I just finished rereading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, for the first time since the 1980s, and I recommend it strongly to anyone who’s never tried it. The recreation of mediaeval culture and atmosphere is as lovingly detailed as I remember it, but what comes through more strongly a quarter-century later is that the story is an account of the birth of modernity. The ideas at the heart of the book are in this regard more relevant today than they were in 1980, when the book was first published. Then, the world was entering the climactic phase of the extramural conflict known as the Cold War; now, the chief struggle is a domestic one within the bosom of the West, between power groups with different ideas about the proper ordering of society.

For most of Eco’s book, Pope John XXII’s court at Avignon is depicted in the harshest terms – it was rife with all kinds of evil, corruption, and scandal. The book’s hero is an aide to the Emperor, who represents the other side of this struggle – a side that wins major victories, only to show itself, too, full of violence, corruption, and infamy. The book’s historical account leaves the result undecided, but, on a parallel track, its philosophical discussions have made clear that there will be a much longer-term movement toward the recognition that the “simple” people have wisdom, and therefore deserve to rise to power, once all authorities have been justly overthrown. I can’t help seeing in this a reflection of our current political situation: Two years ago, public disgust with George W. Bush and the Republicans was so intense that virtually any Democrat could win. Then Obama and his Democrats took a firm grip on power, and proceeded to alienate everyone with a combination of ideological overreach and sheer blundering fecklessness. The result — not centuries later, as in the process Eco described, but within less than a year — was the rise of a massive populist movement even angrier at Obama than the American people had been at Bush.

At the time of Eco’s story, the early 14th century, the failure of the elites — of the potentates of Church on one side and State on the other — was occasioning intellectual ferment. Without this ferment, there would not have been, two centuries later, the Reformation; without the Reformation, it’s hard to envision the eventual rise of the broad-based franchise in the 19th century. From the discussions of the thinkers of Eco’s 1327, then, we can trace a more or less zigzagging line that takes us all the way to Palin, Beck, and the Tea Parties. Populism can, it is true, sometimes have a savage face, and great atrocities have been committed in its name, so it must be looked at skeptically (as, for that matter, must any other political movement). But Eco’s book reminds us that this sort of revolt against authority has deep roots in Western history, roots that we should honor for their role in making possible the positive achievements of the West.