RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new biography explores the long-running rivalry between the Federalist chief justice John Marshall and his Democratic–Republican second cousin, President Thomas Jefferson.

In the American republic’s early days, a seat on the United States Supreme Court was not the coveted plum that it is today. The first three chief justices each served for an average of less than four years, and associate justices were also likely to leave the Court while still in the prime of their working lives. The reason? The Court had limited jurisdiction, heard few cases, and did not pay particularly well. For a talented lawyer, private practice or political office was usually preferable to a judicial backwater convened in an unused committee room in the basement of the Capitol.

In Without Precedent, law professor Joel Richard Paul tells the story of John Marshall, the man who changed all that. Appointed to the court by the last Federalist president in the waning days of his administration, Marshall was seated at a time of his Jeffersonian opponents’ ascendance. He would spend the next 34 years leading a Court that became much closer to a co-equal branch of government than any of the Founders had anticipated. In doing so, Marshall imposed a Federalist vision on often-reluctant Democratic–Republican political branches, cementing his own vision of what the United States should become: one nation, rather than a confederation of disparate sovereignties.

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Paul frames his story as a long-running battle between Marshall and Thomas Jefferson. Both men were Virginians of the founding generation, and both were great-grandsons of William Randolph I, but there the similarities end. While Jefferson grew up rich, surrounded by slaves and powerful family members, Marshall grew up on the frontier, one of 15 children of a father who was a poor farmer, rather than a planter. (Marshall would also come to own slaves, which Paul attempts, without much success, to downplay in comparing him to Jefferson.)

Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”

Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”

President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”

The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”

But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Victorian age, if we knew it and its ideas better, would help us understand our own world, as the debates of that era remain the essence of today’s political discussions. In her major works and invaluable essays, Himmelfarb brings the Victorians back to life.

Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Post-Modernists
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Encounter Books, 2017, 256 pages, US$23.99
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That the past lectures us on the present is one of the reasons we read history. Such lectures are often merely whispers, and coded in a language very few of us speak. This is why historians are indispensable translators.

Past and Present presents some of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s (left) shorter and apparently minor essays. The present the title refers to is contemporary America as it has been shaped by political battles in the last fifty years—a period Himmelfarb has witnessed first hand. The past of the title is mainly, though not exclusively, Victorian England, of which Himmelfarb is a foremost historian. Now Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she is a scholar’s scholar. Her bibliography includes works on Lord Acton and Mill, and seminal editorship of the latter too; explorations of the “Victorian mind”; and a genuine classic, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959). Few historians of ideas have dug deeper in the British nineteenth century, and fewer still have done so from a conservative perspective. Himmelfarb, who married Irving Kristol, often considered the “godfather” of neoconservatism, by and large shared her husband’s views.

Himmelfarb’s conservatism can better be considered a style of arguing, rather than a consistent set of political ideas. Postmodernists have long been ruminating about the subjectivity of historians, making a theory of “a denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective truth about the past”. Surely any work of history is vulnerable because historical records may be imperfect or imperfectly read by the historian, who is as fallible, conceited and biased as any other human being. But, Himmelfarb maintains, there is no reason to think history “is fatally flawed, that because there is no absolute, total, final truth, there are no relative, partial, contingent truths”.

The craft of the historian entails a struggle with her own subjectivity, a careful search for bits of truths whenever possible, a passion for making sense of them with the best of our analytical tools. Sure, history can never do without imagination, for no historian can do without putting himself in other people’s shoes. Macaulay thought that:

A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.

Such a description fits Himmelfarb’s own works, where the inspired writer never shines at the expense of the careful researcher.