There is no doubt that Namier was particularly
doubtful of the value of ‘the liberal spirit’. His dislike of liberalism began
in adolescence; imbibed, along with pan-Slavism, from listening to his tutors
and reading Dostoyevsky. The great figures of the European liberal pantheon may
have been his family’s household gods, but he saw them and their ideology as gods who had failed the Slavs of central and
eastern Europe, while German liberalism had proved unable to withstand the
pathology of the German national character and had transmuted into the
Prussianised nationalism that would reach its apogee under the Nazis. The First
World War and its aftermath only confirmed his distrust of bien-pensant progressivism, exemplified in the League of Nations,
which he despised in spite of the fact that [his friend] ‘Baffy’ Dugdale worked
for it. The League was a creation of political ingenues, insulated from the
realities of European politics, who believed they could ‘cure humanity and lead
it into better ways. It was the expression of the morality and idealism of the
Anglo-Saxons, and of their ignorance of what it means to suffer of neighbors
and disputed borderlands.’ With his background, Namier understood that, as
George Orwell observed, ‘nationalism, religious bigotry and loyalty are far
more powerful forces than . . .sanity.’*
Namier was also impatient with silver-tongued orators like Charles James Fox,
who clouded their sordid intentions with rhetorical vapor. Fox ‘talked in a
grand manner’ and ostentatiously displayed ‘moral indignation . . .towards
other people’ while leading a life of debauchery. The harm done by
twentieth-century demagogues scarcely needs stating: ‘what shams and diseases
political ideologies are apt to be, we surely have had an opportunity to
learn.’ At the same time, Namier readily admitted the power of ideas to sway a
parliamentary audience. The ‘independent country gentlemen’ of the eighteenth
century had to be convinced by argument, and Namier fully appreciated that some
politicians, of whom Pitt the elder was a classic example, owed their influence
to the powers of persuasion rather than to battalions of parliamentary
dependents.
Namier’s own biography, especially his early life, was marked by a personal
commitment to ideals and ideologies: socialism, pan-Slavism, the libertarian
constitutionalism inherited by Americans from seventeenth-century England, and
eventually, and most enduringly, the precepts and aspirations of Zionism. How
could such a man come to believe that ideas did not matter in politics, however
skeptical he might be of liberal beliefs, and however much he disliked
mountebanks who duped the public and their elected representatives with bogus
appeals to principle?
The first thing to note is that Namier differentiated between levels of
argument: between debates over specific problems, and what he would have
considered the airy rehearsals of generalities. Under this latter heading would
come high-flown discussions about constitutional practice in terms of
prevailing notions of good government. Such commonplaces were generally
innocuous, though they could be dangerous when exploited by those wishing to do
mischief. This was the context of his notorious use of the term ‘flapdoodle.’ Neither could he see the point
of the historian spending time in examining closely the way such sentiments
were expressed. They were merely the ‘current cant’ of politics; the only
conceivable interest lay in examining their relationship to political reality.
In the same way that he was mystified by Butterfield’s interest in
historiography- historians should study what happened in the past, not their
predecessors’ generally mistaken notions of what happened – Namier was unable
to see the point of what we now call ‘the history of ideas’. Or rather, he did
not consider it to be the realm of the historian proper: the story of the
development of political philosophy was best left to political philosophers
like his friend Isaiah Berlin. ** Namier’s
overly candid confession of his own inability to comprehend Berlin’s work was
by no means disingenuous politeness, and although he was not the boor he claimed
to be, he did not regard himself as an intellectual: ‘I am not good at abstract
thought.’ When a BBC producer asked Namier to a series on the Third Programme
and sent him a copy of one of the other talks, by the philosopher Stuart
Hampshire on ‘Reason in politics’, he was nonplussed, describing Hampshire’s
discourse as being ‘in the clouds’. He wondered whether, ‘if there is to be
much of that kind in this series . . .you will want me as a bull in the china
shop.’ Namier fully recognized the importance of ideas, especially in political
life, but in a curious way as abstracted from human consciousness. In one late night
conversation with Baffy Dugdale he talked of ‘the curious separate life which Idea develops’:
It has to be born in the brain of a man,
but when it begins to grow in the minds of others, it becomes invested with
qualities of its own, derived, of course, from them, but beyond the control of
any one of them. They become in a way its servants, not its masters –must watch
for its reactions, and in away obey them.
For Namier the subject-matter of history was ‘human affairs, men in action,
things which have happened and how they happened; concrete events fixed in time
and space, and their grounding in the thoughts and feelings of men. It was a
view which became more deeply embedded the older he got, and the more enmeshed
he became in the work of the History of Parliament. In his own work Namier
encountered eighteenth-century constitutional principles primarily in the
context of private correspondence, diaries, and memoirs, or parliamentary
debates, as politicians justified their own actions, to themselves and each other,
and sought to persuade MP’s to follow them. The contemporary pamphlets which he
had studied so intensively in his first attempts at research were rarely cited
in his two great books, and figured even more fleetingly in his History of
Parliament. When he considered the expression of these grand ideas he concerned
himself not with the ideas themselves but with the way in which they were being
used. In examining any historical statement it was vital to take account of ‘context,
emphasis and circumstances. Ideas were instrumental; they expressed and in some
cases disguised motives rather than
constituting motives in themselves.
Character and motivation were what primarily interested Namier. His rejection
of principle was not, as it has often been described, mere cynicism. The analysis
was deeper and more systematic. By the time of his maturity he had cast aside
is juvenile belief in a crude economic determinism, whether advocated by Marx
or Chares Beard. Reports that he had once been influenced by Marx could be guaranteed
to infuriate him. Nonetheless, while he was able to recognize relatively early
in life that human beings were perfectly capable of thinking and acting against
their self-interest, he retained a vestigial deference towards calculations of
motive based on economic circumstances.
The other great influence on the young Namier was Freud, and this he never discarded.
When reading eighteenth-century letters he always paid close attention to uses
of language that were ‘psychologically’ or ‘psych-analytically’
significant. His character sketches of
the leading characters in the political conflicts of the 1760s were heavily
informed by Freudian psychology, always focusing on the gravitational effect of
family and childhood experience. The Freudianism was quite explicit: Namier
thought that the Duke of Newcastle suffered from ‘obsessional neurosis, and
made a similar ‘diagnosis’ of George III. These refreshingly modern
commentaries doubtless formed part of the book’s attractiveness when it first
appeared. At the time Namier was still being psycho-analyzed himself, and
although he stopped attending sessions when he married Julia, he did not relinquish
his belief in the importance of thee workings of the subconscious, and in
particular on the powerful and enduring impact of a tortured upbringing, to
which he gave full rein in his public lectures on George III and Charles
Townshend. ‘History has . . . a psycho-analytic function,’ he wrote in an essay
in 1952, adding sharply that ‘it further resembles psycho-analysis in being
better able to diagnose than to cure.’
*‘The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions – racial pride,
leader-worship, religious belief, love f war – which liberal intellectuals mechanically
write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely
in themselves as to have lost all power of action… [‘Wells, Hitler and the
World State’, Horizon, August 1941]
**’In all sincerity I admire you: how intelligent you must be to understand
all you write” he once wrote Berlin.
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