Re: [Marxism] Gluckstein, Abraham, the Nazis and big business

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Bellesiles suffered a similar fate.  There are limits to what you can 
say in
academia, yet a creationist or someone who denies global warming can be safe.

On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 10:36:32AM -0500, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Ian wrote:
> >SWP (British) stalwart Donny Gluckstein's book 'Nazis, Capitalism and the
> >Working Class' (1999), from what I've heard, presents a theory similar to
> >that advanced by David Abraham in his earlier book 'The Collapse of the
> >Weimar Republic' (1981), namely that big business in essence placed the
> >Nazis in power. Abraham's thesis was comprehensively discredited, it
> >seems, by a range of historians (see Richard J. Evans - 'In Defence of
> >History', pp116-123 - Evans has some credibility not least because of his
> >pivotal role in utterly discrediting the neo-fascist historian David
> >Irving in the highly publicised trial, on highly rationalist grounds).
>
> Evans has a beef with Marxism and postmodernism apparently. I am not that
> familiar with his work, but a cursory look into Jstor is rather unsettling.
> In his article "German Women and the Triumph of Hitler" (The Journal of
> Modern History, Vol. 48, No. 1, Mar., 1976), Evans blames women for
> Hitler's victory rather than big business. (He argues that a collective
> crush on Hitler explains the rise of Nazism.) Myself, I'll stick with big
> business.
>
> I know Abraham's name from another tiff he was involved with:
>
> The Nation
> February 16, 1985
> BOOKS & THE ARTS.
>
> Footnotes to History
>
> JON WIENER
>
> Two senior historians, one at Yale University and one at the University of
> California, Berkeley, have devoted their time and professional reputations
> over the past year to destroying the career of a young Marxist historian,
> David Abraham, whose book, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (Princeton
> University Press), has been found to contain numerous errors. In the past,
> debates among scholars have occasionally been vicious, but the Abraham
> controversy is more than a debate: it's a vendetta, and it's unprecedented.
> Abraham's critics, led by Professors Henry A. Turner Jr. of Yale and Gerald
> A. Feldman of Berkeley, seek not just to expose Abraham's errors but also
> to make sure that he will never get another academic job and to persuade
> his publisher to withdraw his book; they've also argued that the University
> of Chicago should rescind his Ph.D.
>
> Lawrence Stone, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton, comments, "I've
> never seen a witch hunt like this in forty years in two countries." Natalie
> Zemon Davis, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton, has seen
> something like it before: "In some ways it's reminiscent of McCarthyite
> hysteria."
>
> These events reveal much about the position of Marxism in the history
> profession today, about the debate between old-fashioned positivists and
> interpretive historians on where historical truth lies, and about the
> current state of ethics in academia.
>
> In the course of researching and writing his book, Abraham misdated and
> misattributed one document, mistranslated another document in a way that
> distorted its meaning and treated a paraphrase of a third document as a
> quotation. He has also been accused of making dozens of lesser mistakes.
> Abraham has acknowledged his errors in print and has apologized for them.
> His critics, however, have not been satisfied. As historian Carl Schorske
> remarks, "They're not saying, 'Here's a serious error'; they're saying,
> 'Here's a lie, and I'll tell you why this guy lies.' " In accusing Abraham
> of fraud, his critics imply that he had to fabricate documents because his
> Marxist interpretation could not be sustained by the truth.
>
> Stone, whose major work is in the hotly contested field of
> seventeenth-century English social history, disputes Feldman's claim that
> good historians do not make mistakes, especially in their archival
> research. "When you work in the archives," he says, "you're far from home,
> you're bored, you're in a hurry, you're scribbling like crazy. You're bound
> to make mistakes. I don't believe any scholar in the Western world has
> impeccable footnotes. Archival research is a special case of the general
> messiness of life."
>
> Indeed, there is ample evidence that David Abraham is not the single bad
> apple in a barrel of virtuous footnoters. The publishers of the great
> British historian Sir Lewis Namier planned a second edition of his masterly
> Structure of Politics at the Accession of George 3rd. When editors checked
> the footnotes, Stone says, "I was told they found endless, constant, minor
> errors." Recently Emmanuel Le Roy Ladune, France's most celebrated
> historian, has been criticized by the Vatican librarian for mistranslations
> and other errors in Montaillou.
>
> Perhaps Abraham's mistakes are more serious than those made by other
> archival researchers? "I can't think of another case in which an author's
> footnotes have been systematically checked in the archives," Stone says.
> "David's errors seem at the moment to be worse than others', but we can't
> be sure because nobody else's have been subjected to this kind of
> systematic scrutiny." Feldman and Turner disagree; each reports that his
> own work has been checked and upheld.
>
> The campaign against Abraham was begun by Turner, a bitter opponent of
> Marxist history who had been working for years on a defense of German
> businessmen in the period immediately preceding the rise of Hitler. Turner
> became furious after hearing Abraham's work praised at a March 1983
> colloquium on Weimar history at Harvard University. He wrote a letter
> attacking the book and
>
> sent it, along with photocopies of original documents that he said Abraham
> had misquoted, to colleagues in the United States and West Germany. One of
> the recipients, Arno Mayer, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at
> Princeton University, wrote Turner protesting his private campaign against
> Abraham. Feldman, the author of Iron and Steel in the German Inflation,
> 1916-1923, who had read Abraham's manuscript and recommended it for
> publication, sided with Turner.
>
> Turner went public with his campaign against Abraham in the October 1983
> issue of the American Historical Review. In a letter alleging that Abraham
> had forged a document showing business support for Hitler in the last days
> of Weimar, Turner reminded his colleagues that forgery was "among the
> gravest of scholarly offenses." It's hard to remember such a serious charge
> being made against another historian.
>
> Abraham then traveled to West Germany and found the document from which he
> had quoted. It had no signature and an imprecise date; he conceded in his
> American Historical Review response that his dating and attribution had
> been erroneous. Even those who agreed with Abraham's interpretation of
> Weimar felt that some of his research was sloppy and that his mistakes were
> not trivial. But there was a consensus that Abraham had successfully
> defended himself against the charge of forgery. Turner never apologized or
> offered a retraction for his allegations, and to many in the profession, he
> now looked like a man with an ax to grind: his own book had been pre-empted
> by a younger scholar whose Marxism he despised. At that point Turner ceded
> the front lines of the battle against Abraham to Feldman.
>
> (clip)
>
> Many younger scholars see the vendetta against Abraham as a consequence of
> his Marxism, but it's more complicated than that. If Abraham had written a
> Marxist study of Weimar that didn't discuss the role of businessmen, Henry
> Turner wouldn't have bothered to check his footnotes. If he had written a
> Marxist theoretical essay on the Weimar state that didn't present archival
> evidence, Turner wouldn't have been interested. What aroused Abraham's
> critics was his having placed his empirical research on the politics of big
> business within a framework of Marxist theory.
>
> Marxism is indeed an issue. The Nocken typescript distributed by Feldman
> alleges that Abraham follows the "official East German theory" of the rise
> of the Nazis by portraying industrialists as "mighty wirepullers" behind
> Hitler. (In fact, East German reviewers have attacked Abraham for
> "whitewashing the big bourgeoisie and its responsibility for barbarism and
> war.") Turner's new book, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler,
> published this month by Oxford University Press, concludes with a diatribe
> against Marxist historians. He doesn't distinguish between the neo-Marxists
> who may be found in American universities and Soviet or East German
> historians. All seek "to discredit and undermine societies with capitalist
> economies and to legitimize repressive anti-capitalist regimes." Feldman,
> on the other hand, denies that he opposes Abraham because he is a Marxist.
> He did recommend Abraham's book for publication, and in the past, he has
> directed dissertations by radical students.
>
> Abraham's critics have focused their outrage almost exclusively on his
> research concerning the relationship between big businessmen and Hitler. In
> doing so, they've missed the point of his book. It is not an analysis of
> the growth of Nazism but a structuralist study of the success and failure
> of capitalist democracy: of how German elites won popular support from
> socialist and Catholic organized labor, and how this accord failed in the
> face of the Depression.
>
> "The collapse of the Republic and the Nazi assumption of power were by no
> means the same," Abraham writes in his conclusion. "That no stable ruling
> bloc could be organized under a democratic form of state did not, of
> itself, indicate that a fascist solution, whatever its nature, would
> follow." The fact that he focuses his research on structures rather than
> individuals has been widely praised in reviews and was the basis for the
> Princeton history department's decision to hire and then promote him.
>
> The vituperative and wide-ranging attack on Abraham's book is, in fact,
> part of a larger debate between two kinds of historiansthose who seek to
> identify broad levels of causation and those who confine themselves to a
> chronicle of events. The former group includes Marxists as well as
> structuralists, members of the Annales school and practitioners of
> cliometrics, all of whom seek to identify general causes beyond the acts
> and motives of individuals. As for the latter group: "Their attitude,"
> Schorske says, "is that because their footnotes don't contain errors, their
> understanding of history is correct."
>
> The rise of different schools of historical interpretation signals the
> decline of a monolithic profession presided over by an establishment of
> "old boys." Twenty years ago, if the senior men at Yale and Berkeley said
> an assistant professor was no good, that would have been the end of the
> matter. The fact that three departments were interested in hiring Abraham
> last year, despite the opinion of two senior men, and that one actually
> voted to hire him, helps a little to explain Feldman's frenzy.
>
> Abraham wants Princeton University Press to publish a revised edition of
> his book in which he would correct the errors. Feldman argues there would
> be nothing left of the book; Schorske disagrees: "The defects in David's
> book are glaring and inexcusable, but they are remediable and without any
> substantial impact on the unfolding economic and political analysis. When
> all the errors are corrected, the argument will stand exactly; the
> historical configuration will not change; the interpretive logic of the
> book will be upheld."
>
> The Abraham controversy has recently been reported in The New York Times
> and in Time. Feldman says that people "admire my courage in pursuing this
> matter," and he is emboldened by this to call for a broadened effort to
> "clean up shop" in the history profession. Robert Tignor, chair of the
> Princeton history department, takes a different view of the consequences of
> the case's notoriety. He worries about its effect on young scholars: "The
> message is: Don't tread on the toes of established historians. Stay away
> from controversy. Don't take chances. The history profession is a sea full
> of sharks."
>
> It's also full of decent people who have come to Abraham's defense. As of
> this writing, he is again being considered for jobs at good colleges. Carl
> Schorske explains, "David Abraham is a guy who understands historical
> processes and has a subtle and refined interpretation. That's the reason
> why one wants to save him for the profession."
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
>
>
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--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

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