The Dartmouth Observer |
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Commentary on politics, history, culture, and literature by two Dartmouth graduates and their buddies
WHO WE ARE Chien Wen Kung graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004 and majored in History and English. He is currently a civil servant in Singapore. Someday, he hopes to pursue a PhD in History. John Stevenson graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005 with a BA in Government and War and Peace Studies. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He hopes to pursue a career in teaching and research. Kwame A. Holmes did not graduate from Dartmouth. However, after graduating from Florida A+M University in 2003, he began a doctorate in history at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign. Having moved to Chicago to write a dissertation on Black-Gay-Urban life in Washington D.C., he attached himself to the leg of John Stevenson and is thrilled to sporadically blog on the Dartmouth Observer. Feel free to email him comments, criticisms, spelling/grammar suggestions. BLOGS/WEBSITES WE READ The American Scene Arts & Letters Daily Agenda Gap Stephen Bainbridge Jack Balkin Becker and Posner Belgravia Dispatch Black Prof The Corner Demosthenes Daniel Drezner Five Rupees Free Dartmouth Galley Slaves Instapundit Mickey Kaus The Little Green Blog Left2Right Joe Malchow Josh Marshall OxBlog Bradford Plumer Political Theory Daily Info Andrew Samwick Right Reason Andrew Seal Andrew Sullivan Supreme Court Blog Tapped Tech Central Station UChicago Law Faculty Blog Volokh Conspiracy Washington Monthly Winds of Change Matthew Yglesias ARCHIVES BOOKS WE'RE READING CW's Books John's Books STUFF Site Feed    |
Sunday, January 02, 2005
America's Oldest Enemy? The American Conservative has a review of John J. Miller and Mark Molesky's Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship With France, which has been hailed in some conservative circles as a Really Good Book. Well, apparently not, as Columbia's Robert Paxton points out. It isn't just that Miller and Molesky are obviously out to "furnish maximum negative spin and place most blame on the French" by "portray[ing] French malevolence toward Americans as so uniform and unchanging over the centuries as to seem virtually genetic." On a more fundamental level, it appears that they've even fallen for the undergraduate practice of taking their primary source quotations from secondary sources -- which happen to be by like-minded journalists. That won't do, especially when you consider that Molesky is a history professor with a Harvard PhD. I see that the authors have responded to Bernard-Henri Levy's hysteric review accusing them of fascism and racism. But he's an easy target. Let them take on a real history professor like Paxton. An additional note: no one who writes about Rousseau and wants to be taken seriously should ever, ever accuse him, as Miller and Molesky do, of wanting "society razed to the ground before it could be built again." I'll point anyone who's interested in this topic to the Rousseau chapter in Jacques Barzun's Classic, Romantic, and Modern, which I re-read last week but don't have with me right now (I'll quote from it when I return home). Had the authors of Our Oldest Enemy bothered to read that little gem of a book, they might not have been so quick to accuse ol'Jean-Jacques of being directly responsible for the Terror. Given their general disregard for scholarly standards, probably not. |