Parkinson’s Folly

Since Professor Parkinson says that he writes as a historian not as a satirist, we must take him at his word. At times it is a temptation not to, for the declared purpose of this book is to urge the United States to furnish military and economic aid tc the Soviet Government to protect Russia against China: Soviet Russia is the last bulwark of a decadent West, so in behalf of our whole civilization we must help Russia defend itself against the aggressive designs of a resurgent East headed by China.

This curious thesis that the East is resurgent and Russia our only defense against the Yellow Peril is ostensibly arrived at by inescapable reasoning from the historical facts of several millenia. In Professor Parkinson’s image of himself, he is just the trained engineer who correctly foresees the future operation of a new machine by scientific analysis of the past workings of an old one. Actually, his history is not up to the intellectual level of even the most ordinary engineering. He does not bother looking up the known facts in the professional literature. He does not employ anything resembling the rigidly defined units of action that make a limited prevision possible in the mechanical sciences. He does not define historical units and then examine all the action of those units whenever they have appeared in human history, which was, for instance, Toynbee’s intention.

LB

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Lawrence R. Brown

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Since Professor Parkinson says that he writes as a historian not as a satirist, we must take him at his word. At times it is a temptation not to, for the declared purpose of this book is to urge the United States to furnish military and economic aid tc the Soviet Government to protect Russia against China: Soviet Russia is the last bulwark of a decadent West, so in behalf of our whole civilization we must help Russia defend itself against the aggressive designs of a resurgent East headed by China.

This curious thesis that the East is resurgent and Russia our only defense against the Yellow Peril is ostensibly arrived at by inescapable reasoning from the historical facts of several millenia. In Professor Parkinson’s image of himself, he is just the trained engineer who correctly foresees the future operation of a new machine by scientific analysis of the past workings of an old one. Actually, his history is not up to the intellectual level of even the most ordinary engineering. He does not bother looking up the known facts in the professional literature. He does not employ anything resembling the rigidly defined units of action that make a limited prevision possible in the mechanical sciences. He does not define historical units and then examine all the action of those units whenever they have appeared in human history, which was, for instance, Toynbee’s intention.