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Carl Becker Revisited: Irony and Progress in History

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In the following essay, Nelson sees Becker's irony as a response to the impossibility of entirely accepting or rejecting the idea of social progress.
SOURCE: "Carl Becker Revisited: Irony and Progress in History," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, April-June, 1987, pp. 307-23.

Carl Becker's lifelong commitment to ambiguity has not served to make him an influential figure among contemporary historians. It has, however, made him one of the more controversial figures within the Guild. Some historians commend him for this quality. They find his writing to be intentionally paradoxical, full of contraries and oppositions, overturned cliches and circular reasoning, designed to "add 'another dimension of thought' to the initiated" [Milton Klein, "Detachment and the Writing of American History: the Dilemma of Carl Becker" in Perspectives on Early American History, ed. Alden T. Vaughn and George A. Billias]. Others condemn him for slipping into logical fallacies, demonstrating a lack of respect for historical facts, and escaping from commitment into a disappointed liberal's pessimism, otherwise known as historical relativism. The sense of ambiguity that characterizes nearly all of Becker's work is far too sustained and consistent not to be deliberate, and given the subtlety of his thought, too transparent to be the product of simple evasion. Consequently, this clearest of writers remains the most enigmatic of historians. He has eluded categorization within the major historical schools because, as Gene Wise has shown, he was both a progressive and an anti-progressive, depending upon how he is viewed. Similarly, he was an anti-stylist who was nearly preoccupied with style, and he was a relativist whose writing contained lessons on morality. Becker was a subjectivist who cultivated detachment, a "Historian of Revolutions" who doubted the value of political participation, an anti-elitist who distrusted the masses. If Becker was a liberal progressive, he remained skeptical that liberalism and progress would shape the future. If an anti-progressive, he never ceased to believe planning based on well considered values might create a better world.

Carl Becker would surely have savored the irony of historians puzzling over the incongruities in his writing only to find opposing interpretations reflecting their own predilections concerning knowledge, history and moral responsibility. The author of "Every Man His Own Historian" could hardly have overlooked the double entendre; for it is irony that is the controlling perspective behind the ambiguities and incongruous juxtapositions throughout his work.

Becker's ironic style has been universally recognized, but little importance has been attached to it for understanding his ideas. Irony, it is assumed, fit his temper, or, as with the Philosophes who so fascinated him, gave his prose a provocative air. But why was his temper ironic in the first place, and what significance did such a disposition serve for interpreting history? These are essential questions because style, for Becker, was always subservient to the higher end of expressing a writer's intention. Appropriateness of form was a principle he adhered to in everything he wrote. For him that meant a marriage between fact, idea or emotion and the kind of expression required to convey one's interpretation.

Why then was Becker's particular marriage consummated in irony? The answer lies in the dissatisfaction Becker increasingly had with the Idea of Progress in history.

The Idea of Progress had been emotionally tied to faith in a special American exceptionalism created even before the American Revolution. The optimism of that American exceptionalism, Sacvan Bercovitch writes, has been such a powerful cultural myth that even critics of American values like Melville, Hawthorne and Mark Twain were unable to reject it though they struggled against it.

As David W. Noble has pointed out American historians have been even more bound to the myth of American exceptionalism than novelists. They have been the secular theologians who have traced the development of American exceptionalism through time. They have mapped the tracks of progress to chart the promise of the future.

Yet, at the zenith of progressive historiography when Becker enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Frederick Jackson Turner's class in American History the paradigm of progress was already under some strain. Turner's "frontier thesis," published during Becker's freshman year in 1893, retained a progressive American exceptionalism. But the frontier of progress was at an "uneven advance … with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness" [Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, ed. R. A. Billington]. Turner's progress was not the orderly rational progress of a Bancroft following the steady triumph of God's plan. It was more like a brush fire licking at the boundaries of a future that appeared through the smoke to be a fire break. James Harvey Robinson with whom Becker studied at Columbia, similarly reflected the strain in the paradigm of progress. His 'new history' relied on no hand of Providence, saw no steady march of values in time. The historian, he seemed to say, could no longer be content to watch the birth of progress, he must pull the future out of the dead past with the forceps of science.

Becker's interests in European history perhaps helped him to recognize that the intellectual doubts he felt were of larger scope than a crisis of faith in America's special mission. The problem of progress was equally a European one. Since the study of history was so dependent upon the Idea of Progress, the legitimacy of the profession itself was being called into question. Becker's doubt is evident in his essay of 1910, "Detachment and the Writing of History." Here his oft repeated quote of Voltaire that "history is only a pack of tricks we play on the dead," makes its appearance. For Becker, at this time, Truth is not located consciously for its use in the present. "Instead of sticking to the facts," the historian discovers "they stick to him," provided he has the necessary ideas to attract them. In a review appearing in The Dial in 1915 he says that he "contemplates a new philosophy of history with entire equanimity and some little interest." However, he declines to applaud the attempt under review because the author "merely projects into the future the categories which have been used to classify the facts of the past, in the confident expectation that future events, when they occur, may be pressed, without too much difficulty, into these categories."

The same criticism is leveled against the German historians in a review published in February 1917: "It would be more modest, and more in accord with a safe philosophy of history," Becker wrote, "to let coming events reveal the continued superiority of the German Nation." But, he continues, "without waiting for God to dispose, they have themselves, assuming the task of Fate … made tomorrow's programme in the Foreign Office." Becker thought the idea of progress "manifestly important," and complained in a 1920 review of Bury's book on the subject that historians had paid too little attention to it. "Much has been written about 'progress,' " he wrote, "but on the 'idea' of Progress there is little of value.…" The ideas of progress and the concept of man in general, he suggested, are intimately tied together. "It is no accident that the belief in Progress and a concern for 'posterity' waxed in proportion as the belief in Providence and a concern for a future life waned"; he argued, "The former belief—illusion if you prefer—is man's compensation for the loss of the latter."

In 1933, the year after the Heavenly City was published, Becker reviewed a new edition of The Idea of Progress. He had been delighted, he wrote, when the book first appeared in 1920 because the subject interested him greatly. In 1932 Becker found himself still delighted and still interested. He appreciated Bury's refusal to deify the 'Idea.' "For him the Idea was not a transcendent force dwelling in the shadowy world of absolute Being; it was no more than a pattern imposed on the factual reality by the minds of actual men." What will happen to the Idea of Progress when the possibilities of invention and technology are exhausted? Becker wondered. Bury did not say, but Becker speculated that Progress, too, would be supplanted by something different. "The price which we must pay for the pleasure of' escaping from the illusion of finality' is," concluded Becker, "the recognition that nothing, not even the realization that we have escaped from that illusion, is likely to endure." By way of Progress, like the Philosophes before him, Carl Becker had found irony.

The transformation of Becker's ironic temperament, already evident in the 'wild thoughts' notebooks of his college days into a controlling perspective did not occur because of any one event. Early essays like "Kansas" and "Detachment and the Writing of History" show elements of irony. The First World War must surely have had an effect, but as Becker himself warned it is dangerous to assume cause and effect in history where it seems more apparent. His work does become more ironic after the war, but "The Dilemma of Diderot," published in 1915 captures much of the flavor of his later themes and is as ironic as anything he wrote. Much of that essay reappears in the Heavenly City which is Becker's most direct confrontation with the ironic dilemma of progress and of its corollary, the problem of objectivity in history. If Becker found the eighteenth century attractive, it was less as a retreat to a simpler time than as a magnet revealing the negative and positive poles of irony and progress within the field of history. The invention of modern history in the eighteenth century was required because, Becker argued, the Philosophes had previously invented progress.

The enlightenment idea of history was made necessary by the Philosophes' realization that in rejecting Providence to create a truly virtuous society they were unavoidably destroying their own basis for virtue. "It was one of the ironies of fate," Becker wrote in the "Dilemma of Diderot," "that the speculative thinking of Diderot, of which the principal purpose was to furnish a firm foundation for natural morality, ended by destroying the foundation of all morality as he understood it." Reason told Diderot as it told the other Philosophes that man is but a speck of dust blown haphazardly through time. All hopes, beliefs, sympathies and virtues are made of "the same purposeless forces that build up crystal or dissolve granite."

Surely, Becker concluded, if the only message provided by the new philosophy could be that no individual can be responsible for his own actions and vice is only social convention to be avoided in so far as it may be found out, then "the religion of philosophy … must remain as vain a delusion as the philosophy of religion."

The Philosophes turned away from the barrenness of unaided reason to find a more fruitful basis for morality. They found it, Becker wrote in The Heavenly City, in general human experience. Such a foundation could not be built upon the frail and limited perspective of the individual soul which the Medieval Church had linked to the Eternal through revelation. Morality had to be grounded instead in a new Eternal, an Eternal in time; that is, the general experience of Mankind. "History" would provide the source of revelation for reason. It would serve as a standard to discover true virtue, to establish what actually was in accord with human nature.

The "new history" may have been necessary if the Philosophes were to triumph over the "Dilemma of Diderot." However, the "new history" was possible only because of two ingenious reformulations of the metaphysics the Philosophes thought they had discredited. The first was the idea of 'Mankind' in general. "Mankind" (and similarly "Posterity"), Becker claimed, is not a reality, not an objective empirical fact. Rather, Mankind like Posterity is a personification that doesn't exist except as a mental construct. Yet it is reified into a thing, a Being, "a divinity… invoked in the accents of prayer." Secondly, and closely entwined with the reification of many individuals into Mankind and Posterity, is the idea of "Progress" itself. Becker quoted Pascal's famous statement that "the whole succession of human beings throughout the course of ages must be regarded as a single man, continually living and learning." Present generations, Becker quoted Glanvill as saying, "seek to gather, to observe and examine, and lay up in bank for the ages that are to come." Progress and Posterity are linked together, past and future held together by the "specious present" which compresses the past into consciousness and unavoidably reaches toward the future in anticipation. In Becker's interpretation of the Philosophes, Posterity and Progress as reified ideas, outside of time, become interchangeable. Future generations are continuous with past generations; progress is confirmed by the degradation and unhappiness of the past.

The implications of Becker's interpretation of the Enlightenment conception of history are far reaching. If "Mankind" is a personification, as he suggests, and if progress is built upon that personification, the idea of objective historical truth becomes chimerical. This is so not because all historians have biases and all facts are filtered through individual experience. They do, and they are. But Becker is consistent in his refusal to cynically deny the ability of historians to recognize error, or to separate personal views from evidence. Instead the artificial construction "Mankind" is the source of the instability of historical truth. No matter how many facts are gathered, no matter how detailed the observation, the artificial personification of the experience of separate individuals precludes objectivity. Even if the facts of history could be absorbed without interpretation, which of course Becker denied, objective history would be an illusion. The steady accumulation of knowledge leading from superstition to science can only be the product of "Man in General" because any individual life is too short and too limited to contain evidence for progress.

Historians equally depend upon the increase in knowledge of the profession of "History in General." They rely upon it to make their individual contributions of knowledge significant. As Becker recognized in "Every Man His Own Historian," however, the "Historian in General" is but a reformulation of "Mankind in General." Therefore the attempt to escape the pressures of "Mr. Everyman" finally becomes the dog running away from his own tail. Becker developed this theme in the thirties. His presidential address "Everyman His Own Historian" and The Heavenly City, appearing respectively in 1931 and 1932, were followed by Progress and Power in 1936.

In the later book, Becker made clear a distinction between the "Idea of Progress" and progress itself. It was a distinction that he maintained throughout the rest of his work. He found the Idea of Progress to be built upon a nonempirical basis. Consequently, men can have no objective standard to measure it. Standing detached upon the mountain of Olympus and looking down upon human history, Becker wrote, we see it run from "the Java Man to Mussolini—or Roosevelt." Progress, he said, has been

raised to the dignity of a noun.… [I]t is so heavily loaded with moral and teleological overtones that no scientist with any sense of decency will use it. It implies that there are values in the world. It implies, not only that the world moves forward, but that it moves forward to some good purpose, to some more felicitous state. In short, the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a philosophy of human destiny.

Progress, for Becker, was a word which symbolized "the persistent desire of men (and historians and social theorists are men too—it is perhaps our chief merit) to find something that is and will forever remain good." That is why, he continued, though too sophisticated to believe in infallibility "we still seek, in the half-wrecked doctrine of progress, securities that only infallibility can provide." While historians may not use the word 'progress' the "subtle implications of the idea are in our writings—we contrive to make the facts speak for themselves.…"

Becker seems to have pretty well disposed of progress. But the reader of Progress and Power is surprised to find an apparent contradiction in the last section of the book. Suddenly Becker seems to have rejected his own sound pessimism for the very false doctrine he had been busy debunking:

… we have chosen to observe the progress of mankind in the long time perspective. In the long time perspective, from Pithecanthropus to Einstein, the progress of mankind irrespective of the rise and fall of particular civilizations, has been accomplished by the slow, often interrupted, but fairly persistent extension of matter-of-fact knowledge and matter-of-fact apprehension to an ever widening realm of experience. It is only within the last three hundred years that it has been extended to include the entire outer world of Nature and to the forces that are in and behind appearance. Is it then too much to expect that in time to come it will be extended to include the world of human relations.?

Actually, Becker was not guilty of contradiction nor of making a failed effort to transcend his own liberal bias. Nor had he temporarily turned into a technocrat, as Wilkins surmised [in his Carl Becker]. Rather, Becker was making a distinction between the Idea of Progress, as discussed earlier, and progress itself. He never denied that progress could occur; only that it could not be affirmed or denied objectively. In a 1919 review, for example, Becker asked if he was expected to teach the progress of democracy "onward and upward to the Seething Caldron" of the World War era. He decided he could not. But on the other hand he would not teach that it was "undergoing degradation with a headlong rapidity towards inevitable death.…" Part of the reason that Becker could be neither a doctrinaire liberal nor a committed Marxist was that as a historian he was concerned with the movement of events, "the changes of configuration" in time, not in establishing or debunking objective progress. Becker was definitely unhappy with the idea of progress, but he had no other idea with which to replace it.

Consequently, Progress and Power must be understood from the perspective of his intense interest in historiography rather than as a Beardian effort to discover a new political faith. From this perspective, Becker's concern with power as mechanical (tools) and intellectual (the pen), establishes that men and women have the ability to transform their world. They do so, Becker argued, by artificially extending their space/time world. Day follows night. The Sumerians used the flood to divide time on a larger scale. Peoples with kings, which Becker defined as "deified personifications of power," were given a new sense of time—the dynasty.

"As the Time world is ideally extended beyond the range of remembered things, so the Space world is ideally extended beyond the range of known places." Thus, in his example, the kings of Sumer are rulers of "the four regions of the earth" and a Pharaoh becomes "lord of the world."

Within this enlarged Time and Space world not all that is apprehended is concrete, not all that is known is known with equal certainty. Since the image of such a world can be held together only by the nexus of the general concept, the idea of things is differentiated from the things themselves.…

The progress that Becker finally affirmed was, "less an objective world of fact than man's creation of the world in his own image. It is in truth man's most ingenious invention, his supreme work of art."

For Becker, then, Mankind and Progress have become realities in the minds of individual men and women. The physical and social world is transformed by individuals acting together with a common perspective so that the world literally becomes what people think it is. These two tools are exactly like other tools used to extend man's influence over the universe. The personification of 'Mankind' and the 'Idea of Progress' are manifestations of power. As tools, they work in pragmatic fashion. But Becker posits something more than pragmatism when he suggests that such tools actually transform the world into the image they project.

But Becker could not, during the depression of the 1930s, join an ideological crusade to use this power to build a better political society. He was too much aware of the tendency of historical change to frustrate expectations and make a mockery of individual notions of what "moving forward" may mean. Instead, much to the dismay of his students and committed critics like Louis Hacker, Becker remained aloof from political activity during the 1930s. His continuing interest was the dilemma of the idea of Progress and Power, itself. It was the dilemma of how to build a castle of dreams for the future on a foundation of sand. Becker recognized the dilemma to be one more basic than a debate between liberalism and Marxism. It was not a question of finding the truth in history but a question of whether history itself is true. Historiography absorbed his efforts, not the study of revolutions. In 1938, Becker wrote that "Forty years ago," he was "fascinated by the study of history.…" But now he was "less interested in the study of history than in history itself." The Subject of History, or, the history of history, he explained

would have as its main theme the gradual extension of this time and space world (particularly the time world, perhaps, although the two are inseparably connected), the items, whether true or false, which acquired knowledge and accepted beliefs enabled men (and not historians only) to find within it, and the influence of this pattern of true or imagined events upon the development of human thought and conduct. So regarded, historiography would become a history of history rather than a history of historians. A history of history subjectively understood (the "fable agreed upon," the "pack of tricks played on the dead") rather than a history of the gradual emergence of historical truth objectively considered … Nor would he (the historian) be more interested in true than in false ideas about the past.…

Carl Becker, therefore, did not believe that history affords solutions to human dilemmas. With J. B. Bury he believed rather that history transforms them. That is precisely what Becker the historian did when confronted with the dilemma of progress. On one hand, he had early doubted the possibility of finding a place to stand sufficiently detached from present anticipations of the future so one could view the past objectively. He could not but see the Idea of Progress as merely a pattern imposed by men trying to create a "refuge from despair" to save their souls "alive out of pessimism," as he wrote in 1921.

On the other hand, the bleakness of a human world without hope for salvation required him to hold fast to a practical belief that progress was possible. It was this impossibility of rejecting progress even as it was impossible to accept it which constituted Becker's ironic dilemma.

That Becker recognized the dilemma of progress to be ironic is central for understanding his response. Had Becker been less steeped in Enlightenment thought, felt less resonance temperamentally with ironists like Hume, Voltaire and Pascal, and had he been less willing to play hooky from his work, reading the fiction of ironists such as James Joyce, Anatole France, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Proust; in short, had Becker been less Becker, he might be believed that he had solved the dilemma of progress by separating the Idea from progress itself. On one level, of course, it may be said that he had solved a paralyzing dilemma. Separating the Idea from progress did release him from the ironic dilemma of Buridan's ass, caught between two bales of hay and starving for want of an ability to choose. This dilemma could be overcome. This is the message, for example, of "Mr. Wells and the New History":

It may be that Mr. Wells has read the past too close to the desire of his heart. But there are worse things. We may hope at least that the future will be as he thinks. If it should turn out so, Mr. Wells's book will have been more than a history; even if it is not history; it will have been an action that has helped to make history. If it should turn out otherwise, still will the book have been a valiant deed.… If you like not the term history for Mr. Wells's book, call it something else—for example, the adventures of a generous soul among catastrophes!

But because Becker looked for transformation in history rather than solutions, he realized that a solution on one level of irony usually leaves one in a more ironic condition than before, precisely because one thinks one has escaped it. To understand why irony operates in this way and how Becker's sense of irony explains the ambiguities, hesitations and incongruities of his writing, it may be useful to consider irony a bit more closely.

Irony is a shadow concept, a kind of Doppelgänger to the discovery (or invention) of Progress in the eighteenth century. That is not to say that irony was not to be found earlier, but it was during the Enlightenment that it was consciously recognized as a perspective on the human condition. The Idea of Progress gave a forward direction toward the goal of a world of order, reason, objectivity and virtue. However, in doing so, the perverse, the non-rational, the subjective were made more visible and less explainable. The greater the disparity between the idea of a rational universe moving forward and the contradictions and failures in the lives men and women actually lead, the more ironic the modern vision has become. As a 'double' to progress, irony frustrates yet is dependent upon the Idea of Progress. Because irony is built upon dualism, appearance vs. reality, belief vs. experience, it is a very unstable concept. It can only be recognized in context, so any definition is necessarily partial and therefore subject to irony on another level or seen within another context.

Gene Wise has given a sound basic definition though it is a definition that points more towards specific irony in human affairs than to the general irony of events beyond our control, a form more characteristic of Becker's writing. According to Wise "an ironic situation occurs when the consequences of an act are diametrically opposed to its intentions, and the fundamental cause of the disparity lies in the actor himself and his original purpose."

Becker does write with this kind of irony in several of his essays: "The Philosophes," for example, set out to dismantle the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials. Madame Roland's concern for image leads from an effort to restore her husband's title of nobility to the guillotine as a militant republican. The Germans, Becker prophesies in the 1941 essay with the ironic title "The Old Disorder in Europe," "will be defeated in the end by mounting opposition from without and from within—an opposition generated by the disorder which it creates."

Short sightedness, overconfidence or moral weakness is often the source of the victim's fall. Thus Becker declares Victor Hugo's love affair with an actress to be the result of Hugo's overconfident sense of virtue. In a review Becker suggests to anyone with a clever plan for making a new tomorrow: "I should think he could do nothing better, as a precaution, than to read this book carefully and take another look at his plan."

However, in Becker, the irony is rarely simple. If often doubles back on itself to reveal a second level of irony running in another direction. The actress in Hugo's life, though a kind of victim to his overconfident virtue, does achieve spiritual regeneration. "Such is the strange power of ideals, even the most unpromising." The ideal Marie Jeanne created by the overly romantic imagination of the actual Marie Jeanne, detached Philosophe, "became … more and more, and at last altogether, the real Madame Roland." Her transformation completed, Madame Roland is capable of mounting the scaffold with a quite different sense of detachment than that of a Philosophe. Becker takes leave of her as, in high disdain, "she looks down upon the wolfish mob below and lifts unflinching eyes to the poised and relentless knife," revealing a third level of irony running two directions at once. It is as if he sees her as at once the same romantic Marie Jeanne, detached Philosophe, and a new Madame Roland, committed, courageous, revolutionary. Becker seems to suggest that the historian finds both and neither to be true, just as Wilkins notes that personally Becker both fought and joined the "New Historians," and fought and joined "Mr. Everyman."

Because Becker rarely sees simple irony in human affairs but instead discovers levels of irony, often running in opposing directions, the characteristic form of his vision of history is found in the "Irony of Dilemma."

One level on which this kind of irony is expressed is in being confidently unaware that one is caught in a dilemma. This is the perspective from which the fictionalized merchant, Jeremiah Wynkoop in "The Spirit of '76" is drawn. He finds himself engaged in revolutionary politics when he thought he was defending social order and conservative values.

But, if an ironic dilemma may be present when one is really in an impossible situation but confident there is a solution, one may conversely think one is in an impossible situation when one is not. This is the case when two alternatives are equally attractive or both are equally unattractive. The victim of this kind of irony remains neutralized by two opposing attractions or repelled by two opposing dissatisfactions. Such a condition is ironic if we, as detached observers, can see a solution the victim is unable to see. Perhaps the best example of this is Becker's view of Henry Adams, who also was preoccupied with transformation in history and consequently was highly ironic. Becker naturally appreciated Adams' perspective. But he was still critical enough of Adams to interpret Adams' ironic work ironically.

Consider the concluding paragraph of "Henry Adams Once More":

… 'his [Adams'] habitual attitude' was that of a man who somehow feels that he has 'missed out,' but does not really believe that he has missed out, and at the same time cannot quite understand why he should have missed out or should feel that he has.… Isn't this precisely the attitude one might expect of a man whose genius for reflection was always at war with his desire for 'power,' and who never knew it? Perhaps then the secret of Henry Adams was simply that he didn't know what was the matter with him. But then again perhaps he did know, but was too proud or perverse to admit it, even to himself.

There is a third mode of irony, however, which operates on a more general level. That is when the detached observer realizes that we all are ultimately frail and short-sighted. We are all caught in dilemmas and therefore we all are victims. "As victims," Douglas Meucke asserts, "we cannot escape irony as long as we believe or assume that we inhabit a rational universe. We can escape only by finding and adopting a detached position from which we can regard the coexistence of contraries with equanimity, that is to say by abandoning the concept of a rational or moral world, but abandoning despair as well as hope."

The Idea of Progress has served to make men and women ever more aware of the contradictions in life because it has served to define the world dynamically. As faith in Science promises to open the realm of objectivity, subjectivity becomes an ever more acute contradiction. This of course is also the dilemma of Diderot, Carl Becker's dilemma and every other historian's dilemma as well. For this reason irony is a historian's concept more fully than it can be that of the philosopher or scientist. The ironist, Meucke points out, is concerned with "the world as men experience it or have experienced it and not with the world as it objectively is or may be." Therefore, while the ironist may use the insights of the philosopher or scientist, the ironist is unable to identify with their ahistorical claim to a logical or empirical objectivity. Rather, the ironist must consider philosophy and science themselves as part of a social context. Consequently the ironist may use philosophy, the laws of physical science or Freudian theory. She or he may apply them to her or his understanding of the aspect of the human condition under study but she or he cannot become a Philosopher, Scientist or Freudian.

For similar reasons Becker was more interested in the personal and social movements of history revealed in the dramatic and accelerated change of revolutionary periods than he was with revolutions themselves. He believed it quite possible that November 1917 would be celebrated in one hundred years as the events of July, 1789 are today. But Robert E. Brown was very wide of the mark [in his Carl Becker on History and the American Revolution] when he thought that Becker had skated to the thin edge of communism only to 'retreat' to a safe liberalism in the 1930s. Becker was always far closer to Pascal than Marx or for that matter Adam Smith. He was far too ironic to deny that Marxism could create a better world, but he was equally too ironic to believe that the better world would be all that new.

Becker, by the end of the 1930s had discovered an intellectual and emotional equilibrium that had not been possible earlier. Certainly the anguished uncertainties of "The Dilemma of Diderot" can be seen to have been transmuted in the larger vision of The Heavenly City and then in the control of creative possibility evoked in How New Will the Better World Be? and Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life, both published in the last two years of his life. If his sense of irony had filled his earlier years with the uncertainty of progress, that same irony in his later years led him to the discovery of the need to build a world for men and women to find shelter from an unfeeling universe.

Carl Becker's death coincided with the end of World War II, when the contradictions in the modern faith in Progress became increasingly evident to the historians charged with creating a narrative hymn to Mankind's march into the future. Richard Hofstadter and Perry Miller, two of the most influential of Postwar historians, wrote in a consciously ironic mode. For them, however, as for a whole generation of intellectuals, inspiration was not drawn from the work of Carl Becker. Rather, Reinhold Niebuhr's Irony of American History summed up the new postwar mood. "Niebuhr," Perry Miller once remarked, "was the father of us all."

But Niebuhr's brand of irony was a far more ethical and limited form than Becker's. For Niebuhr, irony meant that virtue may become vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; strength may turn into weakness if reliance on that strength turns into vanity; wisdom may become folly if it forgets its limits. The ironic situation may be distinguished from the pathetic one because the person involved bears some measure of responsibility for it. It differs from the tragic in that the weakness is unconscious and not the result of a resolution.

The implication of Niebuhr's view of irony is that given a large dose of humility and some serious self-examination, an individual or a nation-may escape the wages of their folly and reaffirm the values from which they have strayed. Consequently, Niebuhrian irony may be seen as a form of the Protestant Jeremiad and therefore an orthodox expression of the American Civil Religion. This ironic perspective was equally open to the critics of consensus history as well as to its defenders. William Appleman William's Tragedy of American Diplomacy, for example, paralleled the Niebuhrian view of a flawed vision impairing a realistic appraisal of reality. Like Niebuhr, Williams saw America externalizing evil rather than engaging in self criticism which might have led to a moral foreign policy.

Becker's ironic vision, doubling back upon itself and operating on several levels at once could hardly seem serious from such a perspective. Historians like Hofstadter dismissed Becker as a clever stylist without serious content. With few exceptions that is where the matter has been left. Becker's reputation remains in eclipse.

But, perhaps in the twenty years since historians have taken serious interest in Becker, events have made him and his irony more accessible. The Jeremiad has lost much of its persuasiveness as the present crisis in writing narrative history attests. The inability to unthink nuclear war or to conceive how it might be made less likely may be indicative of a crisis in the very idea of Progress itself. In such time of limited possibilities and massive problems, Becker's perspective may allow historians to rethink the relation between progress and history. Such a perspective may permit the asking of significant questions of interpretation even as it denies objective progress in history and its study.

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