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Reviews of Books
raphy (with itself?), so that the theory has little effect
on the practice of and thinking about history writing.
The book has sections on postmodernism and is mostly
concerned with social history, but neither of these
modes of thinking seems to have had any effect on how
Iggers conceived or wrote his own study.
The first part of Iggers's book is concerned with
what he calls "classical historicism," by which he means
a perspective on the world that sawall meaning being
revealed by change over time. Historians were to
discover and disseminate meaning and orientation, but
they were often torn between their obligation to the
truth and their positions in politicized societies. Moreover, the move toward rationality that gradually swept
through historiography undermined the mission of
communicating essential meaning. The social sciences
that would assimilate history were concerned with
piecemeal explanations, not an explicit articulation of
the Truth with a capital T. Despite the wealth of
philosophical and historical literature to the contrary,
Iggers seems to see classical historicism as undermined
more by the development of the scientific side of
historiography than by the destruction of the ideal of
progress and faith in meaning brought about in the
West by modernization, colonialism, and the crises
that preceded and followed World War I.
The second part of Iggers's book is concerned with
social history, or what the author calls the challenge of
the social sciences. In this regard he focuses on the
Annales school, German historical social science, and
Marxist social science. Each chapter gives a brief
account of some of the key players and their texts. The
move away from single defining individuals and institutions is a common theme, and the development of
quantification (and then the backing away from it) is
mentioned several times. "The computer" comes up as
something that historians have used, but how they used
it and what statistical models were important for these
schools is given no attention. Although the title of this
section is "the challenge of the social sciences," the
emphases on particularity and cultural meaning
emerge as vehicles that eventually undermine the
paradigms of systematic rationality at the base of social
science most generally.
Curiously, Iggers begins his section on the "postmodern challenge" not with Michel Foucault or Hayden White but with Lawrence Stone's essay on the
return of narrative (Past and Present 85 [1979)). Iggers
rightly turns to microhistory as an arena wherein social
science is both used and abused, but he fails to address
the extraordinary tension between the empiricism of
Carlo Ginzburg, Robert Darnton, or Natalie Zemon
Davis and the narrative force that has legitimated their
empirical work as historically significant. This is especially unfortunate, because that tension might have
been compared to parallel developments in romantic
historiography of the nineteenth century or with recent
changes in anthropology and literary criticism.
Iggers is surely right to notice that the interest in the
past has only grown more pronounced in the last
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
decades. This interest is not confined to, nor seriously
represented by, historiography. One wishes that Iggers
had said something about the desire for the past that
history writing tries to satisfy (as Stephen Bann has
done for the nineteenth century) and to which many
other forms of expression are responding. In this last
decade of the century, across the humanities and even
in some of the social sciences, it is once again seen as
a great weakness not to be historical (enough). And in
the more public arena, the movements for cultural
heritage, identity, and collective memory bespeak an
important investment in the past. Unfortunately, this is
not part of Iggers's subject, and he does not attempt to
situate recent trends in historiography in relation to
these crucial changes in how people attempt to make
sense of the past.
In the end, Iggers is thankful for all the contemporary trends: social history, semiotics, anthropology,
even deconstruction; they can all be part of the
dialogue of historiography as representatives of what
he calls a "chastened Enlightenment." So, historiography survives scientific critiques and the challenge of
the linguistic turn by simply sticking to its guns and
borrowing ammunition from those who would try to be
its enemies. This old maneuver is used too quickly to
be compelling. The book as a whole reads like a good
annotated bibliography, punctuated by assertions of
the author's views on science, narrative, and the
Enlightenment. If you agreed with those views before
starting to read, or want your students to become
acquainted with some of the important books and
journals in European history since World War II, then
you will enjoy the "dialogue" that Iggers creates and
describes.
MICHAEL S. ROTH
Getty Research Institute
BULLITT LOWRY. Armistice 1918. Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press. 1996. Pp. xv, 245. $35.00.
The five armistices signed in the autumn of 1918
between the victorious and vanquished powers in the
Great War shaped the political, social, and economic
future of Europe for decades to come. Although he
touches briefly on the negotiations that removed Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey from the war,
Bullitt Lowry focuses his attention on the tortuous
diplomacy that eventually produced the armistice with
Germany that was signed in the famous railway car in
the forest of Cornpiegne. Anticipating the complaint
that these events have already been exhaustively
treated in previous studies, Lowry correctly observes
that his predecessors-Frederick Maurice, Harry R.
Rudin, C. N. Barclay, Pierre Renouvin, Gordon
Brook-Shepherd, and Stanley Weintraub-either
lacked access to, or failed to exploit, the full panoply of
archival sources in the United States, Great Britain,
and France that he has mined. This work, although it
appears almost eighty years after the historical events
that it addresses, qualifies as the first study of the
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General
armistice terminating World War I that is based on
government records and private papers from the three
principal powers that won the war.
Several prominent themes emerge from this carefully researched, lucidly written narrative. One is the
depth of the irritation felt by the European leaders at
the presumptuousness of President Woodrow Wilson
in conducting bilateral negotiations with the German
government after receiving from it, on October 5, a
proposal for an armistice based on his imprecise set of
war aims popularly known as the "Fourteen Points."
Another theme is the skill with which Colonel Edward
House, Wilson's man-on-the-spot at the Supreme War
Council in Paris, conspired with French Premier
Georges Clemenceau and British Prime Minister
David Lloyd George to bamboozle his ingenuous chief
in Washington. Lowry recounts how House solemnly
assured Wilson that his airy principles for a just and
lasting peace had been enshrined in the Allied Powers'
armistice proposal when they had, in fact, been virtually ignored throughout the negotiations by statesmen
intent on pursuing what they deemed to be their
nations' vital interests.
Lowry also emphasizes the commanding influence of
Marshal Ferdinand Foch in the drafting of the military
clauses of the armistice terms. Once Clemenceau had
established his supremacy by blocking Foch's bid for
an independent role in the negotiations, the French
premier consoled the sulking marshal by throwing his
weight behind Foch's draft proposal (which was to
serve as the basis of discussion in the Supreme War
Council). Neither Lloyd George, Clemenceau, House,
nor any of the Allied military representatives succeeded in modifying to any significant degree the
original Foch draft. Even the fifth clause, stipulating
German evacuation and Allied occupation of the left
bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads on the right
bank opposite Cologne, Mainz, and Koblenz, survived,
despite Lloyd George's and Wilson's skepticism. Lowry's suggestion that House may have supported the
French position on the Rhineland in exchange for
Clemenceau's acceptance of the Fourteen Points (p.
91) remains a tantalizing if unsubstantiated conjecture.
In any case, the long, acrimonious imbroglio over the
Rhineland at the peace conference and after may be
traced to this arrangement that was improvised during
the two weeks before the armistice.
Lowry's final evaluation of the armistice of 1918 is a
positive one. Its provisions had little to do with the
Fourteen Points, but those Wilsonian precepts were so
vague and subject to interpretation that the European
leaders could easily pay lip service to them while
pursuing their particular national interests. On the
other hand, it fell far short of an unconditional surrender: Even Foch rejected the possibility of a fullscale invasion of Germany and the occupation of all
German territory if an acceptable armistice arrangement could be achieved without further bloodletting.
None of the Allied statesmen and military leaders
expected the Germans to accept the stringent condi-
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1223
tions that they were offered in the railroad car, and all
assumed that the war would drag on into 1919. What
they failed to appreciate was the extent to which the
political and social order of Germany was disintegrating into mutiny and revolution even as they drafted
their terms, compelling representatives of the new
German republic to accept whatever was offered.
WILLIAM R. KEYLOR
Boston University
KEVIN McDERMOTT and JEREMY AGNEW. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin
to Stalin. New York: St. Martin's. 1997. Pp. xxv, 304.
$49.95.
There seems to be little room for the history of lost
causes and dead empires, but Kevin McDermott and
Jeremy Agnew have defied the market conventions
and written an excellent short survey of the history of
the Communist International, focusing chiefly on its
activities in Western Europe. They also bravely and
convincingly describe the reasons for such an undertaking in their introduction. The authors see the
Comintern, or at least "the spectre of communism," as
a significant force in the history of the world in the
1920s and 1930s, and they point out that the authors of
older, standard studies of the Comintern, such as E. H.
Carr, had no access to the archives. They say that there
is no one-volume history of the Comintern, although
they fail to mention the two books by Franz Borkenau
that served that purpose in the 1950s and 1960s. In any
case, their volume is shorter and more scholarly than
Borkenau's The Communist International (1938) and
European Communism (1953).
McDermott and Agnew are quite right that, in its
day, the Communist International struck fear into the
hearts of many Western leaders and hope into the
hearts of many of the poor and downtrodden around
the world. With the wisdom of hindsight, both the fears
and the hopes seem misplaced today. Certainly, at the
time of its demise in 1943, the Communist International had become a weak and irrelevant arm of Joseph
Stalin's Soviet government. Even Stalin, according to
many sources, had nothing but contempt for its agents.
The death of the Soviet Union itself would seem to
make the Com intern more of a dead end in history.
But there may be much to learn from failed institutions
or the ways in which perceptions of them influenced
world history. In their pithy survey of the Comintern's
history, McDermott and Agnew make a strong and
appealing case for a return to the subject. They adorn
their work with a few juicy snippets from the newly
opened Com intern archives and the work of revisionist
Russian scholars such as F. I. Firsov and A. Iu. Vatlin,
who have been excavating among the fifty-three million pages therein.
The intended audience for this short and snappy
book are college undergraduates, and the authors do a
remarkable job in providing a coherent survey and
analysis of the rise and fall of the Comintern, which
OCTOBER 1998