To the Editors:
In the June issue of The New Criterion, Norman Cantor asserts that “[Lawrence] Stone was—and is—an English Marxist.” He goes on to imply that Lawrence Stone used his “extensive patronage powers” as director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University to promote Marxism.
I find those statements distressing. I have known Lawrence Stone for seventeen years and consider him an old-fashioned liberal. Although he is a great admirer of Tawney’s, he is not and never was a Marxist. He is indeed director of the Davis Center, but he does not rule over it with absolute or even partial sovereignty. A committee, of which I have twice been a member, makes every decision on the election of fellows and the selection of seminar topics. The history department approves those decisions and passes on the Center’s budget. And aside from its mode of operation, the Center has never favored Marxism or any of the other ideologies that Cantor names.
His way of calling names strikes me less as a defense of liberalism than as a revival of McCarthyism. It discredits him and the liberalism he purports to defend. I think he should make a public apology.
Robert Darnton
Department of History
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
Norman Cantor replies:
I did say that Stone was and is an English Marxist and I do not retract this statement. On the contrary, I confirm it.
Stone’s first publication, in 1948, was an article in support of a thesis propounded in 1940 by the famous Marxist historian, R. H. Tawney. This thesis attributed the cause of the English Civil War of the 1640s to class conflict, to the “rise of the [bourgeois] gentry.” Stone explicitly supported Tawney’s Marxist model: “Confronted with the rise of the gentry, merchants, and lawyers, a new class whose political aspirations and whose views on foreign policy differed fundamentally from those of the aristocracy, the hold of the latter upon the springs of political power were bound to be loosened.” Lest it be thought that this was a juvenile work that Stone later repudiated, we find him even in 1985 still insisting the Tawney class-conflict rise of the gentry thesis “to be largely true.” One of the amazing things about Stone’s career as a historian has been the remarkable consistency of his devotion to Tawney, the leading English Marxist scholar of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1965 Stone published a very long volume on the crisis of the English aristocracy in the seventeenth century. Here the Marxist model, tricked out with various social and cultural aspects, was repeated, except that the emphasis was now on the aristocracy falling to make way for the gentry. In a book I published in 1968—The English: A History of Politics and Society to 1760—I pointed out that this was essentially a variant of the same tired Marxist Tawney model of the origins of the English Civil War.
Stone makes his Marxist theory of history explicit early on in his book on the aristocracy. The historical infrastructure—“this bed-rock of history,” he calls it—is in characteristic Marxist fashion “changing means of production, changing economic relationships between one class and another, changing distribution of the national income.” Following Adorno, Gramsci, and the proponents of neo-Marxist critical theory of the 19 3 os, Stone goes on to tell us that the political and cultural superstructure is “equally significant.” But “God help the historian,” he warns, who fails to pay sufficient attention to the basic material and class infrastructure.
Stone’s 1977 opus—another very large book—was a history of the family in England from 1500 to 1800. In the family book and other recent work Stone is somewhat less dialectically Marxist than in his earlier publications. Like many Marxists in Britain and this country, he has sought to bask in the glowing reputation of Fernand Braudel and the French structuralist historians. Braudel’s structuralist history—uneasily balancing contradictory synchronic and diachronic views of the world—is a kind of Marxism with the Hegelian dialectic severely muted. Yet in Stone’s book on the English family, as in Braudel’s history of capitalism, the essential Marxist historiographical assumptions remain: the longitudinal study of institutional and status development shaped by class interests. This is the updated Marxism that Stone now peddles, while denying the Marxist label. It is not Leninism. But as far as academic history is concerned, it is a more subtle and poisonous Marxism than traditional Leninism. In peddling this Braudelian snake oil, Stone has been assisted by the social historian Natalie Zemon Davis, whom he personally recruited to join the Princeton department.
What exactly are the dogmas of this neo-Marxism that Stone advocates? They are readily apparent from his writings in the late Seventies and early Eighties.
1. There is a rejection of the narrative focus of traditional liberal historiography in favor of “an analytical, not a narrative arrangement . . . . The historian is obliged to adopt an analytical organization of the material.” By analytical organization, Stone means the divestment of humanistic concerns from historical writing, the obliteration of the liberal historian’s concern about what individual people actually did in real-time situations in the past, and the replacement of liberal historiography with abstracted and mechanistic structures. This attitude originated with Marx and Engels and is essential to neo-Marxist historiography.
The “first” concern for the historian, Stone claims, is “the material basis of human existence, the limitations imposed by demography, human geography and ecology (a particular interest of the French).” Indeed, this reductionist materialism is precisely the manner in which Braudel, in the Fifties and Sixties, established his alliance with the then-dominant Marxism at the University of Paris and legitimated a soft-core (but very present) neo-Marxist orthodoxy in French historiography. Stone goes down this neo-Marxist line all the way.
3. Stone expresses his contempt for those traditional liberal-conservative historians who have “concentrated most of their attention on kings and presidents, nobles and bishops, generals and politicians” (i.e., those who have had the audacity to write about what actually happened in history). Instead, he admires a group of recent leftist writers who have focused their attention on “the inarticulate masses.” This is the pure Marxist line in historiography. The masses are morally good and important, the leaders of government and society are bad and unimportant. And since the masses are inarticulate, the Marxist historian’s imagination is not limited by inconvenient factual material when he attributes extravagant virtue to them.
4. At the head of the list of Stone’s favorite historians—he tells us—are the American Eugene Genovese and the Englishmen E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm. These are well-known Marxist scholars: they might not even be designated soft-core, but may be more of the conventional Marxist variety. Indeed, Stone himself says, while praising Thompson vehemently, that “Mr. Thompson’s position seems to be a consistently neo-Marxist one.”
These quotations are all from a book published by Stone in 1981. Perhaps Professor Darnton has not read this book. As recently as 1977 we also find Stone quoting with strong approval Marx himself on the Industrial Revolution. In 1984, Stone’s Marxist orientation sharply persisted. In trying to answer the question what made England different from Continental Europe in the eighteenth century, Stone provides—as would any Marxist scholar—explanations drawn exclusively from class and social group behavior and status. He totally ignores the first explanation that would be given by a liberal or conservative historian—the difference in legal and constitutional principles and institutions, the primacy in England of common-law due process and parliamentary traditions as against Roman law and absolutist traditions on the Continent. Obviously, these liberal traditions mean nothing to Stone. After all, of what account are English law and constitutionalism, upon which the American Constitution is based, compared with the glories of the “inarticulate masses”?
May I suggest a reason why Darnton and Stone (I received a letter from Stone virtually identical to Darnton’s letter to The New Criterion) are so excited? The Princeton department is currently under a thick cloud.
Two years ago the department voted to give tenure to David Abraham, a young Marxist historian of the Weimar Republic accused of manufacturing evidence to demonstrate—in accordance with the Marxist model—the close association between German big business and the rising Hitler. Fortunately, Henry Turner at Yale and Gerald Feldman at Berkeley charged Abraham in time for the Princeton administration to veto Abraham’s tenure, to the shock and embarrassment of the Princeton History Department. At last December’s meeting of the American Historical Association, a member of the Princeton department was buttonholing AHA members on Abraham’s behalf, probably commissioned by his mentor Stone to do so. A scholar in West Germany has checked a representative sample of Abraham’s footnotes and concluded that the great majority are rife with error. Yet Stone and his associate Natalie Zemon Davis have both publicly avowed their support for Abraham. These arrogant people have no sense of shame.
Naturally, Darnton and Stone are frightened by my reference to Stone as a Marxist because, added to the Abraham scandal, this information, if widely disseminated, could harm the Princeton history department’s high prestige and its capacity to garner grants and recruit and place graduate students. All the more should the truth be known, that the Princeton history department, the best in the country in the 1950s, and then deeply committed to liberal traditions, has become in the Stone era a central school for indoctrination of the young in Marxist ideology as applied to historical scholarship. It is perhaps better that Marxism find its historiographical focus in the cultured Ivy League than in some dreadful, mean state college. But Stone and Darnton want to have it both ways—to be Ivy League haute bourgeoisie using their positions of affluence and power to promote leftist ideology while denying their leftist orientation. They want to drive to the barricades in their Ferraris.
It is principally Stone’s brand of “social history” that the resources of the Shelby Collum Davis Center have been used to promote. As an expert on the history of patronage, Stone is assuredly aware of the subtle ways in which patronage can be exercised. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that—it is done all the time in the academic world. What is unfortunate in this instance is that, though Shelby Collum Davis’s political views are far to the right of Marxism, the proceeds of his generous gift to his alma mater are being used to sustain an ideology that is the polar opposite of Mr. Davis’s own attitude.
What has happened to the Princeton history department is not unique on the American academic scene. The history department at New York University has similarly been taken over by the Marxists and their radical feminist allies. At Harvard, the art history department has fallen prey to T. J. Clarke, another English Marxist, and Marxists have assumed positions of power and influence in the law school. At SUNY-Binghamton, a major institute sympathetic to Marxism flourishes, supported by the long-suffering taxpayers of New York state. At Columbia, an apologist for the PLO holds the senior chair in the humanities. Marxism is fashionable these days. It is well known that the Yale English department is the center for structuralism and deconstruction—the ideological cognates of contemporary Marxism—in literary criticism. In many other major academic departments, the forces arrayed against humanism arc triumphant, often abetted—as at Rice and Duke—by timid or cynical university administrators. The peculiar thing about the Princeton situation is not the Marxist triumph in the history department, but that Stone and his associates persist in denying what they are. They continue to claim that night is day, and red is white.