professor of International Relations at Boston University maintains that they have. According to the author, its roots go back to the Roosevelt administration but became accentuated following the defeat in Vietnam and were recently fueled by the quest of the neo-conservatives or “neo-cons” for American imperial hegemony. Prior to this era American military forces were, according to the author, miniscule and American society was not militaristic and especially not imperial. But is it true?

An imperial thread in American society goes all the way back to colonial times when the Scots, both Scots-Irish and native Scots, immigrated in large numbers to the then-frontier where they organized militias for defense against Indian tribes, and during the Revolution, against the British army as well. As explained in great detail by former Secretary of the Navy James Webb in his Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (Random House, 2004), they pushed steadily west and south. Indeed, Webb argues that the new nation of the United States of America would have remained a string of states lying along the Atlantic seaboard if the Scots-Irish and Scots had remained at home. Texas, for example was settled largely by Scots-Irish who fought for independence and only then applied for admission to the Union. All of the exploration and the resultant expansion after independence was imperial by any definition. The citizenry rather than the American national government were primarily responsible in much the same way that the British Empire grew more-or-less absent-mindedly as a result of private actions of its subjects.

American military force levels were dictated by this expansion. The Navy, for example, was miniscule after the Civil War when the Army was busy quelling Indian raids and revolts. When the national geographical limits reached the Pacific Ocean, the Navy began a renaissance that led to successful prosecution of the war with Spain and imperial forays into the Pacific (Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines) and the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal). In short, American imperialism and its associated “militarism” can be traced to colonial times, mainly to the Scots-Irish who provided political and military leaders from then to the present.

The religious “evangelicals” who form a segment of Bacevich’s villains are heirs, either by blood or by culture, of the Scots/Scots-Irish. Billy and Franklin Graham (a famous Scottish name) are a case in point. Both hail from North Carolina, the state with the largest fraction of people of Scottish descent. Indeed, Bacevich singles out the Grahams, probably without any inkling of their cultural heritage. Thus the ties between the armed forces, the Scots-Irish and the evangelicals are not new but extend all the way back to colonial times. Indeed, the close relationship of the Scots to military service is obvious to anyone acquainted with the history of the Scottish regiments in the British army or Scottish mercenaries in foreign armies. All of the foregoing is presented simply to show that a connection of a very important part of the civilian population to the military forces is not new--it has been there for centuries. The connection with the neo-cons is recent and quite superficial.

However there is another segment of the population exemplified initially by the mandarins of the Northeast and more recently by liberal academics and political leaders who are heirs of that establishment. Thus when Bacevich contends that the armed forces are “out of touch with America,” he is partially correct. Is it worrisome that the armed services are out of touch with the liberal establishment? Obviously the author thinks so, but this reviewer has serious doubts. Mixing the effete “liberal” academia characteristic of the major universities with our institutions of national defense does not seem to be a good way to create an efficiently functioning military force for the national defense. However if the object is to put brakes on the military forces by degrading their effectiveness, then the author has a point. Bacevich also complains that Hollywood, of all places, has aided and abetted the rising militarism by producing movies such as “Top Gun” and “Hunt for Red October” that in his opinion glorify militarism. He is completely silent about the vast anti-military output of Hollywood since the conflict in Vietnam, ranging from “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now” in the 1970s to the recent “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

In this vein the author goes out of his way not only to criticize but also to belittle the technology of the American armed forces. Why else would his acid description of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier and its air wing be included except to destroy public support for its force projection capabilities. Similar criticism is directed at the Army and the Air Force. His suggestions for military personnel “reform” serve a similar purpose--short term enlistments in order to entice children of the elite class and also to degrade technological efficiency. Signing up the children of the elite would also be made more attractive by increasing educational benefits, or so the author claims. Exactly how these enticements would attract the elite, however, is unasked and unanswered. They would certainly be attractive to the children of the middle and working classes as they are now, but the liberal elite? Most unlikely. As for officers, the author, despite being a West Pointer, suggests that officers be obtained only after unsubsidized graduation from a four year college with military training to be provided by a one-year OCS course at one or more of the present service academies. Under this formula for officer acquisition, promotion from the enlisted ranks would presumably be a thing of the past, thus producing a gulf between “middle America” and the officer corps, a gulf of class that is now nearly non-existent. The incentives to embark on a military career for both officers and enlisted would be completely lacking. No matter--it seems not to be the author’s objective anyway.

There is considerable merit to the author’s insistence that we are much too dependent on Middle East oil. However his objections to such dependence are not new; many articles and books decrying it having been published since 9/11. Western involvement in the Middle East for oil did not start with Franklin Roosevelt as the author claims. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the predecessor of British Petroleum) was formed just prior to World War I to secure a reliable source of oil fuel for the then-new Queen Elizabeth class battleships of the Royal Navy. Bacevich appears to think that somehow, if we disengage from the Middle East (and other areas as well) that the problem of militant Islam will disappear. While it is true that money pumped into Saudi-Arabia because of the world’s insatiable appetite for petroleum has served to further Wahhabism, we in the U.S. have little control since Europe, China, Japan, and India will soon make up the difference of any American withdrawal from the oil market. In his What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford, 2002) Bernard Lewis explains the deep roots of the conflict between Western civilization and Islam that extend back more than a millennium and follow a cyclical pattern. American withdrawal from the Middle East will not solve the problem of the jihadists. Nor will foreign aid do anything to help. Bacevich suggests that if we replace part of our military expenditures with foreign aid to the less developed countries (LDC), their occupants will have less reason to hate the West. Not so. The West has spent enormous sums in aid to LDC only to see nearly all of it squandered in propping up local dictators and in general corruption. Increased aid will exacerbate the problem, not reduce it. Years ago the late Lord Peter Bauer demonstrated the evil influence of foreign aid on economic development (catastrophes such as the recent Indian Ocean tsunami excepted).

This reviewer realizes that to some degree he is criticizing a book not written. Nevertheless the omission of the influence of the early Scottish immigration to the American colonies ignores an explanation for what Professor Bacevich believes to be a recent phenomenon. In a recent review of The New American Militarism in the National Review, Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens of the Naval War College cites the Bacevich book as an important and serious work, despite its flaws. Unfortunately the “important” part may well gain traction among the liberal elite establishment of whom Bacevich has become part, his protestations to the contrary. Despite his military background or maybe because of his experience in Vietnam he appears to have been to a considerable degree co-opted by that establishment. Professor Bacevich is a very bright and knowledgeable fellow. If only his level of understanding were commensurate with his level of knowledge.

--Robert C. Whitten