▲ 43 points
back
92 comments
All: if you're going to comment, please engage with the specifics of the article (there are a lot of them) and not just its baity title. (We've changed that above now.)
(Generic ideological tangents are boring and therefore off topic here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
This is a book review of The_Machiavellian_Moment.[1] I haven't read it. Sounds interesting. The reviewer's comments are more about modern interpretations of the American revolution and constitutional convention than the events themselves.
The US constitution was the result of an attempt to build something that wouldn't easily break. That's clear from the debates at the convention, and the Federalist Papers, all of which survive and are still widely read. The US constitution was Version 2. Version 1 was the Articles of Confederation, which created a weak central government subordinate to the states. That government was closer to the United Nations or the European Union than a national government. It wasn't strong enough.
The framers knew they needed a strong central government. They expected the British to come back and try to re-conquer the United States, which happened in the war of 1812. The obvious solution was a monarchy. Hamilton wanted that. (He wanted to be King.) Nobody else did. They'd fought a war to get out from under a king.
The other worry was descent into anarchy and mob rule. Which is what happened in the French revolution. Followed by years of civil wars, then Napoleon.
So the framers wanted something between those extremes. They had the advantage that most of the colonies already had elected representatives and governors, and that seemed to be working. So there was a model to copy.
Much stability was built-in, such as 6-year terms for senators. Impeachment was made possible but hard. The President can't dissolve Congress and call a new election, as in a parliamentary system. Congress controls spending. It's not perfect, and it's being stressed at the moment, but it's still holding together.
Most of the rest was trying to work out the spheres of control of the federal and state governments. The original plan was that the Federal government is in charge of war, foreign policy, and interstate commerce, and the states do everything else. That's still pretty much the case. There's far more interstate commerce, but most government is still state level and below. That's rare, worldwide.
There were many arguments and compromises. But the Framers, on the whole, did a good job. It's worth reading the Federalist papers as a design exercise.
There are strange interpretations of what the framers did. There are people who claim they were divinely inspired. But no; the debates show lots of arguments and compromise. They were very afraid of failing. "We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately". Which would have happened had Britain won the war of 1812, which was a close thing. The British reached the Capitol and burned it.
We actually attacked Canada first in 1812 and attacked residential property up there. The British came into Washington DC and destroyed Federal Stuff but they left the civilian stuff mostly alone.
"Yes, the United States attacked first in the War of 1812, by declaring war on Great Britain and invading Canada on June 18, 1812, marking the official start of the conflict."
There are also Anti-Federalist papers as well. https://history.nycourts.gov/about_period/antifederalist-pap...
While not directly related to the intellectual debates that surrounded the creation of the Constitution, I do recommend _America's Revolutionary Mind_. A detailed account of the better ideas in the culture at the time in the decades leading up to July 4, 1776.
I just ordered the book.
This thread though really sums up this site. 100 comments about an article no one read about a book no one read.
Everyone is just so obsessed with their own political bullshit.
It is just so boring.
The book is well worth reading.
The definition of both history and politics is vague and broad enough that there's guaranteed to be a complete overlap between the two. Anything that ever happened is history. The reason why things happened a certain way (at least in the form it was written down) is politics.
>Pocock’s claim is that history writing is, to some extent, political in itself.
Future historiographers might note a similar relationship between the papers of computer scientists and the economy..
In particular:
>history is the most powerful element in the construction and destruction of self-knowledge of political societies
I wish the reviewer had attended to the novel thing that Pocock had pointed out about the age-old tension between collectivism and humanism, though:
The time scale factor. (Think tech debt)
>the difficulty he faced in reconciling an ideal of citizenship with the uncertain and temporal character of republics.
I only read a chunk of the article but this stuck out:
In sum, Pocock was paradoxically under attack for being too liberal, but also for not being liberal enough. Said differently, Pocock was criticised for being too American and for not being American enough – all the more intriguing for a New Zealander.
If you have both sides criticizing you, chances are you got pretty close to a truth. Reminds me of Dave Chappelle, someone that both left and right culture warriors turned on in recent years.
This is a lazy heuristic. It abdicates actually engaging with the substance of what someone is saying and weighing it against your own judgement in favor of seeing how much of a spectacle they've managed to create. No, creating more of a spectacle does not indicate that someone is closer to the truth.
I have both flat earthers and round earthers criticizing me for my "cylindrical earth" theory. Chances are I'm pretty close to the truth :)
I have always liked the programming version of this: "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration"
With that argument, fascist regimes would be pretty close to the truth, since they were criticized by both liberal democracies and communist countries.
Also, you’re assuming there are always only two positions on a given topic. I know it might look that way on Twitter—most people today seem weaponized to pick one side or the other—but real social studies are far more nuanced than that.
The fact that everyone criticizes you only means that whatever you say doesn’t align with their narrative, not that you’re close to the truth.
I find it interesting that we're in a post truth society now, and it may not mean what I think it means. While considering your last paragraph I realized that post truth doesn't necessarily mean absence of fact.
It's simply people trying to write history while living it instead of waiting for it to actually be history or relying on experts to maintain an historical account. Facts don't matter. What gets remembered is all that matters, really.
Fascinating.
"If everyone is telling me I'm wrong, then I must be right!", is also an interpretation.
The other option is that if both sides are critisizing you, you are completely nuts. Saying the moon is made of green cheese isn't going to get support from the progressives or reactionaries.
I mean, beyond even the general truism that history is written by the "victors" - not just in war, but in soft political power as well - the choice of which parts of history you decide are important enough to present and which you omit is itself inherently a political decision.
It's not written by victors. Look at Jewish history. Or Polish. Or basically any small European country.
If anything - losing and surviving makes you more likely to write what you went through than just winning. And people who believe their pasts were better than futures tend to look into history more.
History is mostly written by survivors, and losing is a powerful motivation for self-reflection.
You can even see it in US with the different attitude people have towards civil war history. How many hardcore civil war history enthusiasts do you know that are mostly interested in Union?
> Or Polish.
Yeah... I don't know how it is these days, but my history lessons covered being attacked and under occupation for a very long time. But when Poland expanded the size, it just happened in the background. It's ok, I'm sure nobody was affected and it wasn't worth mentioning. Let's just be proud that it reached from sea to sea.
You're ignoring that I specifically included soft power. Garnering sympathy as an underdog is a historically effective form of soft power.
To your point: not to sound like an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, but it's pretty clear that while the Jewish people have been the victims of many tragedies, they also have managed to accumulate a great deal of political soft power as well, even while being a disadvantaged minority.
That's why certain types are so obsessed over the so-called "culture war". While some people just want a right to live and love who they want, the currently dominant cultural factions see that as a threat to their ability to, among other things, control the narrative of history for their own gain.
I am Polish. I know this from experience. The parts of history we focus on are the parts where we lost. When a society loses political power - it focuses on history and culture to survive (as opposed to "integrating"). Which influences the culture in a self-reinforcing way. Very easy to end up with martyrdom complex.
That's what Jews have been doing for 2000 years and their history is one of the best studied out there.
When a society wins political power - it looks into the future. A few eggheads will write the history but nobody'll read it.
Soft power is secondary - it comes FROM losing and focusing on history. Victors go split the loot, losers go write how they were the "moral winners".
No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories. Almost every sphere of human activity has history attached to it. Anything you do, people did before and there is a chain of influences and knowledge. We have to concede that the major developments in any of those histories do intersect with politics. For instance, if we trace the history of almost anything across the years 1940 to 1950, we almost certainly cannot ignore the both the disruptive and reinforcing effect of World War II. A lot of progress in STEM was accelerated by the war. But there isn't going to be a detailed political discussion there if our historic focus is something in STEM and not politics. The political details are tangential to that kind of history.
That's not to deny that there isn't an interesting point of view in exploring the connections among different threads of history. James Burke's fantastic Connections series comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
Some people are keenly interested in the history of their profession or hobbies. E.g. musicians interested in the history of music, or the development of their favorite instrument and such. Hackers, software devs and computer scientists interested in the history of computing and retrocomputing. Etc. Usually they are not into the political connection unless they are also interested in politics.
I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview, with what we might call party politics. History is always political because you can’t document every event that occurred during a given time; you’ll inevitably choose certain events over others. That very selection reflects a political stance, whether you realize it or not. Moreover, the subject itself is inherently political—for example, if you’re writing about music history, why focus on European composers rather than on whatever Chinese music existed at the time?
There isn't anything wrong in that, is just the way we work, we live in a particular culture, in a particular social system, in a particular time, and we are political beings.
An true history without politics would be like raw data of the state of every atom trough history, and even that may be political (why you choose to view the world as data?)
You are talking about the potential of political bias.
Actual political history itself can have political biases.
An apolitical history can also have political biases.
The biases aren't what make political history political, but rather its explicit discussion of politics: political events and the people behind them: the when, where, what who.
I am certainly not confused among "study of politics" and "personal politics" and "political bias" and such.
>An apolitical history can also have political biases.
seems contradictory. If you lived on earth, there is no "apolitical lens" to look in. You can only try to grab a truly comprehensive view by finding and studying multiple lenses.
>The biases aren't what make political history political
If you lived in a country, or need a public press to post your findings, or are simply hidden in exposure based on some private company with their own biases, I'd say all those are connected to the political.
Nope, i'm saying that humans are political beings, as aristoteles defined it, and any human action is by itself political.
History in itself tries (or should try) to be objective and avoid the bias you mention, but that doesn't make it less political by any mean.
> I think you’re confusing “political,” which refers to a particular worldview,
“Political” refers to things related to the governance, policies, or affairs of a country, organization, or group. Usually involves the structure of power, decision-making, and public administration, and debates or actions concerning laws, rights, or societal issues.
Having a worldview is not a political act.
Having a worldview is a political act. In fact, even having a sense of right and wrong is political. My point is that humans are inherently political beings: we don’t live in a vacuum, and our values, life choices, and even our language arise from a particular social system. Everything we do is political.
Your perspective seems limited to the more common or everyday meaning of “political,” and I understand that; however, in social studies, “political” usually has a much broader scope.
Not OP but I think you’re confusing “politics” with “bias”.
History is biased, I don’t think anyone would debate that, but bias isn’t necessarily political. There’s lots of reasons for people to think some item or story is worth preserving, and most of them aren’t about politics.
The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.
>The “everything is political” concept has been a very successful propaganda campaign, particularly in the US.
Everyone thinking politics is only about 2 parties and some controversial thinkg to even utter is the successful propaganda.
>the academic study of government and the state.
That's all it is. unless you are truly independent and in the wild, it's hard to say anyone isn't influenced by politics. Hence, biases. Bias in this lens is a byproduct of your environment, managed by politics.
If someone documents a natural disaster like a Volcano engulfing an entire city, that's not political in any way, that's just recording facts that any historian regardless of their political views would record.
There have been N volcano eruptions over the history of mankind, why you are taking focus on one and not the other is the political part.
That may be the worst counterexample you could conjure up. The first self sustaining nuclear reactor, electronic computers, information theory itself, etc were all political projects that are impossible to divorce from politics.
They even made a whole movie about the politics of nuclear science last year, it was a massive hit.
It's entirely possible to divorce the histories of those developments from politics, giving just the progression of discoveries and technical improvements. The next level up from that is to just touch on major political currents or events and how they shaped the development; and that's the most that some technical buff would care about. You would have to add several orders of political detail before you can call it a political history.
Attribution in science is one of these areas where people are led to believe that is apolitical.
But when you dive into it, it is almost cringy.
An obvious example is the story about Alan Turing that mostly leaves out the foundational work carried out in Poznan.
Or how women’s contribution to sciences were continually overlooked and sometimes purposefully hidden, going along with the social/political status of women.
History is stories we tell ourselves about the world, stories backed by the evidence not yet lost to entropy. But which stories we choose to tell and which to forget — and what records to preserve — are always influenced by politics.
You two point out something important: a history that appears apolitical on the surface can have a social/cultural/economic/political bias in it (whether conscious or not) by omission or emphasis.
As someone who was born and raised in behind the Iron Curtain of the Eastern Bloc, for instance, I remember the Periodic Table of the Elements being taught as "Mendeleev's Table". That's a political stance: crediting "Us" as much as possible for every development rather than "Them".
Political bias in ostensibly apolitical historic storytelling, is not quite the same thing as historic storytelling from an explicitly political angle.
You may say the history of some niche topic isn't political, but it is and I am pretty sure most historians would agree. E.g. if you look at technological inventions you just have to look how that history treated prior or parallel inventions by people who were seen as lesser by those who wrote the history books, that means women, people of non-european cultural and ethnic decent.
Don't get me wrong: There should be no reason at all to make technological history political, but in practise it is, was and will be made political, either subconsciously or on purpose. Even a good historian can't separate themselves from their own blind spots or darlings — and those colour their selections. And whenever you have to make selections you get political no matter how hard you try not to.
Try to talk to a certain class of people a about whether Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first thing deserving to be called a computer program — this should be a matter of facts, but you may quickly find yourself in a heated debate lead by people who have no clue what the logical flow of that program entails.
Every history is political because telling a story about the past that isn't commonly told is political and not telling a story about the past that should be told is political as well. And both constantly happen, regardless of which subsection of history we look at.
Which of these histories do not reflect any ideology, any regimes, any political settings, are expressed in a universal language, &c.?
>No, history is not always political. Political history is political, but there are other kinds of histories.
No, history of any kind is always political.
Why? Simple: History is written by the victors.
History is written by the survivors and descendants. Not all those who are vanquished are so completely eradicated that they don't have descendants; and even in those unfortunate cases, someone unrelated to them will dig up and reconstruct their story as best as possible, and tell it to the world. Some of the loudest voices are from the descendants of those who had been trampled.
Not all kinds of victories are political. Transistors over vacuum tubes: is that a political victory? Or just a matter of the former not being easy to shrink to microscopic sizes, or operate without high voltages and waste heat.
Just the concept of "history" depends on a shared objective reality, which is under attack in 2024 more than any other time.
Thermodynamics. Politics is about the struggle to control the flow of energy between organisms. History is about creating narratives of that struggle, in order to learn to tap the flow or to direct it. To a first approximation, a history that's disinterested in politics is like a football game commentary that's disinterested in the score.
I realize this is largely a lost battle but strictly speaking "disinterested" means no interest in the sense of "conflict of interest." A disinterested party has no "interest" in one outcome over another and can therefore be trusted to be impartial in the matter. "Uninterested" means what you wrote, they are not interested in something in the more everyday sense of the word. Not everyone thinks it matters but the two words do have distinct meanings, and in some situations (like in conversations about values, politics, etc) it is actually worthwhile to be precise so that one does not inadvertently mislead the reader.
Merriam Webster agrees with you for word sense 1a, but with me for word sense 1b. So you win and I agree that uninterested is a better choice here.