Churchill and the Academic War on Greatness
9th March 2023
It is commonplace for politicians and scholars alike to refer to “history” (or sometimes a more solemnly invoked “History” with a capital H) as the final arbiter of political actors and of history and statecraft more generally. Let History Judge, as the dissident Soviet Marxist historian Roy Medvedev called his massive indictment of Stalinist terror published in the West in 1971. But what does this appeal to the judgment of history finally mean? In some larger philosophical or ontological sense, it is a non sequitur since history in and of itself judges nothing. Human beings make history, but history as an impersonal process (or as one event after another) itself is bereft of any capacity for moral or civic judgment. When people evoke the judgment of history, they mean the judgment of future generations, or even the reigning consensus among (often small-souled) academic experts and specialists. They should hardly be confused with Thucydides, Plutarch, Macaulay, or Henry Adams, who were capable of exercising judgment in a manner both sublime and judicious.
‘History’ is from the Greek word for ‘research’ (thank you, Herodotos), and so ‘history’ merely means ‘information that somebody has dug up’.
Is the judgment of future generations always superior to those who had a direct experience of men and events, who immediately saw what was at stake in the great and enduring drama that is the sempiternal rivalry of men, regimes, nations, and parties? With good reason, Aristotle insisted that the spoudaios, “mature” or “serious” men (and we would add women) informed by the full range of the moral and intellectual virtues, should set the tone for moral and civic judgment and for decent political life more fundamentally. Without prudence, discernment, courage, and moderation, the fashionable preferences of academics and academic historians are hardly worthy of having pride of place when it comes to serious and sustained historical and political judgment.