Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War

by Perry Anderson

A group portrait of six of the finest historians of the First World WarIn A Sextet on the Great War, Perry Anderson picks out from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the Fritz Fischer, famous historian of German war-guilt; Pierre Renouvin, a disabled serviceman and preeminent authority on the conflict in France; Luigi Albertini, the Italian newspaper tycoon who unlike any other scholar on the Grear War was himself a leading actor in pitching his country into it; Paul W. Schroeder, the American expert on the system of European interstate relations and its breakdown in 1914; Keith Wilson, the one radical deviant from a patriotic consensus in Britain about the country’s role in the outbreak of the fighting; and, from Australia (a dominion dragooned into the Great War by the British), Christopher Clark, acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring.A Sextet on the Great War is a compelling analytical guide to the finest competing accounts of the First World War’s origins.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, World War I, War

400 pages, Hardcover

Published November 5, 2024

About the author

Perry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson.

He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in New Left Review (January-February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_An...

Reviews

[Brecht Rogissart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extensive review soon someplace else, but I want to recommend this book. Typically Anderson style of writing (What is his argument? Why is he devoting 2 pages to this microscopically small event?), you'll have to crawl through the the essays and take your time and search for historical background if he glosses over alliances, colonial wars... that you've never heard of. But if you get through the first half of the book, the second half is an absolute treat. This is the most solid defence of World War One as an *imperial* war, in which he theorizes on the Concert of Europe, its foundations in domestic European class politics, why it resulted in peace on the Continent and warfare in the colonial periphery, and why that imperial urge was eventually smuggled back into Europe via the decaying Ottoman Empire, resulting in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and eventually, the opening shot of WW1 in Sarajevo. Absolutely brilliant. He hints on further theorizations on imperialism and capitalism, suggesting a rereading of Lenin and its complementarity with Schumpeter's theory on imperialism. That second part is underdevelopped, yet insightful, and I've spent some time writing about those issues in my extensive review, which will hopefully find a journal!

[Murray Katkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a book disguised as essays on the historiography of World War One, Perry Anderson writes a compelling narrative about the connections between personal history, scholarly production, and political outlook. This is a wonderful book for anyone curious about history, the people who write it, and the events which shape the historians. World War One is merely the backdrop of this examination, but what a mighty backdrop it is! Perry Anderson is a titanic scholar, and his erudition and expansive knowledge of the literature of ww1 is astounding.

I feel the book is written in order of interest: least to most, with the exception of Luigi Albertini—an utterly fascinating character. Christopher Clark and Paul Schroeder receive most attention in number of pages, and their chapters extend beyond the historiography of world war, though not disjointed from the latter. Perry Anderson’s incisive criticism is matched only by the respect he holds for the scholarship of all the men he discusses. Such a book is clearly only possible if it is the product of a considerable intellectual love for history, historians, and the pursuit of truth. For that effort, Anderson’s work is worthwhile.

[Patrick Link · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last two chapters cover the heights and limits of stolid liberalism and stolid conservatism respectively in Clark and Schroeder. I am most interested in reading Schroeder’s posthumous collections on the post Cold War coming out in 2025. And I should definitely check out Clark’s Revolutionary Spring despite the lack of focus on the reactionaries.

[JR Roach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beneath the surface, World War I does not lend itself to the easy moralizing of World War II. Far from a democratic Entente facing off against an authoritarian and expansionist Central Powers, a prefiguring of World War II, at its inception the war pitted a variety of aggressive, militaristic European empires against each other. Suffrage was wider in Germany and Austria-Hungary was than in Britain, and Russia was the most autocratic state in Europe. And the complicated sequence of events in July 1914 makes any placing of blame far from straightforward. Yet from the immediate close of the war to the present, historiography in both the Entente powers and in Germany has been dedicated to blaming the Central Powers for the war and vindicating the justice of the Entente cause. Perry Anderson provides the way into, and out of, this literature by analyzing the work of six paradigmatic historians from the major powers. Each one of these chapters is a classic New Left Review-type essay, combining close-individual biography with wider political and intellectual context. Particular highlights of the book are chapters on Luigi Albertini, who as an Italian newspaper baron and politician helped both engineer Italy's entry into the war and wrote its first major history after Mussolini forced his retirement; Christopher Clark, whose "Sleepwalkers" is the definitive account of the "how" of the July Crisis, but not of the why; and Paul Schroeder, who is well known for his masterpiece "The Transformation of European Politics," but who in Anderson's accounting provided the best structural account of the "why" (the displacement of the consensual diplomacy of the Concert of Europe by aggressive realpolitik) in less well known writings throughout his career. Anderson keenly draws attention to the contingencies and unpredictability of 1914, which make any singular placing of blame on Germany and Austria-Hungary impossible, but more importantly he emphasizes the structural nigh-inevitability (Anderson occasionally equivocates here) of the war. The rise of aggressive, zero-sum imperialism, in the Balkans and abroad, and the breakdown of the consensual diplomatic norms of the concert of Europe, made conflict between the powers a matter of time. No power was innocent in plotting aggressive territorial aggression or in recklessly provoking diplomatic crises throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And while Germany and Austria-Hungary possessed the initiative for most of July 1914, Austria's desperate ultimatums to Serbia occurred in a context shaped by Italy, France, and Russia's longstanding desire to eliminate it as a great-power.

1914 is perhaps the greatest diplomatic failure of the modern era, and without understanding its real causes it's impossible to learn the right lessons. The post-1945 international order, rooted in international cooperation effected via norms-based institutions, was a product of the very hard learning of the previous 30 years. The EU, NATO, and US hegemony especially after the Soviet Union's collapse were distinct advances in preserving international peace and justice through order, but ones easily threatened by the US's own irresponsibility. Only emphasizing the need for American policymakers today to learn from both their immediate past and the deeper past of global diplomacy if we are to face the challenges of today and the future.

[Nathan Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is, in style and structure, very much “just let Perry write about whatever he wants.” Which is deserved and usually good, but also at times quite tedious and unfocused, at the expense of his exquisite sharpness.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

By comparing and contrasting multiple noteworthy historians takes' on the First World War, almost none of them conventional narrative upholders for their country and time or origin, Anderson gives us a glimpse into historiography and its use for active practitioners not just of history, but of political theory as well. The last chapter, on Paul Schroeder, is the most interesting and the natural jumping off point for my next reading.

I had heard of Schroeder before, but not yet read him. As he was a contributor to the American Conservative, and sometimes these days I am too (on an ad-hoc basis), this might as well be in a kick in the pants to get things going.

[Simon Mee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meandering run through some historiographical tidbits and the nature of personalities and their impact on history. There’s a thruline of World War One, combined with other partial thrulines, diversions, junctions and deadends.

There are brilliant insights and I probably should have saved much more into my notes, but I did find it hard to remain focused. The book is a collection of essays with the occasional separate essay inside. The book also demonstrates the author’s own personal foibles (quite a shallow dismissal of Folly and Malice by way of footnote!) but that is fine.

More a paen to the last two of the sextet than a proper coherent set of thoughts, it’s quirky and erudite enough to let that slide.

[History Today]

Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War (Verso) takes a new look at the trans-generational debate over the origins of the First World War. Anderson’s forensic analysis of a selection of historians shows how politics, ideology and emotion have shaped our efforts to understand how this catastrophic event came about.

Read History Today’s Books of the Year 2024 at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Chris Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magisterial account of the Great War from the finest intellectual historian I’m aware of

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting account of World War I from the perspective of historians of each of the great powers in the war.

[ANTHONY CUTLER · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing book. Anderson analyses five historians' respective accounts of the origins of the First World War. The striking structure of the book is the unevenness with the way it deals with the various historians. Pierre Renouvin, French, is dealt with principally by an account of how the War had been dealt with by the French up until Renouvin's major 1925 work. As to Italian Luigi Albertini, focus is mainly on his own involvement in the Fascist regime. Again, for German Fritz Fischer, we have largely his biography.

Representing, purportedly, the English view is Keith Wilson, an academic Historian who developed a severely technical analysis.

The most interesting pieces were on Christopher Clark (Australia) and Paul Schroeder (US). The slightly unsettling thing here is that Anderson spends much of the book analysing their work on other topics: revolutions of 1948, Napoleonic Wars etc. ..., even to the extent of his own substantive analysis of those very conflicts.

That makes the book feel very unevenly written. I suppose that Anderson, as a self-described Marxist, believes that the true causes lie in vast impersonal historical forces. He cites the "uneven development" of the belligerents, not confining that idea to a narrowly economic context.

So all slightly oddly structured but well written and, as I say, intriguing. Lots of stuff here I didn't know so there's always value in that. I must get round to reading The Sleepwalkers. I shall likely read some Schroeder.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

One for specialists. This is a well written but rather uneven series of essays about historians who, at some stage, wrote about the origins of the First World War. The studies of Renouvin (and others of his type), Albertini, and Fischer tackle some key themes in the early historiography of the war, and include important biographical context. The essay on Keith Wilson is a bit of a curved ball in terms of a fine specialist writer who had an important but limited exposure in the wider historical world. For most modern readers, Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers" is well known and fairly described, although there is perhaps too much of a diversion onto his masterwork on the 1848 revolutions. The final essay on Paul Schroeder is more of a wide-ranging tribute from one colleague to another.

This book is recommended to those who are familiar with the general issues of this debate.