Fate and freedom in history: the two worlds of Eric Foner

National Interest, The, Fall, 2002 by John Patrick Diggins

One thinks (yet again) of Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog and fox. As we know, the "hedgehog" is the monist who sees only one big thing and relates everything else to it, whereas the "fox" is the pluralist who pursues different ends and entertains a variety of thoughts without concern for philosophical foundations. The hedgehog presumes to understand both the movement and the meaning of history, but is often untutored in or unconcerned about practical matters. The fox confesses perplexity in the face of history's inscrutable ways, but accepts the responsibility of coping with events. In American terms, hedgehogs tend to be ideologues, foxes pragmatists. At the height of the Cold War, European intellectuals were presumed to be ideological and American intellectuals pragmatic. Today it often seems the other way around, at least in certain sections of historiography. Consider in that light the careers of Francois Furet and Eric Foner.

French Fox, American Hedgehog

FURET HAD been a member of the French Communist Party from 1948 to 1956, when he broke away in protest of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In his career as a historian, he came to realize that his attraction to communism flowed from his personal need for protective illusions. "A great deal of intelligence", he quotes Saul Bellow's epigram, "can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusions is deep." No one had to tell Furet that the personal is the political: "The question I am trying to understand today is therefore inseparable from my own existence." (1)

Furet became a leading authority on the French Revolution and, hard into its details like a fox, could not help but illuminate its practical lessons for contemporary scholars and intellectuals. In Penser la Revolution francaise and elsewhere, he observed French radicals operating under the perilous illusion that they spoke for and represented the will of the people--the very thing John Adams keyed upon in his critique of Rousseau's idea of the general will." When the Revolution turned toward terror in the 1790s, the competition for control of committees became vital, and those who could manipulate discourse and dominate language, like Robespierre, rose to the top. The Jacobin faction succeeded temporarily not because it was democratic but because it was linguistically adept, and hence sought "to radicalize the Revolution by making it consistent with its discourse." (2)

Furet's description of France almost succumbing to the most persuasive and devious writers and orators bodes ill for counties willing to trust their future to frustrated intellectuals, particularly those with a will to political correctness. In France the Jacobins fell; in Russia, however, they triumphed, and Furet's The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, offers a comprehensive study of the course of the Bolshevik Revolution in different epochs, and of the illusions held by intellectuals in various countries in each of those epochs.

Few Europeans, Furet notes, had any real idea of what was going on in Russia; there was no equivalent, for example, of New York's Partisan Review. After World War II, French communists could barely stand the thought that their country had been liberated by America, Furet notes, as he describes how the French Left depicted the hopelessly "bourgeois" United States carrying the seeds of "fascism" and "totalitarianism." All along, the Bolsheviks disdained everything the United States stood for although such views had to be played down during the period of the Popular Front and the U.S.-Soviet alliance of World War II. Later, however, after he broke with communism, Furet came to see the United States as a "role model", a country whose religion nourished capitalism and liberal individualism. He became an admirer of Tocqueville, the first Frenchman to see America's promise and the vision of the future it could offer. In his last few years (he died in 1997), Furet had become something of a cultural hero on French tel evision. Adults of his generation, as well as young students and academics, were shocked to find that they had been misled by their elders about Russia, particularly by writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who denied the terrors of Stalinism and the existence of slave labor camps. Furet helped them see that what they had been taught about Russia was worse than an illusion; it was a lie. (3)