What do you think?
Rate this book
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War
A group portrait of six of the finest historians of the First World War
In Disputing Disaster, 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, unique among scholars of the Great War, played a part in pitching his country into it; Paul W. Schroeder, the American expert on the system of Europe - an interstate relations and its breakdown in 1914; Keith Wilson, the one radical deviant from a patriotic consensus about Britain’s role in the outbreak of the fighting; and, from Australia (summoned into the war as a dominion), Christopher Clark, acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers.
Disputing Disaster offers a compelling analysis of the major competing versions of the genesis of the Great War; fresh light on the political background of its leading historians; and a novel synthesis of the determining pressures that brought the conflict to pass.
Perry Anderson is emeritus in History at UCLA, and an editor at New Left Review. Recent Different Speeds, Same Furies, a comparative study of Anthony Powell and Marcel Proust.
In Disputing Disaster, 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, unique among scholars of the Great War, played a part in pitching his country into it; Paul W. Schroeder, the American expert on the system of Europe - an interstate relations and its breakdown in 1914; Keith Wilson, the one radical deviant from a patriotic consensus about Britain’s role in the outbreak of the fighting; and, from Australia (summoned into the war as a dominion), Christopher Clark, acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers.
Disputing Disaster offers a compelling analysis of the major competing versions of the genesis of the Great War; fresh light on the political background of its leading historians; and a novel synthesis of the determining pressures that brought the conflict to pass.
Perry Anderson is emeritus in History at UCLA, and an editor at New Left Review. Recent Different Speeds, Same Furies, a comparative study of Anthony Powell and Marcel Proust.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published November 5, 2024
About the author
Perry Anderson
131 books278 followersPerry 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...
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...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 13, 2025
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!
November 15, 2025
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.
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.
January 21, 2025
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.
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.
September 15, 2026
This book is a bit unique, or at least not what I usually read. It covers six Historians who wrote on the origins of the Great War, but goes beyond that to provide biographical descriptions of the authors, delving into their work not strictly on the Great War in the process to provide insights into their thinking on politics and international diplomacy that can inform us of how they view the crucial processes and events that led up to it.
The book starts with Pierre Renouvin, a French veteran and young scholar who represents the early consensus of nearly every nation that participated in the war, that being that 1) their side did not start it and 2) the other side is completely responsible. However, despite the patriotism that lasted in France after the war (evidenced by President Poincare being the only leader of the major powers before the war that remained politically relevant after 1919), there were academic and intellectual circles within France which began to question this outlook.
The book then moves on to Luigi Albertini, the only scholar who of the book who had a direct hand in moving his country to war. As the editor of Italy's largest newspaper, he campaigned for war against Austria when the war started, and was closely affiliated with General Cordona's headquarters during the conflict. Afterwards, Albertini supported Mussolini against the socialists in the hopes that the fascists could be easily used against leftists (who, to be fair, were quite corrupt in Italian politics) and then discarded. This did not happen and eventually, Mussolini pushed Albertini out of his editorial position, and so Albertini withdrew to his private estate to write his thoughts on the Great War. The author states that since Italy had no direct hand in the war's beginning, Albertini could write more dispassionately on how it came about, believing that blame could be shared around amongst all the major participants.
The book moves on to the post-Second World War period which presented a sort of devolution of the complexity on Great War discussion. In places like Britain, which was already convinced of its total innocence in the conflict, the conclusion of a second conflict started by supposed German barbarism only reinforced those notions. This was helped along by the emergence in West Germany of Fritz Fischer, a Historian who argued that Germany bore sole responsibility for the conflict's emergence. The new Germanies of east and west were eager to shed themselves of their pasts in the Second and Third Reichs, and so a complete condemnation of both in the two world wars of the 20th century presented an easy opportunity to do so. A very narrow and straightforward view, the author spends most of this chapter debating whether Mr. Fischer was a Nazi or not. Being a former member of the Party was not controversial in 1950s West Germany, but it was generally believed that Fischer did it for career advancement like most in 1930s Germany. But it was revealed after his death that Fischer was a little more than that, subscribing to proto-fascist movements in his teens, joining the SA, and connecting himself with prominent Nazi academics during the years of the Reich. I did not find this chapter the most interesting, but since Fischer was important to the discussion of the Great War's origins I guess he was necessary to include.
In the later 2oth century came Keith Wilson, a British Historian whose contribution to the discussion was rather straightforward but important. Britain also had a hand to play in the origins of the First World War. This is kind of self-explanatory. Albertini first argued that Britain's indecisiveness in the month before the war helped cause it, but Wilson goes back to British foreign policy in decades leading up to the war and how its fixation on Russia in relation to protecting its foreign territories and its alienation of Germany as well as casual British belligerence helped to contribute to the start of the war.
Christopher Clark is an Australian Historian who decides to take a different approach in his work on the Great War, The Sleepwalkers. Instead of starting from the position of asking why the Great War came about, he starts with asking how exactly the Great War came about, going in blind to the questions that have troubled Historians about the origins of the conflict and simply narrating what events and processes before the war and the months leading up to it. He discusses the name of Sleepwalkers and the criticism Clark received for it (were they Sleepwalking? Many of them sure knew what they were doing). He paraphrased the next Historian on the list who argues that those who made the decisions leading to the war were not exactly "sleepwalking" but were instead acting with "eyes wide shut," moving with purpose towards their own aims of prestige, imperialism and great power politics, unaware of the greater conflagration they were moving Europe and the world towards. What was also interesting was the discussion on Clark's Revolutionary Spring, taking a different approach from Sleepwalkers by looking at the catastrophe which came from below instead of how it came from above. The author draws parallels between 1848 and the present day, arguing that there are similar dissatisfactions in modern society at unequal wealth distribution, a lack of voice for general populations and a desire for change.
The last is Paul Schroeder, whom Anderson has a lot of respect for. However, though his contributions on the Great War were important and combined many of the points built up by previous Historians, the author's remarking on Schroeder's view on international politics in the 21st century makes it clear that the author and Schroeder are both very stuffy academics exasperated by modern American politics and incapable of understanding how it came about. Because the author is a Marxist, Schroeder is a sort of conservative to him (really, he is a "conservative" for the liberal international order, making him hardly conservative at all), but neither he nor the author can understand how liberal internationalism and leftist progressivism has led to the pessimistic, individualistic and socially isolated American public and why the USA is destabilizing its own system. Their views on the world has not changed since the late 1990s to early 2000s because their model of the world has not changed since, and it is infuriating to hear these old academics stick to their guns and fail to understand the modern world.
Otherwise, an okay book.
The book starts with Pierre Renouvin, a French veteran and young scholar who represents the early consensus of nearly every nation that participated in the war, that being that 1) their side did not start it and 2) the other side is completely responsible. However, despite the patriotism that lasted in France after the war (evidenced by President Poincare being the only leader of the major powers before the war that remained politically relevant after 1919), there were academic and intellectual circles within France which began to question this outlook.
The book then moves on to Luigi Albertini, the only scholar who of the book who had a direct hand in moving his country to war. As the editor of Italy's largest newspaper, he campaigned for war against Austria when the war started, and was closely affiliated with General Cordona's headquarters during the conflict. Afterwards, Albertini supported Mussolini against the socialists in the hopes that the fascists could be easily used against leftists (who, to be fair, were quite corrupt in Italian politics) and then discarded. This did not happen and eventually, Mussolini pushed Albertini out of his editorial position, and so Albertini withdrew to his private estate to write his thoughts on the Great War. The author states that since Italy had no direct hand in the war's beginning, Albertini could write more dispassionately on how it came about, believing that blame could be shared around amongst all the major participants.
The book moves on to the post-Second World War period which presented a sort of devolution of the complexity on Great War discussion. In places like Britain, which was already convinced of its total innocence in the conflict, the conclusion of a second conflict started by supposed German barbarism only reinforced those notions. This was helped along by the emergence in West Germany of Fritz Fischer, a Historian who argued that Germany bore sole responsibility for the conflict's emergence. The new Germanies of east and west were eager to shed themselves of their pasts in the Second and Third Reichs, and so a complete condemnation of both in the two world wars of the 20th century presented an easy opportunity to do so. A very narrow and straightforward view, the author spends most of this chapter debating whether Mr. Fischer was a Nazi or not. Being a former member of the Party was not controversial in 1950s West Germany, but it was generally believed that Fischer did it for career advancement like most in 1930s Germany. But it was revealed after his death that Fischer was a little more than that, subscribing to proto-fascist movements in his teens, joining the SA, and connecting himself with prominent Nazi academics during the years of the Reich. I did not find this chapter the most interesting, but since Fischer was important to the discussion of the Great War's origins I guess he was necessary to include.
In the later 2oth century came Keith Wilson, a British Historian whose contribution to the discussion was rather straightforward but important. Britain also had a hand to play in the origins of the First World War. This is kind of self-explanatory. Albertini first argued that Britain's indecisiveness in the month before the war helped cause it, but Wilson goes back to British foreign policy in decades leading up to the war and how its fixation on Russia in relation to protecting its foreign territories and its alienation of Germany as well as casual British belligerence helped to contribute to the start of the war.
Christopher Clark is an Australian Historian who decides to take a different approach in his work on the Great War, The Sleepwalkers. Instead of starting from the position of asking why the Great War came about, he starts with asking how exactly the Great War came about, going in blind to the questions that have troubled Historians about the origins of the conflict and simply narrating what events and processes before the war and the months leading up to it. He discusses the name of Sleepwalkers and the criticism Clark received for it (were they Sleepwalking? Many of them sure knew what they were doing). He paraphrased the next Historian on the list who argues that those who made the decisions leading to the war were not exactly "sleepwalking" but were instead acting with "eyes wide shut," moving with purpose towards their own aims of prestige, imperialism and great power politics, unaware of the greater conflagration they were moving Europe and the world towards. What was also interesting was the discussion on Clark's Revolutionary Spring, taking a different approach from Sleepwalkers by looking at the catastrophe which came from below instead of how it came from above. The author draws parallels between 1848 and the present day, arguing that there are similar dissatisfactions in modern society at unequal wealth distribution, a lack of voice for general populations and a desire for change.
The last is Paul Schroeder, whom Anderson has a lot of respect for. However, though his contributions on the Great War were important and combined many of the points built up by previous Historians, the author's remarking on Schroeder's view on international politics in the 21st century makes it clear that the author and Schroeder are both very stuffy academics exasperated by modern American politics and incapable of understanding how it came about. Because the author is a Marxist, Schroeder is a sort of conservative to him (really, he is a "conservative" for the liberal international order, making him hardly conservative at all), but neither he nor the author can understand how liberal internationalism and leftist progressivism has led to the pessimistic, individualistic and socially isolated American public and why the USA is destabilizing its own system. Their views on the world has not changed since the late 1990s to early 2000s because their model of the world has not changed since, and it is infuriating to hear these old academics stick to their guns and fail to understand the modern world.
Otherwise, an okay book.
December 16, 2024
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.
April 21, 2025
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.
October 29, 2025
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.
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.
July 27, 2026
Really wonderful and strange book, pretty novel in construction that allows it to achieve some unlikely things.
Anderson chronicles six different historians who wrote about the causes of World War I: examining some of the personal and national impulses at play, tracking the shifting professional consensus, and ultimately using them as a window into how we understand 19th and early 20th century European history as a whole.
It is a surprisingly daring book, one that expects a pre-existing familiarity with European history, but very rewarding. Perry Anderson such a great writer who always feels like he’s inviting you into grand currents of thought, stretching across centuries.
Anderson chronicles six different historians who wrote about the causes of World War I: examining some of the personal and national impulses at play, tracking the shifting professional consensus, and ultimately using them as a window into how we understand 19th and early 20th century European history as a whole.
It is a surprisingly daring book, one that expects a pre-existing familiarity with European history, but very rewarding. Perry Anderson such a great writer who always feels like he’s inviting you into grand currents of thought, stretching across centuries.
May 5, 2025
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.
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.
June 11, 2026
A fantastic meander through the transnational historiography of the causes of the Great War, each chapter focused on one eminent historian from one of the major powers involved the War, reflecting on how their own life histories informed their interpretation of the war. Over the course of the book, Anderson also unveils his own interpretation, which (unsurprisingly given his own political commitments) is that the historiography as a whole has too much focused on the immediate events and decisions that led to the outbreak of the war, and not enough on the structural conditions that made the war likely or perhaps even inevitable and that also ensured that its course would be so catastrophic and its effects so cataclysmic. Anderson emphasizes the deeper structural forces: the “Balkan gap” in the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe, and the friction in particular that imperial rivalry produced. A classic move in historiographical criticism: it started longer ago, and it's more complicated.m
Several of his main characters also were either participants in the war (Pierre Renouvin fighting and grave injuries, Albertini cheering Italy into war — and enabling Mussolini’s rise) and/or crucial figures in their countries’ postwar political and ideological trajectories (Renouvin’s establishment a sober French academic conservatism, Fritz Fischer’s obfuscation of his Nazis sympathies in order to integrate Germany into the postwar Atlanticist order).
Several of his main characters also were either participants in the war (Pierre Renouvin fighting and grave injuries, Albertini cheering Italy into war — and enabling Mussolini’s rise) and/or crucial figures in their countries’ postwar political and ideological trajectories (Renouvin’s establishment a sober French academic conservatism, Fritz Fischer’s obfuscation of his Nazis sympathies in order to integrate Germany into the postwar Atlanticist order).
Read
November 29, 2024Perry 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
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
May 26, 2026
If you look at the start & finish dates you can see that this is not a quick read, not for me anyway. I found it more like a history text book.
It deals with a specific period of time and goes into the minutiae of every decision, every incident, every event of a complex period.
However having read it I have a better understanding of the causes and lead up to WWI.
It deals with a specific period of time and goes into the minutiae of every decision, every incident, every event of a complex period.
However having read it I have a better understanding of the causes and lead up to WWI.
March 11, 2025
Interesting account of World War I from the perspective of historians of each of the great powers in the war.
February 18, 2025
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.
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.
December 5, 2024
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.
This book is recommended to those who are familiar with the general issues of this debate.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews