Sad news out of Britain this morning of the passing of the great historian Paul Johnson at the age of 94. He was one of my models (along with the Hungarian historian John Lukacs) of how to write history—a style I have described as the “analytical narrative.” I once got to ask Johnson if he accepted that label for his style of work, and he readily embraced it, acknowledging that he had never thought of if that way.
His greatest or certainly most successful book was Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, published in 1983. One of the later chapters in the book is called “America’s Suicide Attempt,” covering our mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we’re attempting suicide again just now. His final chapter detected what he thought were signs of hope, such as the turning away from socialism under the leadership of Reagan and Thatcher. The “cult of the state” was broken, he thought, though this passage resonates today:
What was not clear was whether the fall from grace of the state would likewise discredit its agents, the activist politicians, whose phenomenal rise in numbers and authority was the most important human development of modern times. As we have noted, by the turn of the century politics was replacing religion as the chief form of zealotry. To the archetypes of the new class, such as Lenin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung, politics—by which they meant the engineering of society for lofty purposes—was the one legitimate form of moral activity, the only sure means of improving humanity. This view, which would have struck an earlier age as fantastic, become to some extent the orthodoxy everywhere: diluted in the West, in virulent form behind the Iron Curtain and in the Third World. At the democratic end of the spectrum, the political zealot offered New Deals, Great Societies and Welfare States; at the totalitarian end, cultural revolutions: always and everywhere, Plans. They marched across the decades and the hemispheres: mountebanks, charismatics, exaltes, secular saints, mass murderers, united by their belief that politics was the cure for human ills. . .
By the 1980s, the new ruling class was still, by and large, in charge; but no longer so confident.
Alas, the ruling class was not fully discredited, and has its (unjustified) confidence back. Its activism and pretension are now much less muted than when Johnson wrote. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that dissident Chinese liberals look at the cultural revolution under way in America right now and remark how much it reminds them of the tyranny of Mao’s time.
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