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Since the 1950s the number of books and articles devoted to the philosophy of Hobbes has expanded so greatly that by now its quantity has become almost overwhelming and made him one of the most stu...

This essay deals with the relationship between the writer Proust and the work of the historian. It explains why Proust's great novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, should be of interest to historians and discusses his historical sensibility as a literary artist, his portrayal of French society and its changes during the era of the Third Republic up to the years after the first World War, and his observations on anti-Semitism and homosexuality in France at this period. The essay stresses the preoccupation with time and memory which Proust shares with the historian and discusses the points of contact and difference between the two in their view of memory and their efforts to recover and understand the past.

I. Since the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, when Pieter Bruegel ceased to be seen simply as the naive artist Pieter the Droll and Peasant Bruegel, chosen, as his first biographer Carel van Mander said, "from among the peasants" to be "the delineator of peasants,"1 he has been generally ranked among the foremost artists of the Netherlands and northern Renaissance as well as one of the greatest of European painters. His oeuvre is broad, consisting of moral allegories and satires, panoramic landscapes, religious and biblical themes, and a variety of genre and secular scenes. Anyone who looks attentively at his forty-odd paintings, his drawings, and the prints made after the latter is likely to notice not only their strong formal structure and outstanding skill in organizing pictorial space, their command of the complex disposition of large masses of figures, and their masterly sureness and economy of figural draftsmanship in the depiction of human beings in every kind of posture and action, but also that many of them seem to be animated by some idea. Gazing at such engrossing and intensely vital images of human life and nature as his paintings of proverbs and children's games, festive peasants, the seasons, and religious subjects like the tower of Babel, Christ on the road to Calvary, and the triumph of death, the viewer is bound to recognize that the painter, in the words of Edward Snow, quoting Cezanne, was "a thinker in images."2 It is accordingly not a denial of his character as a profound and original observer of human behavior and the world around him that one cannot help wondering what attitudes, values, and particular philosophy underly his works. On this question, however, there has never been agreement. His monumental peasant scenes, for instance, like the Peasant Wedding Feast (see figure 1) and Peasant Dance in Vienna, which are among his most famous works known through thousands of reproductions, have elicited very divergent readings.' They have been variously perceived as comic and sympathetic representations of peasant life by a humane observer, as detached and accurate descriptions by an objective recorder, as graphic allegories of human folly, as visions of an organic community which is passing away, as products of a literary and pictorial genre of satirical commentaries on peasant crudity, gluttony, and lechery, and as an expression of the social condescension and moral superiority which humanist intellectuals and the dominant landed and urban classes of the painter's time are said to have felt toward peasants and popular culture. These differences and contradictions respecting his peasant paintings are merely an example of the more general problem of interpreting Bruegel which is repeatedly encountered in discussions of many of his compositions. There is no other sixteenthcentury artist whose works have been understood in such different and opposite ways.4 Bruegel's era was of course a period of great conflict and religious and political division caused by the advance of the Protestant Reformation and its conflict with the Catholic church. During his lifetime, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and anabaptism were spreading throughout the Netherlands and northern Europe despite censorship and persecution and many people of all classes under Catholic rule were changing their religious allegiance. In the years prior to his death in 1569 he also witnessed the growing manifestations of religio-political opposition followed by the outbreak of armed resistance and revolution in the Netherlands against the policies and government of its absentee sovereign, Philip II of Spain. Among the disputed issues in the understanding of Bruegel's work is how he reacted to these momentous events and whether they were reflected or alluded to in some of his compositions. In trying to answer such questions and to elucidate the meaning of various of his works, art historuns, beside examining his artistic inheritance, milieu, and imagery in relation to the productions of contemporary artists and predecessors, have also looked for clues to Bruegel's thought in the influences that might have shaped his outlook as result of his personal, social, and intellectual affiliations. …

Sixty-odd years ago the historical profession in the United States was confronted for the first time with the troubling specter of relativism in the form of a questioning of the possibility of objectivity in the investigation of the human past. The authors of this challenge to objectivity were two distinguished members of the profession, Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker, who promulgated their position in various essays and books during the 1930s and later. Both men took some of their arguments from philosophy and showed traces of the influence of European thinkers such as the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. Basically pragmatists in their outlook, they did not despair of historical knowledge or recommend any changes in historical practice. They simply maintained that no student of the past could escape the dominance of the practical problems of the present in determining his or her interests, values, and presuppositions, and that this relationship to the present made historians unable to achieve an objective approach to the past or to know it as it actually was. The extended debate provoked by their relativistic perspective persisted down through the 1950s and beyond before it finally faded away. In 1988 the entire controversy was retrospectively surveyed in Peter Novick’s excellent study, That Noble Dream. Novick himself held, as he stated in his introduction, that objectivity was not only a delusion but an essentially confused concept. It was thus quite paradoxical that some reviewersof his book praised it for its objectivity, thereby implying its self-refuting character in the manifest contradiction between its author’s practice as a historian and his professed disbelief in objectivity.1 Moreover, if we ask what effect the objectivity debate had upon historians, we see no sign that it shook their commitment to objectivity as an ideal. At the most it may have persuaded some of them that objectivity was not an easy goal and perhaps also induced them to become more conscious of their values and biases as inquirers. As Novick acknowledged, however, the historical profession as a whole continued to give allegiance to objectivity as a regulatory principle and to believe that some approximation to it was attainable.2 In taking this view, it seems to me that its members were implicitly recognizing a fundamental truth, namely, that objectivity, rightly understood and its limits grasped, was not a chimera, but an intrinsic aspect of historical reason which could not be abandoned as an aim or standard without also abandoning history itself as one of the foremost of the human and social sciences. In the aftermath of the objectivity debate has come postmodernism, whoseskeptical questioning and redefinition of history involves a much more radical form of relativism than was ever envisaged by Beard, Becker, and others of their persuasion. By now postmodernism has been with us for well over two decades and generated an extensive literature of exposition and controversy. Today anyone with a theoretical or philosophical interest in historiography, literary studies, or language knows all the cards in the postmodernist deck and how its theories have been applied to history. Possibly this leaves out the majority of professional historians who, as usual, appear to ignore theoretical issues and would prefer to be left undisturbed to get on with their work while no doubt hoping the postmodernist challenge will eventually go away.3 But among the historians who have taken part in the postmodernist debate or attach some importance to the philosophical and methodological foundations of their discipline, a variety of responses can be distinguished. There are some who evince great alarm at the incursions of postmodernism, considering the latter as a new kind of nihilism threatening the very existence of history as an intellectual discipline, and who tend to regard themselves as a beleaguered minority defending the citadel of reason against its hordes of enemies. This, one might not unfairly say, is the impression created by the treatment of postmodernism in writings like Keith Windschuttle’s recent polemic, The Killing of History, Geoffrey Elton’s Return to Essentials, and several of the essays on the subject by Gertrude Himmelfarb.4 Opposite to these are a small number of historians favorable to postmodernism, who embrace it as providing new and profoundly original insights into the nature of history which must decidedly affect historical practice. Among the exemplars of this point of view are the editors and most of the contributors to F. R. Ankersmit and Hans Kellner’s volume of essays bearing the revealing title A New Philosophy of History, and the recent books on postmodernism and historiography by David D. Roberts and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.5 Still other historians, while giving respectful and sympathetic consideration to postmodernist ideas or perhapsacknowledging certain contributions postmodernism has made to historiography, draw back or dissent from some of its extreme theoretical claims. Such is more or less the attitude expressed in essays by John Toews and Gabrielle Spiegel, in the collaborative work on the present condition of history by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, and in the dispassionate comments contained in Georg Iggers’s recent survey of twentieth-century historiography. In Defence of History, by the British scholar Richard J. Evans, is another instance of a work that, while generally very critical of postmodernism, nevertheless holds that it has benefited historiography in certain ways.6

The literature on Hobbes in English and other European languages has grown so large in the past two decades that it has become almost unmanageable by students of the philosopher. No one who is interested in Hobbes, however, can afford to overlook the two books that are reviewed here, the first, Quentin Skinner's study of the relationship of Hobbes to rhetoric, and the second, Noel Malcolm's edition ofHobbes's correspondence. Skinner is well known not only as a leading British Hobbes scholar and historian of early modem political thought but likewise for his ideas concerning the correct method of studying the history of political philosophy. In a view akin to R. G. Collingwood's he maintains that there are no permanent or perennial questions in political philosophy and that a historical approach based on a thorough comprehension of context is the only way to grasp what political philosophers are doing and saying when they write their texts. In implementing this prescription, he argues that to understand a historical text it is necessary to reconstruct its author's intentions and the meaning of his ideas by ascertaining the linguistic conventions and usages and the intellectual currents and background that form its context. He offers the present study both as an exemplification of this method and as a new interpretation of the principles of Hobbes's political philosophy which takes rhetoric as its focal theme. His aim, he tells us, is to situate Hobbes's theory and practice of civil science within its intellectual context and to depict the philosopher less as the author of a philosophical system than as a contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences within Renaissance culture. Our judgment of the success of his work will accordingly depend on whether or not we are satisfied that rhetoric possessed for Hobbes and his philosophy the crucial significance that Skinner claims for it.

The fullest development of the concept of religious toleration in the West occurred in Christian Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The emergence and establishment of religious pluralism in modern societies, and most notably in the Western world, has been very largely the result of the evolution and gradual victory of the principle of religious toleration on a variety of grounds. Among the world's great monotheistic religions, Christianity has been the most intolerant. Early Christianity was intolerant of Judaism, from which it had to separate itself, and of ancient paganism, whose suppression it demanded. The New Testament recognized heresy as a danger to religious truth and the Christian communities. Heresy entailed the existence of its opposite, orthodoxy, which meant right thinking and true belief. Following World War II, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 named freedom of religion, conscience, and thought as basic human rights.