A History of the World

...What to make of a history of the world full of engaging detail about "the history of the grape" and the career of the founder of Reuters...

...technological innovations have not been complemented by political achievements of comparable ingenuity...

...He has to show its peculiar character as it differs from modernity, taken as wholes...

...Faced with this, they quite naturally embrace the twin idols of democracy and equality, all other values being understood as mere disguises for i n t e r e s t or as appropriate only to limited times or places...

...But the liberalism of Macaulay knew all about fanaticism and superstition...

...Four are developing new cars using hydrocarbon fuels, one is creating an electric car, and others are working on computerized engines and emission controls, a new kind of automatic transmission, and the inflatable restraint system...

...Lead time has been reduced by 25...

...accordingly, the past is found wanting...

...A few months later, the Arab countries launched the oil embargo...

...Thomas, like the most influential school of contemporary historians, spends most of his time describing the social and economic history of ordinary life: what people ate, how they worked, what they built, and how they died...

...It is especially noteworthy that Thomas, whose contributions to political history in the form of studies of the Spanish Civil War and Cuba remain classics, agrees with the historians of the Annales school that la longue duroc should be treated with little reference to politics...

...campus, and it has never been separable from the larger political issues that have shaped the life of the Republic...

...But by putting all the parts of General Motors to work together, we found a way to speed up the process...

...They are as bad, Smith says, as those who encourage the young to enlist as soldiers and get themselves killed for dreams of glory...

...B 0 0 K R E V I E W S A t the close of his history of the world, Hugh Thomas observes that while modern i n d u s t r i a l society sometimes seems free of its past, modern tyrannies are usually driven by a strong sense of the past...

...What he has done is to show us the whole course of human history in order to bring home vividly how rare has been the Opportunity for a life that is both decently comfortable and decently f r e e , and how t h e r e f o r e those of us who have it should be willing to defend it cheerfully, confidently, and without shame...

...The market cannot support all the ambitious young lawyers seeking fame and prestige...

...For Thomas offers an account of man as seen by a Whig, an old-fashioned English liberal...

...It encompasses development, design, s t r u c t u r a l analysis, handling analysis, emissions, noise and vibration, safety, reliability, serviceability and repairability, manufacturing, assembly, marketing, financing...

...What can be done about the desire for honor and glory, that willful blindness to rational self-interest that destroys all calculations of mutual benefit...

...Some world histories have therefore not confined themselves to the past...

...And of histories, world histor4es are in this sense the most important, because, unlike other histories, world histories claim to offer us a comprehensive and thus authoritative account of what we are and what has made us what we are...

...Partly and necessarily we are interested in their historical judgments: what interpretation seems soundest to the author, what kinds of connections are emphasized, etc...

...Colorful and charming as are his descriptions of everything from the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 29 gradual development of the plough to pre-modern means of contraception, Thomas throughout prepares the way for the case he will convincingly make when discussing "Industrial Triumphs": We are far better off with plumbing than without, with china plates than with trenches dug in a wooden table, with penicillin than with various plagues...

...But on the main point of distinction he is right...

...Wells predicted the triumph of Science...

...They do not appear here in their mid- and lateVictorian avatars as captains of industry...

...Early Christian universal histories told their readers about the triumphant coming of Christ...

...In treating pre-industrial life, Thomas has two tasks...

...Yet just when Thomas seems no more than a charming guide to the eccentric byways of the past, off comes his Mr...

...Histories of the world are thus a literary genre, like the novels and books of prophecy they somewhat resemble...

...This does not seem adequate...

...One depended largely on rainfall, with some smallscale irrigation added...

...Somewhat similarly, H.G...

...Then, pilot models will be built from production tooling and tested some more...

...There a r e now e i g h t Project Centers i n General Motors...

...Politics thus appears as a contest among i n t e r e s t s , all of which are accorded equal status, save for those which question the fundamental equality of interests and which invariably provoke savage outrage...

...But in 1973, GM determined that the times required revolutionary changes...

...Rather they appear for the most part as martyrs, misunderstood by the workingmen their inventions were ultimately so greatly to benefit, persecuted by solicitous governments as enemies of the public peace...

...And it serves Thomas much as it did his Whig ancestors to account for his unapologetic emphasis on the history of Western Europe and, within that, on the history of England...

...But where irrigation meant cities and culture and civilization, it also meant despotism and the ideal of a static and manageable society...

...By treating this vast span as one, Thomas points to the exceptionality of our society and prepares us to appreciate how our's is both the answer to perennial human longings and at the same time something utterly strange and problematic...

...A special section goes to the last part of the age of agriculture when clocks and sailing ships and banking and guns started to change the ancestral world...

...It started its first Project Centerwhich by itself heralded a revolution in the use of science and technok)gy to meet the changing demands of the marketplace...

...Here we must determine not only what kind of car, but how many we might be able to build and sell years later...

...Smith's economics are doubtless sound, but his anger sounds like a confession of helplessness...

...One might add that it is just those people who think they are free of the past who are therefore the easiest makes for manipulations whose very possibility they can scarcely conceive...

...As the modern university was transformed into a "representative" institution, it increasingly required that teachers adopt the skills appropriate for the politician in a r e p r e s e n t a t i v e democracy...

...The puzzlement of reviewers may therefore not be too surprising...

...But characteristic of Thomas's outlook seems to be the suggestion his examples constantly make: that individual initiative, while self-interested, need not be" demonic or make demons of others...

...Refutation doesn't help when the taste is lacking for the goods reason can afford...

...For Europe has been the engine that has made the world modern and England (which for Thomas includes its creations, like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) has been the engine of Europe...

...Again, Macaulay breathes a near-divine assurance that the peculiar virtues of the English constitution and customs are just what the world should have ordered to solve its fundamentally needless problems...

...Thus Goethe's aged Faust, after a career of devilish glamor, finds fulfillment in what he thinks is a public works project...

...New and rew)lutionary cars can't be mass produced for the road overnight...

...The second phase of the Project Center takes 24 to 30 months...

...The advertisements said they were "designed and engineered for a changing world"-and they were...

...What to make of something that dares call itself a history of the world, but then announces that it is just an essay, a try, something incomplete that only suggests the shape of a true history of the world...

...The concern for the poor, the dispossessed, and the historically neglected, so noble from a certain standpoint and so evident in the American university, is doubly reinforced by the b e l i e f that these groups are left unrepresented in the combat among interests...

...Irrigation required a higher degree of civilization, of cooperation, of organization, and hence of direction than simply staring upwards hopefully from time to time...

...As all principles were thought subject to corruption and heretical interpretations, teachers and political men were on their guard to maintain the true principles of republican liberty...

...Pickwick mask to reveal the grim visage of Margaret Thatcher in a fighting mood...

...The t e a c h e r often faces a large and diverse audience of students, a great number of whom would justly prefer a more productive adolescence...

...GM's f i r s t Project Center brought o u t t o t a l l y new fullsize c a r s : smaller, yet roomier, and far more efficient than their predecessors...

...In a far different time, this study consisted of the examination of those principles that inspired the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution...

...That is why histories are important...

...Fortunately, machinery was already in motion in GM to create and develop new cars and components in a new way and faster than ever before...

...They offer the whole in microcosm, even if they stop at the present...

...The study of American government has a long and honored history on the James Piereson teaches political science at the University of PennsyL vania...

...The Whigs, of course, were the party of the Glorious (because bloodless) Revolution of 1688, of free trade and enlightened, prudent reform, of respect for privacy and of tradition, of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke linked in uneasy coexistence, of Gladstone and of Fox, of high principle and low cunning, and, finally, of the Whig School of History, whose most prominent exponents, like Thomas Babington Macaulay, managed to invest the politics of compromise and moderation with the unearthly dignb ty and sonorous condescension of the statue of the Commendatore dropping in for dinner at Don Giovanni's...

...It is the lubricant that keeps the system together and the fuel that keeps it lurching along...

...Yet Thomas must explain why it is that the history of the world has not been a universal march to modernity, by means of a wise accumulation of small advantages...

...Economics, customer tastes, availability of various kinds of fuels must be compared with state-of-the-art technology-and what steps must be taken to advance that technology quickly yet surely...

...I n fact, the book is a consistent whole...

...And Thomas makes us understand what a difference in the relative decency of life the availability of cheap, reliable pottery and mass-produced clothing made to all those who could not have afforded them before...

...In the first stage, which we call "concepting," experimental engineers, environmental scientists, forward planners, and marketing experts pool their thinking...

...Smith gets surprisingly sharp in condemning those who fund scholarships...

...Its structure already tells us a lot...

...I think that is the reason the book has puzzled some reviewers who really shouldn't have been puzzled by it...

...Thomas writes in the tones of an ordinary mortal, and often a remarkably funny one too, but he is deeply worried about what lies in wait for liberal societies...

...One wonders, is even building Xerox or IBM enough for ambition today...

...The teaching of principles was in this way directed to the ends of virtue, self-restraint, and patriotism...

...Thus, the first factory inspection law in England that also set limits to the working hours of children under 14 (the limit, one should note in fairness, was 12 hours), was introduced by Sir Robert Peel, a cotton manufacturer, in 1802...

...General Motors People building transportation to serve people THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 31 errors men have made and Thomas does it c r e d i t a b l y . Those who took capitalism for granted and sought " h i g h e r moral v a l u e s " may have indeed paved the way for the stagnation of democracies, while those who gave themselves over to the intoxication of nationalisms or the phony eschatology of class-war t h e o r i e s have industriously c r e a t e d hell on earth...

...Like the coal miner from "Beyond the Fringe," Thomas makes us appreciate the absence of falling coal and therefore leads us to think well of those who struggled successfully, to whatever small degree through the predndustrial era, to take their fellows' lives and their own a little farther from the edge of pure necessity...

...The teaching of principles, however, in addition to being highly political in intention, was also conn'ected to the formation of character, since a system of self-government was thought to depend on citizens who were themselves self-governing...

...In the end, though, it may not be fair to ask Thomas for something persuasive to say to people whose chief fun is ordering executions or attending them...

...As he ranges back and forth over the centuries, talking about population growth, farming, plague, war, famine, weaving, medicine, politics, and religion, one obvious, banal, but nevertheless fundamentally important fact comes through...

...When Jefferson, with Madison's advice, formulated a course of study in government at the University of Virginia, he recommended a selective list of republican writings that could be used to combat the consolidationist principles then being taught in the New England colleges...

...And he has to show the roots of modernity within the age of agriculture...

...But does this say more than that what we call political success, the perpetuation of dull, moderately honest parliamentary democracies, is not of much interest here...

...Those who are in the business of knowing such things estimate that more than 200,000 students in colleges and u n i v e r s i t i e s around, the country will sit down this year to take their introductory course in American government...

...Unsurprisingly, the differences between Macaulay and Thomas, especially as historians, are at first more evident than their kinship...

...Climate, he contends, created two kinds of agricultural civilization...

...This explanation leads to a categorization that has been familiar all the way back to Tacitus...

...A passage in The Wealth o f Nations illustrates the point...

...The other depended on vast irrigation schemes...

...seek to learn and judge in turn from a history of the world...

...He distrusts the regulating state for familiar reasons: because it officiously frustrates the endeavors of private men who might otherwise better the lot of all in bettering their own, and also because it tends to make men dependent and less than they might be...

...it did not expect it to reinherit the earth...

...When he comes to the twentieth century, Thomas remains evenhanded about industrial triumphs...

...Thomas treats the problem as "quite simply" a matter of political failure...

...Yet, while Thomas rightly emphasizes the previously unimaginable benefits of the industrial revolution for the great mass of men (which, as everybody before the industrial revolution knew, meant the poor), he does not try to deny that during the first stages of the transformation of society the conditions in some industries became worse and the work much harder...

...While they must be based on the best and most contemporary historical scholarship in order to be able to claim a comprehensive and authoritative account, they cannot, given the magnitude of the task, seek the kind of monographic precision proper to the historian narrating, for example, the exact sequence of events at the Battle of La Hogue...

...In celebrating the peaceable hero, the e n t r e p r e n e u r , or inventor who conquers nature r a t h e r than man, Thomas adopts the traditional liberal solution to the problem of glory...

...The traditional course in American government, like the American university itself, may be understood as a victim of the modern corruption of democracy...

...gather people, ideas, and knowledge from all 30 divisions and staffs of General Motors...

...Hugh Thomas's contribution to this genre gives welcome voice to an interpretation of history and a judgment of man that has not been as much in evidence as it used to be...

...The reliance on industry to create the civility that made liberty possible seems not to be secure, in the light of the twentieth century's descent into political barbarism...

...New technology, such as structural analysis by computer, saves time...

...Led by the five car divisions, Project Centers...

...How much of it is rooted in agricultural technique and how much in odd events like the triumph of Christianity, which offered its transcendent God at a time when a great empire was falling apart, is.something one could argue...

...Here Thomas suggests his central theme early on...

...Components are hand-built and "cobbled" into existing models for road testing...

...Their objective: what the marketplace will require...

...Another Project Center, begun in 1975, developed the immensely popular GM X-cars...

...In what nearly becomes a litany, Thomas shows that almost every invention ultimately developed in the West had in fact been discovered first by the Chinese, who discarded it as of no particular use to a society whose goal was permanence and order...

...If all men wanted to live better eclectically, what, on the whole, stopped them for so long...

...One can of course show persuasively the intellectual and moral Throughout the history of the automobile industry, product change was almost always evolutionary...

...The last section is devoted to "Our Times," but is bifurcated, like a divided mind, between "Industrial Triumphs" and "Political Failures...

...Amid the bluster it is easy to forget that this version of the equality principle is itself grounded on the rather 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980...

...But, as the example indicates, Thomas is not in favor of entrepreneurship simply because it creates wealth...

...It is these men, the traders, the anonymous inventors, who, in the magnified circumstances of the industrial revolunon, will emerge as Thomas's heroes...

...It leads off with a long section on "The Age of Agriculture," Thomas's name for the millennia between the beginning of human settlement and the industrial revolution...

...This adw, rtisement is part of our con tin uing efS~rt to give customers useful information about their cars and trucks and the company that builds them...

...Liberty and innovation therefore, while they result ultimately in far greater material progress, originated in those rude places where farmers depended on rain...

...This is the most important stage...

...Yet how then account, not only for the relatively petty vices of the modern democratic state, for OSHA or the over-mighty British TUC, but for the horrifying fact that the splendid material achievements unleashed by the creativity of liberal economics and political thought have proved a perfect medium for the rebirth of those oriental despotisms that Macaulay's generation thought were fading away in disgrace...

...He is a Whig, too, in his concern for political liberty...

...However familiar, Thomas's distinction between the " o r i e n t a l " despotisms that have characterized most times and places (including, for example, pre-Columbian Central American cultures) and the few, strange societies that remain unbalanced and striving is a good one...

...For the most part, pre-industrial life was a constant battle just to stay alive...

...These enable the Project Center team to determine how newly developed, pretested components operate as a unit...

...We have integrated the c r e a t i v i t y of thousands of human mi~nds to make invention into reality when it's needed...

...In the "concepting" stage, a new car is conceived...

...Our Times," however, were made, if by any group of individuals, by the inventors and entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution...

...even the taste for civility, in which the old liberalism may have had its deepest, pre-philosophic roots, seems bland today...

...From such a standpoint, "interest" appears as the safest unifying principle, and the lowest common denominator, according to which one can understand politics...

...This is perhaps the chief reason why we haven't heard much from Whigs recently...

...In the hands of those who are strongly predisposed to think well of themselves, this can be blown up into a high-sounding doctrine indeed...

...preservation of an alternative allegiance to the state as a force in creating the West...

...Prototype c a r s are handb u i l t at a c o s t o f more than $250,000 each...

...When world histories understand themselves fully as comprehensive accounts of man, their authors sometimes grow impatient with the conventional limitation of only writing about that part of time that has already happened to happen...

...There most will encounter one of the more familiar landmarks of American higher education - - t h e textbook in American government, from which they will learn, chapter and verse, the dark secrets of American politics...

...Yet this solution is only provisional...

...And it should be noted that Thomas is careful ~o give at least some due to memories of classical democracies and to Christianity's...

...Yet these conditions began to improve, often because of government intervention, at a very early time, he observes, noting furthermore that the legal regulation of working conditions and hours of labor was, remarkably enough, in part the work of some of the same men who owned the factories...

...Many seem to have ended insane, in poverty or in France...

...Because teachers lack real authorigy, they are led unwittingly to adopt the strategems of the politician--appealing to a diverse constituency, eager to please and fearing to offend anyone, and excessively sensitive to the varied claims e n t e r t a i n e d by members of the audience...

...After almost four million miles, nearly three billion dollars, and nearly three years of work, the new cars-quite unlike anything before themstart coming off the production line at a rate of better than one a minute...

...For there is evidently a kinship between the conqueror of nature and the conqueror of man, just as t h e r e is a tension between that good, sane, and peaceable state of mind that has characterized Whiggism from John Somers to Orwelt and Thomas and that restless desire to b e t t e r o n e ' s condition which ultimately gave most men something to feel reasonably peaceable about...

...Yet underlying the author's historical judgment and informing it is his judgment about what man amounts to, and it is that judgment we most Fred Baumann is a program officer at the Institute for Educational Affairs in New York...

...This peculiar version of the equality principle, which is of such recent origin, is also used as a standard by which to judge the past...

...from ten years ago, when cars were far less complex...

...By liberating men from the incessant struggle for survival, modernity makes civility possible and with it, self-government...

...They have appreciated, he says, that an excellent way to capture their peoples' minds is to distort their historical imagination...

...Macaulay wrote a History of England that covers a mere 20 years or so and that emphasizes the details of political intrigue as well as profound constitutional issues...

...thus, many talented lives are blighted...

...Similarly, Thomas is surely right, with Carlos Rangel, when he attributes the political failure of the Latin American republics to themselves and not to malevolent Yankee corporations...

...Advanced product engineers and research scientists work with the one hundred fifty to two hundred people at the Project Center and thousands more in the staffs and divisions to transfer new science and technology to the new car...

...If the car is to be sold to customers three years later, construction of new plants, must begin and basic tooling must be ordered...

...He notes, for example, the effect of the loudspeaker and television on politics, turning debate into sloganeering and participation into voyeurism...

...These are 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 the men Thomas celebrates, in the best Whig tradition of the heroism of peaceable commerce...

...The contrast between the urban despotism of Rome and the rude liberty of the Germanic forest, which Thomas in effect universalizes here, was once a staple of the older liberal historiographers like Bishop Stubbs...

...Thus, what matters about histories of the world is the judgments they make...