Theory and Processes ofHistory, by Frederick J. Teggart
Nisbet, Robert
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Theory and Processes ofHistory, by Frederick J. Teggart" inadequate as were the American disciplinary measures, a less partisan writer might have noted that they were something of a landmark precedent. To the best of my knowledge no other nation at war...
...For those who have been excited by the ostensible novelty of Collingwood's Idea of History, Isaiah Berlin's Historical Inevitability, and Karl Popper's Poverty of Historicism, a reading of these two books by Teggart will be salutary...
...He is currently working on a study of the relationship between religion and the idea of human progress...
...Teggart's passion was making a science of history...
...Teggart's own effort at a scientific study of historical materials resulted in his notable Rome and China, a work that deals in comparative fashion, working from hypotheses to be tested, with the successive assaults upon and then invasions of Rome by the barbarian peoples...
...He was the most learned Robert Nisbet is Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and author of most recently, Twilight of Authority and Sociology as an Art Form...
...I would not exclude military lawyers from practice as appointed defense counsel, though I see no objection to usingcivilians too...
...As winner of the coveted Harold Robbins Award for Worst Book of the Year, Mr...
...Teggart was much more than the comparative historian...
...Those who find themselves impressed by the recent renascence of evolutionary sociology, associated with the names of Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah, and Gerhard Lenski, among others, owe it to themselves to read Teggart's chapters on the subject in his Theory of History...
...His special interest was the idea of progress, and I believe his course on the subject (commencing in 1919 in his own newly-created department) was the first in this country...
...In my own Social Change and History, dedicated to Teggart, I have, I think successfully, brought out the true presuppositions and assumptions of our social evolutionists, so-called, but my book would not have been possible without Teggart's powerful, but long-neglected, critical insights...
...Robert Park, a major founding influence in the famous Chicago school of sociology, was strong in his praise, and in his use of Teggart's insights into migrations of peoples and the breakup of what Teggart called "idea-systems...
...He didn't say anything, but there was something suggesting itself to me that if I was going to continue reading such tripe, I had best leave it outside his office...
...The first time I ever visited him in his office I had my week's Nation and New Republic in hand...
...Hence the great emphasis in The Processes of History (the second of the two works in this volume) upon the necessary formulation of guiding problems and tentative hypotheses, upon the kinds of forces involved in the rise of political kingdoms and their conflicts with kinship systems (the historical struggle between family and state was a kind of paradigm in Teggart's comparative-institutional studies), and upon the great significance of migrations and invasions in creating the conditions under which old, rigid systems of thought were dissolved, making possible the rise of new ones...
...Coover's honor to be held at the Women's Christian Temperance Union drinking fountain on the west portico of the Monroe County Courthouse in Bloomington, Indiana...
...All in all, a bad book on a good subject...
...He advocates that the administration of military justice be entrusted to civilians under the control of the Attorney General, and that trials be handled by civilian lawyers and judges...
...But since he does not trust "juries composed of white farmers in southern Alabama [or] of blacks drawnlargely from the inner-city ghetto," he favors juries of soldiers drawn by lot...
...What the Annales group in Paris today criticizes as l'histoire ivenementielle was dealt with critically by Teggart as early as 1910 in a fascinating article in the American Historical Review, and at greater length in the two works contained in this volume...
...Colonel West's recommendations, though I do not agree with all of them, are oddly restrained and reasonable, considering the tone of what has gone before...
...Coover will receive Robbins' complete works in handsome, pre-owned, paperbound volumes...
...Whole armies of hacks would have to be exterminated before readers would turn to him...
...I have my doubts about military juries selected at random, for the armed services are less able to afford the luxury of unjust acquittals than is civilian society...
...Technically flawed, intellectually unserviceable, stupefyingly boring, it is prodigiously worthy of the 1977 Harold Robbins Award for the worst book of the year...
...I think, though, that he despised liberals—the kind I was, I fear, when first I began to study and work under him—more than out-and-out radicals...
...More positively, it called, in his view, for history regarded as the comparative study of events, institutions, cultures, such study to be undertaken with a distinct question or problem in mind that permitted the kinds of answers which could be found in such disciplines as geology, biology, and other sciences...
...One of his obsessing interests was the far-flung eruptions, all in the sixth century B.C., of the religions associated with the names of Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tze and Confucius in China, Mahavira (founder of Jainism) and Buddha in India, the prophets Ezekiel and Second Isaiah in Judea, Thales in Ionia, and Pythagoras in southern Italy...
...Oh yes, he liked what I brought to him of Mencken...
...Both originally published by Yale University Press, they were brought within the covers of one book by the University of California Press in 1941...
...Quick to temper, fierce in resolve, it was said that the earth shook every time he changed his mind...
...He was not, however ideologically inclined, much less politically absorbed...
...The reader will also find a much more compact and forthright statement of the differentiations among events, small and large, short and long, and their diverse impacts in Teggart's Theory of History, published half a century ago, than in the tortured, prolix passages which we find in Braudel and others of his French school...
...For Teggart this called for eschewal of unilinear narrative, single time-frame, and the artificial forcing of the diverse and plural into the unitary...
...Like a few other great scholars of his age, he disdained a Ph.D., no doubt wondering, as others did on written record, who would be qualified to examine him...
...Certainly there were lasting divisions and fissures on the Berkeley faculty even when I got to that campus as an undergraduate in 1932, and Teggart had become a kind of legendary figure on the campus...
...I saw more of him than anyone save members of his immediate family during the years 1936-43, and I can testify that he and Edmund Burke are, if there is a heaven, close by each other...
...I would remove defense counsel from the chain of command, as military judges have been...
...The accused is, of course, always entitled to retain his own civilian counsel...
...The award will be presented at a ceremony in Mr...
...He could be wonderfully patient and understanding, though, as I discovered during the several years I studied under him, and at his best he was a lustrous teacher, always demanding but at the same time inspiring, by example and spoken word...
...Teggart's scholarship has always seemed to me grossly underrated, especially in this country, and yet I could be wrong, as I think of the written expressions of obligation and esteem...
...Socialism in any and all its forms, he used to assure me, was only absolute political power extended through handouts into every corner and crevice of society...
...His brilliant insights and conceptual uncoverings are as relevant today—and as badly needed—as when he first published them...
...The American Spectator January 1978 37...
...He feared the New Deal and its centralizing, monopolizing impact upon American society, and voted resolutely against FDR...
...Finally, Teggart was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize that under the pretentious terminology of "social evolution" and "social development" in the 19th and 20th centuries lay nothing in fact derived from the scientific-biological study of evolution, but rather spin-offs of the idea, the philosophy, of progress that had begun doodle about Communism, I should like very much to have the award presented to him by Andrei Sakharov, if only we could spring him from The Phantom's maw...
...Although Teggart was a recluse by nature, almost never attending scholarly meetings and conferences, and, to my knowledge, never paying any living scholar a written compliment, he nevertheless received the acco36 The American Spectator January 1978 lades of such distinguished historians as Paxson, Shotwell, and Robinson...
...He voted regularly, but it was to vote against, not for, someone...
...Harry Elmer Barnes, himself learned and effective in his best years and notoriously hard to please, said of Teggart that he was "unquestionably the foremost writer in this country, if not in the world, on the theoretical basis of the new history as the science of social change...
...He was, as I trust I have made evident in this review, a great teacher in all respects...
...Radical though he was in the areas of theory and method in history and the social sciences, he was a full-blown conservative in ideological-political matters...
...Theory of History is an absorbing treatment of the theoretical foundations of conventional history on the one hand and, on the other, of the study of social change in the social sciences...
...It might be difficult to obtain convictions for absence without leave, when some of the jurors may be tempted to go AWOL themselves, or convictions in war-crime cases, when few soldiers have much sympathy for the victims...
...BOOK REVIEW Theory and Processes of History Frederick J. Teggart / University of California Press / $4.95 Robert Nisbet We can be grateful to the University of California Press for restoring to print this volume, which is actually two separate, though related books by Teggart: the earlier (1918) The Processes of History and the later Theory of History (1925...
...There is something to be said for military experience and expertise in the trial of military crimes...
...Toynbee, in one of the final volumes of his A Study of History, declares that it was Teggart's works which first attracted him to the idea of a comparative, plural history and furthermore, Toynbee writes, "showed me where to find the entry into my subject after I had been groping for it without succeeding in discovering it by my own native lights...
...To return to the book's principal theme, more could and should be done to eliminate command influence from military justice...
...He was a librarian for the first ten or so years after receiving his A.B., but those were years of immense reading and the beginnings of what would be a stream of articles and books during the rest of his life...
...Perhaps a few personal notes on this remarkable mind are in order, by way of conclusion...
...He had a genuine hatred of war and the military, believing them to be the most destructive forces, historically, upon civil society, especially family and local community...
...Finally, I would make the decisions of the Court of Military Appeals reviewable by the Supreme Court (not, as Colonel West recommends, by the Circuit Courts of Appeal) by writ of certiorari...
...Senator undone by bushy nose hair...
...I had the sense that he regarded all politicians (and the overwhelming majority of university administrators, paid and unpaid) as fools...
...Except for four undergraduate years at Stanford, his vast learning was entirely self-acquired...
...As a practical matter, collateral review by the federal courts now includes appeal to the Supreme Court, and the change would decrease the caseload of the inferior federal courts without adding much to that of the highest court...
...The Public Burning is momentous in its failure...
...Past Robbins Laureates Theodore White, Peter Schrag, and Lillian Hellman head the list of invited dignitaries...
...I would myself prefer an expansion of the power and independence of military judges —specifically giving them tenure during good behavior and referring all cases arising in the military to permanent military courts composed of one or (for serious offenses) three to five judges, both military and civilian...
...Explain that patterning in time over the whole Eurasian continent, he used to say, and you will have at long last THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR (continued from page 4) loathing are not such alluring literary props...
...As his Theory of History in this volume demonstrates, he was at home in the history of ideas in Western civilization...
...On the other hand, I think the commander's responsibility for discipline entitles him to a strong say in the decision whether to refer charges to a military court or to resort to milder sanctions, and in the decision as to what degree of clemency is appropriate...
...To the best of my knowledge no other nation at war has ever tried members of its own forces for war crimes...
...I am glad to say that I quit cold-turkey within the year...
...And, bearing in mind Coover's flap-brought the science, rather than the Thucydides-formed art, of history into being...
...Not that Teggart ever claimed originality for himself, but he had a penchant for making his way to books and ideas well off the mainstream in his day...
...but this notwithstanding, he was among the very first at Berkeley to recognize the threat Hitler posed to Western freedom, and he used to rage at the Chamberlains and Daladiers in Europe for not sensing immediately what Hitler was actually about...
...Somewhere at this very hour Coover doubtless is dreaming up new philosophical metaphors—why not a U.S...
...man I have ever known, and was regarded with some awe at Berkeley where he taught for a third of a century, retiring in 1940, dying at age 76 in 1946...
...He was a stormy petrel in the Berkeley history department after he received appointment there as Associate Professor in 1911, and when he broke with it a few years later—to create his own department at Berkeley, built around the history of ideas and the comparative study of peoples and cultures —there must have been tremors in the San Andreas fault...
...The first paperback edition appeared in 1960, and has been out of print for several years...
...In short, Colonel West's treatment of the law of war is even less scholarly and more purely propagandistic than his chapters on command influence...
...What of a Supreme Court Justice with incurable flatulence?—but he dreams in obscurity...
...more specifically, abandoning the conventional format of the writing of history—which he declared a form of art, like any narrative "story," irrespective of its claimed objectivity or its grounding in documents and observations—and using the empirical materials of history in ways akin to the operations of scientists...
...Augustine, and succeeded in becoming the master-idea of the social sciences in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries...
...with the Greeks, received masterful statement by St...
...His search for an answer took him across Asia to China, its Great Wall and its changing political systems...
...Teggart was one of the genuinely original minds in the historical and social sciences during the first half of the century...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
