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Reviews of Books
I military deaths are increased from a real 1,800,000 to
3 million (p. 121), and so on.
When the facts do not support the theses advanced,
they are altered out of ignorance or intent. JapaneseAmericans were "relocated" from the western counties
of Washington and Oregon but not the eastern counties; here they are moved out of the whole states (p.
190), perhaps because it would be difficult to convince
readers that the government had determined there was
a racial difference depending on county of residence.
The utterly hopeless discussion of strategic bombing
concludes with a picture of the German city of Wesel
whose caption attributes the destruction explicitly to
1000 American bombers and implicitly to the strategic
bombing offensive (p. 169). In reality, two hundred
British bombcrs dropped the bombs in immcdiatc
tactical support of the Rhine crossing of Field Marshal
Montgomery's 21st Army Group. Would it have been
better if the Allied forces had remained on the left
bank?
This brings up a fundamental issue that Markusen
and Kopf refuse to engage. In August 1944, as Allied
troops raced toward Paris, trains with French Jews
were regularly leaving the city for Auschwitz. The
defeat of the German air force in the February-March
strategic bombing offensive had made the invasion
possible; would it have been better, would fewer lives
have been lost, if the Allies had not crossed the
Channel and the trabs had kept running? The topics
dealt with in this book are serious ones and deserve
serious consideration, but this book is too flawed to fit
into that category.
GERHARD L. WEINBERG
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
URI BAR-JOSEPH. Intelligence Intervention in the Politics
of Democratic States: The United States, Israel, and
Britain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 392. Cloth $55.00, paper $18.95.
In this book, Uri Bar-Joseph proposes to assess why
intelligence agencies have intervened in the politics of
democratic states. After first reviewing the secondary
literature on both intelligence policy and civil-military
relations, Bar-Joseph discusses in detail four case
studies involving the United States, Israel, and Great
Britain: the role of CIA officials in the planning and
execution of the Bay of Pigs covert operation to
overthrow the Castro government in 1961; the role of
Israeli intelligence officers in the so-called Lavon
affair of 1954, wherein an untimely sabotage operation
involving the recruitment of Egyptian Jews subverted
Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharon's delicate negotiations with Egyptian officials; and the so-called
Henry Wilson affair of 1920 and Zinoviev Letter affair
of 1924, wherein information relating to Soviet subversive activities in England was leaked by British intelligence officials to the conservative British press. Based
on these four case studies, Bar-Joseph develops a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
model that attributes political intervention by intelligence agencies in democratic societies to the lack of
"professionalism at the bureaucratic level and the
effectiveness of the control system at the state level" (p.
2).
Bar-Joseph's ambitious attempt at model building
adds little to our understanding of intelligence policy
or to the factors contributing to intelligence intervention in politics. It is not simply that his four case
studies are unrepresentative or that he fails to compare cases of intervention with those when intervention was averted or not attempted. A far more serious
deficiency stems from the recognizably incomplete
documentation on which his sweeping and impressionistic conclusions are based. Bar-Joseph's account is
replete with thc qualifying phrascs "probable," "likely," "must have," and "could have." He concedes that
available documentation does not confirm that intelligence bureaucrats were solely responsible for these
four operations. Thus, although contending that Israeli
Colonel Benyamin Givli's personality had led him to
act without authority, he admits that this assessment
"involves the use of speculation and circumstantial
evidence no less than hard facts" (p. 244), adding that
Givli's personality "best explains the initiation of the
operation" (p. 153). Similarly, while concluding that
low-level British intelligence officials were solely responsible for leaks to the British press, Bar-Joseph
acknowledges that the "nature of the evidence makes
it very difficult" to assess responsibility and that his
conclusions are based on evidence that "is incomplete
and mainly circumstantial" (p. 256).
Classification restrictions and the interest of highlevel government officials in securing "deniability"
make it very difficult to document the level of authorization for intelligence operations. Had Bar-Joseph's
four case studics becn bascd on particularly complete
documentation, his proposed model could have served
as the basis for further research projects. Political
scientists are wont to impose order on complex and
chronologically distinctive events through seemingly
scientific models of decision making. This book is a
particularly egregious example of the questionable
value of this genre.
ATHAN THEOHARIS
Marquette University
CHARLES R. BAMBACH. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis
of Historicism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
1995. Pp. xii, 297. Cloth $42.50, paper $18.95.
Like historical happening itself, the haunted mansion
of German historicism has many rooms, and they are
arranged more like confounded Chinese boxes or
nested catacombs than adjoining chambers. The passageways seem to bring as much labyrinthine involution into perplexity as evolution toward perspicacity.
In recent years, a brave "new historicism" has been
enlisted into many academic disciplines, even though
there is hardly any agreement about what constituted
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General
the old historicism. Charles R. Bambach's suggestive
study of German "high historicism" illuminates this
still-spiraling process throughout its vertiginous ruptures as well as its subtle spectral shifts; it also engages
a whole array of issues agitating contemporary
thought. The reader accustomed to today's "culture
wars" about values, tradition, and dominant suppositions will find many of the main philosophical fronts
carefully elaborated in this work.
Bambach contends that there is a deep affinity
between historicism as an intellectual outlook and
modernity as a way of life: both call notions of
foundation, presupposition, and essence constantly
into question. We emerge with the compound paradox
of "fundamental anti-foundationalism" linked to "crisis" as the routine matter-of-course for modern life
and thought. Bambach furnishes a lucid guide to the
way German thought arrived at the predicament of
holding to a larger framework to make sense of
historical happening while at the same time disallowing any fixed foundations under it or ultimate ends
beyond it.
The book's arrangement effectively deploys its argument: after setting forth the larger cultural context of
German thought "between scientism and historicism,"
it provides cumulative, interwoven chapters on Wilhelm Windelband's taxonomy of the sciences, Heinrich
Rickert's epistemology of the historical knowledge,
Wilhelm Dilthey's critique of historical reason, and
Martin Heidegger's deconstructive critique of historicism itself. Bambach strikes a happy balance between
general insight and analytical detail.
There are real jewels of insight and thoughtful
exposition in this book. Bambach offers terse, probing
judgments concerning difficult theoretical issues-notably Dilthey's differences with neo-Kantian thought,
the tension between relativity and validity after this
crucial confrontation, the different forms of valuephilosophy, and the "return to metaphysics." Bambach
effectively expounds the wrenching antinomies of historicism, showing huw they l:arried uver into the dark
nimbus of post-World War I thought, wafting between
nihilism and eschatology. The origins of Heidegger's
radical "Destruktion" of Western tradition are comprehensively examined. Bambach makes judicious use
of recent scholarship, including the best interpretive
studies and recent primary source material published
in the ongoing collected works of Dilthey and Heidegger.
There are also some problems with this stimulating
book- more concerning tone than real substance. But
when foundations are being called into question at so
many turns of page and event, atmospheric "tone"
tends to take on a sort of substance of its own. Awash
in the torrent of spiritual crises and radical shifts, the
reader undergoes "crisis fatigue," reinforced by Bambach's admission that crisis "sold well" and had become something of a tired cliche even before World
War I. If modernity-or at least German modernity-is (was?) a condition of constant crisis, then a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
91
sober, crisis-schooled historicism might be led to ask,
"So what else is new?" What can qualify as new, even
as a genuinely new crisis, in an ever-shifting framework
bereft of normative, "normal," or otherwise traditional
notions? Bambach does not press the linkage of actual
historical "crisis" and "critical" historical thinking to a
convincing conclusion: admittedly, by his reading of
the trajectory of historicism, such a conclusion must
necessarily remain beyond reach, just as do any fixed
foundations. What were the real temporary/temporal
compass points defining this engrained and oddly
"routine" German tradition of crisis thinking, other
than its very fixation on crisis? Was the old historicism
simply the absurd exercise of "trying to hold onto the
waves amidst a shipwreck," as Heidegger's student,
Karl L6with, once defined it?
In his own version of the teleology of German
historicism, Bambach tends to slant the presentation
toward Heidegger's darkening and harkening utterances. In his quest for the ultimate and most radical
historical "revisionism" of re-thinking Being (including being human)-thereby converting human history
into temporalized ontology-Heidegger set up many
straw concepts, notably the caricature of historicism
itself as purblind "scientism" and smug "all-too-humanism" conspiring in the blindly anthropomorphic
project of the empty "will to will." Historicism was
"deconstructed" and execrated for furthering not
thoughtful reflection and awareness of "otherness" but
rather narcissistic self-indulgence.
Bambach rightly insists that German historicism
bore little resemblance to Karl Popper's rendition, but
in his own zeal tu harken tu Heidegger's even quirkier
version, the authur tuu often rehashes something quite
Popperesque in its linear teleology and oddly credulous "progressism." The sort of history (and historicism) that Friedrich Nietzsche and Heidegger attacked
was nut the historicism that Dilthey, Ernst Troeltsch,
and Max Weber defended. The anchorage of historicism in an open-eyed, "critical" humanism awake to
the limits of knowledge, will power, science, and
technology as well as keenly alert to the inhumane
dimensions of history gets somewhat side-lined in
Bambach's otherwise probing, fair-minded, and comprehensive work.
MICHAEL ERMARTH
Dartmouth College
M. C. LEMON. The Discipline of History and the History
of Thought. New York: Routledge. 1995. Pp. vi, 280.
$89.95.
This is a philosophical treatise on history that claims to
be based on actual historical practice. M. C. Lemon's
background is in political theory from Plato to Karl
Marx, which constitutes the primary source material
for the study. It is written in the style of British
ordinary-language philosophy (in the manner of J. L.
Austin and Quentin Skinner) and is relatively innocent
of continental philosophy of history. In consequence,
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1997