Books, Arts & Manners: Tuchman as Whig

The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman

Knopf, 447 pp., $18.95 A reading of The March of Folly prompted me to look again into Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 essay The Whig Interpretation of History. My recollections of it were confirmed. In several major characteristics, Barbara Tuchman corresponds to Butterfield’s depiction of the breed: a bent for “dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress”; an acceptance of Lord Acton’s aphorism about the corruptiveness of power, along with the implicit corollary of powerlessness as redemptive; a proclivity for overconstruing analogies between bygone epochs and the protean present; the “possession of a principle of exclusion” by which to facilitate omission of “the most troublesome elements” in the puzzles of cause and effect, and thus to clear a way “to heavy and masterly historical judgments”; and so on. Mrs. Tuchman takes the judgment of history to mean judgment by historians, and in the role of judge she tends to throw the book. Sometimes her severity moves me to venture a mitigating word for the accused.

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Charles Burton Marshall

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The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman

Knopf, 447 pp., $18.95 A reading of The March of Folly prompted me to look again into Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 essay The Whig Interpretation of History. My recollections of it were confirmed. In several major characteristics, Barbara Tuchman corresponds to Butterfield’s depiction of the breed: a bent for “dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress”; an acceptance of Lord Acton’s aphorism about the corruptiveness of power, along with the implicit corollary of powerlessness as redemptive; a proclivity for overconstruing analogies between bygone epochs and the protean present; the “possession of a principle of exclusion” by which to facilitate omission of “the most troublesome elements” in the puzzles of cause and effect, and thus to clear a way “to heavy and masterly historical judgments”; and so on. Mrs. Tuchman takes the judgment of history to mean judgment by historians, and in the role of judge she tends to throw the book. Sometimes her severity moves me to venture a mitigating word for the accused.