From Far Left to Far Right
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing FROM FAR LEFT TO FAR RIGHT BY ROGER DRAPER During the 1970s, Paul Johnson departed the immoderate Left of the British Labor Party for the immoderate Right of the British...
...The second chapter, for example, is called "The Congress Dances," but after an account of the Congress of Vienna (ending the Napoleonic Wars), it goes on to examine the development of the Austrian secret police...
...Then he noticed mine was untouched and asked why...
...The secret police, it appears, investigated Beethoven and his followers...
...Yet he remains "oneofthose," as he was in the old days, albeit on the opposite side of the barricades: the watchful guardian of its purity, ever-vigilant to detect hints of compromise and betrayal...
...Beethoven was a known republican, and his contemptuous treatment of aristocrats and even members of the imperial family, admirers included—he was really an awful fellow, Johnson shows entertainingly—helped to create the Romantic notion that true artists are properly rebels against society...
...Although Johnson never bothers to sort out these different claims, it is the creation of a global community that appears to capture his interest...
...and a variety of additional topics—all lurching back and forth in time...
...do not want to hear anything composed by Herr van Beethoven...
...He tells a revealing story about his constitutional tendency to excess in the Introduction to The Oxford Book of British Political Anecdotes (1986...
...Johnson's advocacy of this powerful theory is curious in two ways...
...Erosion and soil depletion continually forced the peasantry to seek new land...
...The composer could act upon these principles because he worked mostly for the market, through publishers, rather than for traditional aristocratic patrons...
...Second, attributing Russian imperialism and despotism to pressures for colonization is exactly the kind of argument Johnson, in this very work, derides as "typical of moral relativism," of the tendency to see "society, not individual wickedness," as the source of evil...
...The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (HarperCollins, 1,095 pp., $35) is extreme...
...He asserts that the settlement of the War of 1812 put the Special Relationship on a firm foundation...
...The host, a Socialist millionaire, gave each guest aMonte Cristo, then as today Cuba's most expensive cigar...
...Marxists might easily hold such views...
...Well, give it here, boy,' and he took my cigar and tucked it safely into his top pocket...
...Bevan "puffed his with profound enjoyment...
...Moreover, despite titles implying that the chapters are at least structured thematically, this too is not quite the case...
...Thus "men and women from one failed form of primitivism were leaving to pass the death sentence on another...
...I had only just become a Socialist, and I explained that I did not think it right that Socialists should enjoy such luxuries...
...A further inconsistency is the author's willingness to accept, in conservatives, certain attitudes that move him to contempt when they emanate from the Left...
...To be quite fair, the investigation was not so absurd as it may seem...
...By the 1980s, Johnson had become perhaps the chief literary voice of Thatcherism...
...Perhaps—though Johnson, who makes his own neat sums about a lot of issues, absurdly claims to be a moral absolutist...
...The author does end both on a chronological and a thematic note...
...Most important of all, thinks Johnson, the period 1815-30opened the greatest eraof immigration: It was during those years that Europe seized, and began to populate, the remaining sparsely inhabited areas of the world in North and South America, Australia and the Russian Empire...
...First, it is strongly materialistic...
...I would say that, on the contrary, Johnson has an excess of definitions, none of them very original, and never brings them into a consistent scheme...
...Yet two of Johnson's heroes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, really did see only its evils, and he appears to be quite sympathetic: The conservative poets "identified themselves with what Coleridge called 'the hopeless cause of our poor little White-Slaves, the children of the cotton Factories, against the unpitying cruel Spirit of Trade, and the shallow, heart-petrifying self-conceit of our political economists.' It was, above all, the exploitation of children that drove Southey to hate industrialization so bitterly...
...In "The Coming of the Demos" he takes up the story of Andrew Jackson's election as President of the United States in 1828, the emergence (at the same time) of the democratic Catholic Association in Ireland, and the revolutions of 1830 on the Continent...
...Forgetting his insistence (in the Preface) "that chronology forms the bones of history on which all else is built," the author almost abandons any chronological structure after the beginning, an overoptimistic description of Anglo-American relations before and after 1815...
...In spite of Johnson's conservatism, he emphasizes (to my mind, very plausibly) the continuity between Imperial Russia and its Communist successor...
...At one point, Johnson suddenly (and without further explanation) suggests that the development of new techniques of raising capital in peacetime was "perhaps the key factor in the birth of the modern world...
...In a society whose mainspring is self-interest, why should we expect workers threatened by changing production techniques to respond more selflessly than proprietors...
...Of Karl Marx, he sniffs disapprovingly—and incorrectly—that he "saw only the evils of industrial capitalism...
...In his overall discussion of colonization, emigration and immigration, the author makes an effort, largely absent in the rest of the book, to tell both sides of a story...
...Trade routes and financial crises were coming to link the advanced countries, and a majority of the backward ones...
...Occasionally, Johnson himself is bizarre...
...He has been widely criticized on two grounds...
...Everything between the first chapter and the last is held together, very loosely, by Johnson's belief that during the years 1815-30, "the matrix of the modem world was largely formed...
...One day, he was seated at a luncheon beside Aneuran Bevan, the radical British Labor Party politician...
...almost imperceptibly, mankind was transforming itself into a single global community, in which different races and civilizations...
...Two factions," it reported, "are now forming, for and against" him...
...What a pity Paul Johnson uses his storytelling abilities so tendentiously...
...A large majority of connoisseurs...
...Suppose this accurately describes the demands...
...in reality, the United States and Great Britain almost came to blows as late as the 1890s...
...hence the need to maintain a huge military establishment and a militarized society—and their acceptability to a large number of Russians...
...We do not ordinarily connect the last with colonization, but Johnson persuades me that it is "the fundamental fact of Russian history, to which all its other features are related...
...Writers & Writing FROM FAR LEFT TO FAR RIGHT BY ROGER DRAPER During the 1970s, Paul Johnson departed the immoderate Left of the British Labor Party for the immoderate Right of the British Conservative Party...
...the mass production of pianos...
...He has also been accused of failing to propose any real definition of "the modem...
...The emigrants, forced by economic change out of the Scottish Highlands, Ireland, the Alps and other backward parts of Western Europe, were "dispossessed clansmen, the progeny of hunters and warriors, pastoralists and herdsmen...
...It is unfair...
...Liberalism, Romanticism and competing cultural ideals were inspiring behavior from Buenos Aires to Siberia...
...Beethoven's politics, personal behavior, cultural impact, and sources of income...
...These were not, he readily admits, wholly beneficial events...
...Elsewhere, he asserts that "Public opinion, and, by inference, democracy, "was the great new fact of the dawning modern world...
...To me, this decision is partly excused by his focus on modernization...
...and the market chiefly demanded piano music, which became popular as those instruments were manufactured in greater quantity...
...Oooooh, you are one of those, are you?' asked Bevan with Olympian contempt...
...From 1955 to 1970 Johnson worked at the Leftist New Statesman...
...Almost everyone thinks he concentrated unduly on the AngloAmerican world...
...I half wish I could also call it uninteresting and unreadable...
...Cold was an obstacle to farming practically everywhere, and rainfall was distributed poorly...
...And does an employer actually have a "right to run his business" without external control...
...Most of Russia's territory was relatively infertile, he notes...
...But triumphing over its chaotic organization, reactionary prejudices, and insufficiently thought out ideas, it succeeds in its declared aim of bringing "back to life a remarkable epoch in world history, rich in grand and bizarre events and in human characters...
...Arriving in the United States, they subjected "the Indians of North America to a similar process of eviction and exile...
...simply had to come to terms with each other...
...Johnson nonetheless warns that improvements in transportation and an exploding population in Europe "made huge movements of people not only possible but inevitable, and the historian should avoid making neat sums in moral arithmetic about the rights and wrongs of it all...
...Since all of a manufacturer's costs—and prices—may rise, why not the cost of labor...
...The connections among some of the topics are fascinating, however...
...Like a great many others, he has changed his politics, not his extremist temperament...
...This is a frequently recurring theme, yet so is Johnson's contention that "Perhaps the most important single aspect of modernity was the way...
...Johnson himself blames the problems of industrialization mostly on trade unions: A "spirit of appeasement," he insists, "was evident in industry," where faint-hearted businessmen were prone to accept "long shopping lists of [labor] requirements, each of which tended to lower productivity, raise manufacturers' costs or restrict the employer's right to run his business...
Vol. 74 • November 1991 • No. 12
