Richard Evans, Simon Schama and the plight of the historical profession

“This is Britain’s Reichstag Fire decree moment.” This is the most memorable comment from a piece by Sir Richard Evans FBA published in Prospect, but it is not the sole ahistorical comparison in this updated version of a lecture delivered by the Gresham College Provost on 18 June. Another example: “In some circles the British Empire is being lauded, just as the supposedly glorious medieval German Empire was in the 1920s and early 1930s.”

We will all have different views about the country’s current position, but possibly what we should anticipate from professional historians is the judicious consideration of topics and the rational assessment of analogies and comparisons. Sir Richard is a former Cambridge Regius Professor and head of house, a Fellow of the British Academy, and so on. Well-connected, as well as professionally powerful, he is also a member of the same club as me, the Athenaeum; maybe I should be doubly careful.

You may find Evans’s arguments convincing, but to me, material of this low quality is a dire indication of the state of the profession and of its patronage network. I would not accept material like this from the most mediocre student.

This is an aspect of a more general problem. In part it can be seen as humorous, a virulent affliction of hyperbole irrationalis, one that is highly infectious and for which there is currently no known vaccination. Ludicrous comparisons can then be sought, as with Sir Simon Schama rolling out the case of Mussolini (“Duce Johnson”). While both men were indeed journalists,Johnson was never a socialist, as Mussolini was before he became a fascist. Nor do we live in the aftermath of a difficult war and disappointing peace.

Accuracy is not the point, however, for we are talking about a profession that does contain individual free thinkers, but relatively few of them. Indeed, the power bodies in the profession, institutions such as the Royal Historical Society, talk relentlessly of diversity, but rarely practice it. Instead, there is a very qualified diversity that posits an imaginary consensus within the academy and has no interest in those (usually on the centre-right) who disagree with their public pronouncements. And because these bodies have become dangerously one-dimensional in their intellectual make-up, it has become all too simple for them to comfort themselves that they are genuinely representational and speak for the profession as a whole.

They do not. But public dissentient voices are few and younger scholars are, whatever their own private convictions, wary of being “off-message” because that would pose risks to their funding. In a somewhat suffocating system of politically correct “relevance”, the funding system itself has been heavily compromised by the agenda-setters, the very people who control the purse-strings. This situation could be seen as analogous to Disraeli’s description of liberalism as a conspiracy against the manners and customs of the people.

Disraeli was a politician, but (in Opposition, at least) not paid by the state. Many commentators at present are paid directly (e.g. the BBC) or indirectly (via student loans) by the state or the public. The use by some of flashy, superficial comparisons underlines the political nature of much of the profession. The degree of engagement is presumably designed to demonstrate relevance; instead, it can be downright silly. The comparisons themselves are interesting. Schama, not noted as a specialist in modern Italian history, has been hysterically anti-Brexit from the outset, frothing on the BBC on the night of the referendum result. He has simply shown how little he understands modern British politics.

In his case, the farfetched analogy with Mussolini will serve only to rally a dedicated base of people already convinced of the rightness of their views. Drawing such analogies in this propagandist fashion does not educate or raise the level of public discourse. Indeed, it is generally greeted with a shrug of the shoulders by the public.

Evans is in a very different situation to Schama, as he is an acknowledged expert on Nazi Germany and Hitler’s rise to power. The comparison he thereby implies between modern Britain and Weimar Germany will therefore possibly be more troubling to those who are unaware of his strong political partisanship. The latter is certainly no crime, but the comparison he offers is flawed and made more troubling by the deliberate attempt to weaponise it politically by publication in a centre-left magazine. Prospect might help Evans in a quest for further recognition on the Left; but it is sad to see the prominence given elsewhere to his views, which rest on a fundamental misreading of the nature of modern British politics. There are also numerous differences between Britain today and Germany in 1933, including the rate of unemployment and recent defeat in a major war. It might suit Evans to see Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party as the alternative to a rampant fascist or Nazi populism, but that is not the case. Such an approach might serve Corbyn to direct attention away from his own anti-Semitism; again, that will convince few.

For a scholar, there are also interesting questions to consider in the form of the weakness of diachronic comparisons – those across time. Such comparisons have long been a staple of left-wing history, drawing on aspects of Marxist stadial theory: there were always feudal elements to spot; now there are always fascist ones. Separately, but also relevant, is the habit of using historical episodes as apparently clear reference points. Thus: Munich, Suez, Vietnam and Iraq for international relations, or, here, the Reichstag Fire.

There are many problems with this practice. The most obvious is the tendency to simplify episodes, to decontextualise them, and to rob them of internal development (for example, the French Revolution). Secondly, comes the often hilariously inappropriate, and frequently contradictory, nature of the application of analogies. Thus, “appeasement” is generally misunderstood (and somehow the US and, far more, Stalin get off largely scot-free), and then misapplied across time. It serves as an easy way to condemn. Who wishes to be called an appeaser — or a racist?

In practice, the use of such terms and analogies serves to crowd out debate. They are the classic tools of the demagogue: rallying the rabble and intimidating the worthy. We might all think of analogies, but why follow Evans and Schama into folly?