The Murmur of Engines

For​ more than fifty years, Perry Anderson has been the most erudite and compelling voice on the British Marxist left. His writing has always been marked by prodigious reading across the widest possible front, a commitment to clarity and analytical rigour, and fidelity to a materialist reading of history. The style is cool and forensic, its austere surfaces set off by a sprinkling of recherché locutions (mouvance, primum movens, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, coup de main, plumpes Denken, kataplexis, animus pugnandi, lapsus calami, ante diem, to cite just a few from this book). Two great works of historical synthesis, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, both published in 1974, earned Anderson wide renown for the brilliance and complexity of their conceptual architecture, though the empirical soundness of their arguments was challenged by some historical specialists. The epochal disappointments of the 1980s, when it became clear that the political hopes of the radical left were not going to be realised any time soon, had a muting effect. The mordancy of the early decades made way for the realism of the mature Anderson style, marked by long and probing critical essays focused on individual issues and thinkers.

There was a mid-19th-century moment when critics emerged as arbiters of the present, applying a science of discernment whose purposes were no less (and sometimes were more) ambitious than those of the works they examined. Anderson is a critic in this mould. His attention falls not just on works, but also on the persons who fashion them. This is not because he is in the business of augmenting or destroying reputations, but because he sees writing as a way of being active in the world. He can say, with Sainte-Beuve, who pioneered this exalted form of critique: ‘I do not look upon literature as a thing apart, or, at least, detachable, from the rest of the man and his nature; I can savour a work, but it is difficult for me to judge it separately from the man himself. For me, literary inquiry leads quite naturally into moral inquiry.’

Anderson brings a peculiar gift to the work of criticism: he can step into a book and inspect it closely, even sympathetically, scrutinising its structures, immersing himself in its style and atmosphere; then he can step out of it again and size it up coldly from a distance. It’s surprising how rare this is. Historians rarely attempt it. We tend either to dismiss one another’s books altogether or to fillet them for material and move on. Anderson, by contrast, lets the books and arguments of his subjects relax and breathe a little, until they begin to betray their inner contradictions and blind spots – then the vivisection can begin. The result is an unsettling oscillation between connoisseurial appreciation and brusque takedown. Nobody is exempt from this severity, not even the superstars of his own intellectual tradition. In his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Anderson rebuked György Lukács for his ‘cumbersome and abstruse diction’, Walter Benjamin for his ‘gnomic brevity and indirection’, Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ‘sibylline rhetoric of elusion’. The good cop, bad cop alternation is not a trick or a tactic, it manifests a fundamental tension between Anderson’s humane interest in a great variety of things, persons and ideas, and the commitment to clarity, analytical discrimination and theoretical rigour that drives him as a writer.

In Disputing Disaster, Anderson examines a debate without parallel in Western historiography: the multigenerational contention over the causes of the First World War. This began before the war itself, as the statesmen chiefly involved in starting it forged arguments exonerating themselves and inculpating their adversaries, arguments that would later resonate in the works of historians. The formerly belligerent states weighed in with enormous volumes of official documents designed to put their own policies in the best light (an exception was the Russian collection, edited by Bolshevik scholars, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v epokhu imperializma, which aimed to impugn tsarist imperialism).

The debate unfolded under formidable political and emotional pressures, not just because the question of culpability was so central to the postwar order, but also because the matter became intertwined with national, political and academic identities. By 1991, an overview of the current literature estimated that it ran to more than 25,000 books and articles; the number today will be much higher. The variety of arguments on display is bewildering. Some accounts have focused on the culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but none of the Great Powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in the ‘system’. Even within the schools that emerged from the skirmishing there are endless nuances. All of this was possible because the convoluted aetiology of this war and its oceanic documentary legacy made certainty elusive. There was always enough complexity to keep the argument going. And around the debates of the historians, which have tended to turn on questions of culpability, extends a landscape of international relations commentary, in which categories such as deterrence, détente and inadvertence, or universalisable mechanisms such as balancing, bargaining and bandwagoning, occupy centre stage.

This is a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of considerable interest, yet synthetic historical accounts of it have been surprisingly few, and most of those that do exist are exercises in adjudication by historians aiming to vindicate a specific view of culpability. Against this background, Anderson’s book is unusual. His interrogation of six authors who have contributed to the debate on the origins of the war is not primarily intended to chart its mutations over time. Nor is it focused exclusively on books or articles pertinent to that debate; Anderson reads these against other texts by the same authors – it is the body of work that is under scrutiny. There is no summative chapter distilling the ‘correct’ view, no contrastive adjudication of the kind ubiquitous in the literature, and no qualitative ranking. Anderson is as interested in the way arguments are constructed as in what they postulate. And, like Sainte-Beuve, he moves easily from literary into moral inquiry, from questions of quality to questions of character and stance. At no point does he single out one of his historians and announce ‘This is the winner’ (though he has his preferences). All are evaluated and, while most are commended on specific merits, all are found wanting, some more so than others.

Anderson’s sextet is an odd crew. The eldest, who would now be 153 years old, is the Italian newspaper editor and politician Luigi Albertini. Next, at 131 and 116 respectively, are the French and German historians Pierre Renouvin and Fritz Fischer. The American historian of international relations Paul W. Schroeder would be 97 and his British colleague Keith Wilson 80. The youngest, at 64, and the only one still alive, is me. Anderson states in the introduction that he selected his sextet for two qualities: ‘originality’ and ‘impact’. This is less acclamatory than it sounds because it quickly becomes clear that impact is for Anderson no index of quality, and originality no guarantee of trustworthiness. The book is a study of the way historians handle complex material, the mutations and inconsistencies in their thinking, the underpinning that leads them to focus their attention on some things and remain blind to others, and the pressures, both political and emotional, that warp their arguments. Of his own take on the problem at the heart of this book, Anderson offers only partial glimpses, though these are revealing enough. On this journey through the work of six historians, the reader feels underfoot the sonorous reverberations of his hermeneutic, like the murmur of engines beneath the deck of a ship.

Ivividly recall​ a conference in 2014 at which the French historian Antoine Prost spoke impromptu about the memory of the First World War in France: ‘It is like a scar,’ he said, lightly touching his left wrist, ‘that can still cause pain.’ This was true in a literal sense of Pierre Renouvin. Called up when war broke out in 1914, the 21-year-old Renouvin was sent to the front, where he lost first his right thumb and then his left arm, mutilations that would cause him pain throughout his life. Renouvin had begun his studies as a historian of the French Revolution, but his career changed direction after he was selected by the minister of education to run the documentation section of the newly established Library and Museum of the War in Vincennes. By 1922, he was teaching on the subject at the Sorbonne.

Today, Renouvin is best known as the author of two magisterial studies, Les Origines immédiates de la guerre of 1925 and La Crise européenne et la Grande Guerre of 1934. The first focused on the weeks of the July Crisis between 28 June and 4 August 1914, the second on the years from 1904 to 1918. Writing at a time when the bitterness stirred by the conflict was still fresh, Renouvin fashioned work of monumental scope, empirical depth and serene tone. It was time, he wrote in the opening pages of Les Origines immédiates de la guerre, to set aside the political passions of the war years and apply the techniques of a cool and exacting scholarship. The narrative that followed was beautifully written and lucidly structured around the many decision-makers and theatres of action. Reviewing the book, Aubrey Leo Kennedy, who had been a correspondent for the Times in Paris and the Balkans before the war, observed that ‘no one can write except from his own point of view, but with this qualification, M. Renouvin is as impartial as a man can be.’

And yet, Anderson observes, Renouvin’s books were shaped – how could they not be? – by the emotion and politics of his time and milieu. French innocence of any share of responsibility for the outbreak of war was axiomatic. This, Renouvin pointed out in an article of 1931, was the unanimous conviction of ‘the majority of Frenchmen … To us it seems unnecessary to prove a commitment to peace that is part of ourselves.’ His accumulation of appointments and preferments made Renouvin something of an official historian, entrusted with defending the French government view. As secretary and later president of the commission charged with publishing the Documents diplomatiques français, he was among the foremost warriors in what the German historian Bernhard Schwertfeger called in 1929 ‘the world war of the documents’.

Renouvin was close to Raymond Poincaré, president of France between 1913 and 1920 and prime minister intermittently during the 1920s. After the cessation of hostilities, Poincaré’s record in office came under hostile scrutiny from French historians, most of them men of the left. They argued that his belligerence had helped to bring the war about and that he had falsified and concealed his own role in the crises of the prewar period. Anderson suggests that Renouvin became complicit in the effort to whitewash the former president’s record. Les Origines immédiates de la guerre was strikingly taciturn on the subject of Poincaré’s controversial visit to St Petersburg in the week before the outbreak of war, and La Crise européenne et la Grande Guerre airbrushed Poincaré’s name almost entirely from the narrative. Renouvin’s handling of Austrian policy on the Balkan peninsula in the prewar years was tendentious and one-sided; there was no mention of the expanded remit of the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1912, negotiated by Poincaré when he was foreign minister; German provocations were itemised in detail, whereas those of the Entente powers were not. As Anderson observes, there was a tension between evidence and inference: Renouvin’s narrative suggested a war of complex inception involving interlocking decisions in different locations, yet the conclusion assigned ‘undivided responsibility’ to the Central Powers.

The tension was even more pronounced in the work of Luigi Albertini, sometime editorial secretary, director, managing editor and two-fifths owner of Corriere della Sera, which he built into the most influential newspaper in prewar Italy. In 1911, he was a cheerleader for the unprovoked Italian assault on Ottoman Libya, an escapade that helped to trigger the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Once the world war was underway, Albertini and his paper goaded the Italian government into entering the conflict on the side of the Entente. Throughout the bloodbath that ensued, he was promoter-in-chief of Italy’s incompetent and brutal supreme commander, Marshal Luigi Cadorna. In the turbulence following the end of the war, Albertini backed Mussolini and campaigned for the ‘absorption’ of the fascists into the Italian constitutional order. Only after the abduction and murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 by Mussolini’s henchmen did he part ways with the fascists and exit from public life, though hardly under heroic circumstances. At Mussolini’s behest, the other part-owners of Corriere della Sera paid handsomely for Albertini’s share of the paper. He retired to an enormous estate outside Rome, where he lived in luxury and spent his days travelling and writing history until his death in 1941.

Le Origini della Guerra del 1914, published in three volumes in Milan in 1942 and 1943, remains the key point of departure for serious research. To a greater extent than Renouvin, Albertini offered a genuinely multipolar analysis of the aetiology of the Great War. The perspective was distinctively Italian (and highly original) in its close attention to developments on the Balkan peninsula, where Italian and Austrian geopolitical ambitions had long been in conflict. Albertini benefited here from the collaboration of Luciano Magrini, one of the most gifted journalists of his era, who managed to track down and interview many of the Serbian and Austrian participants in the crisis of 1914. In Albertini’s account, there is plenty of blame to go around: the official justifications offered by all the belligerent governments for their respective entries into the war are denounced as tissues of lies and manipulations; the Serbian connection to the Sarajevo assassinations receives extensive critical scrutiny, as does the ‘fatal’ Russian decision to mobilise for war on 30 July, well before Germany. Albertini also reproached France for urging Russia into the conflict. And yet he assigned blame for the outbreak of war squarely to the Central Powers and above all to Germany, whose support for Austria had been decisive. It was in Berlin, Albertini insisted, without actually making the case, that ‘all the acts and all the roles in the tragedy were settled in advance.’ Anderson notes the subtle modulations in the book’s tone: the missteps of the Entente powers are narrated ‘more in sorrow than anger’, those of Germany and Austria ‘more in anger than sorrow’.

In​ a critique of Renouvin’s La Crise européenne, the historian Jules Isaac noted that the placid surface of ‘objective’ historical prose could be deceptive. Might it not be better, he wrote

that a work of history not seem too objective, since it never is … I begin to worry when a historical exposition, by its even, bare, ‘scientific’ tone, gives the reader the illusion of certainty: I ask myself where the author is hiding, for that he certainly has to do, and by looking carefully one always finds him, as in those picture-riddles where a sheep’s fleece, insidiously drawn, contains the silhouette of a shepherd.

Nowhere does the quest for the hidden author lead along more convoluted paths than in the case of Fritz Fischer. In a suite of studies published between 1961 and 1979, Fischer argued first that Germany had uniquely aggressive war aims in 1914, and later that the country’s political leadership had deliberately engineered the outbreak of war, and even planned it in advance, initiating a countdown in 1912 that expired in the summer of 1914.

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Fischer’s books. Since 1945, a consensus had been settling among European historians – led by Renouvin, among others – that blame for the outbreak of war should be shared out among the chief belligerent powers. Fischer triggered a paradigm shift. He and his collaborators and assistants dug more widely and deeply than any previous researchers into the German archival record to construct a portrait of an elite in the grip of paranoia and aggression. Particularly resonant, in the context of the cultural revolution underway on West German university campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, was his increasingly shrill insistence on the continuities between the Wilhelmine empire and the Third Reich. The Fischer thesis became intertwined with the arguments of a younger generation of German historians for whom the disasters of modern German history were rooted in the lopsided political and economic development of its society since the mid-19th century. The burst of critical energy released by these reorientations in turn converged with the quest for a fuller reckoning with the Nazi past. In the process, adherence to the Fischer thesis became a marker of probity and moral rectitude. ‘The Fischer controversy of the 1960s was always more than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and lasting, making Germany a model democracy and its people the most peace-loving in Europe.’

Fischer’s ascent to the status of moral icon appears strange, even grotesque, if we set it against the background of his early life. As a teenager he joined the militantly antisemitic Bund Oberland, receiving paramilitary training in his native Franconia. He took part in the Deutscher Tag of September 1923, a rally in Nuremberg organised by the Nazis and other far-right groups, two months before the Munich putsch. In 1926, he joined the militant student association Uttenruthia Verband, which offered a mix of antisemitism, weapons training, homage to Hitler and propaganda work. He signed up with the paramilitary SA in November 1933 and the Nazi Party on 1 May 1937, as soon as the ban on the admission of new members was lifted.

Fischer had first studied theology, not history. He was drawn to the teachings of the German Christians, a network of groups within German Protestantism aligned with the principles of Nazism. German Christian theologians argued for the application of racial principles to religious life, the severing of the New Testament from the Old and the acknowledgment of Christ’s Aryan racial heritage. But by 1936, Fischer’s interests were shifting, as Anderson puts it, ‘from articles of faith to questions of power’, and he applied to switch from theology to history. Frustrated by academic bureaucracy and finding it hard to make ends meet on his postdoctoral stipend, he turned in 1939 to the Institute for the History of the New Germany, set up by the Hitler regime and run by the vehement antisemite Walter Frank. Fischer proposed a research project on ‘external enemies’ of the Reich in adjacent neutral countries, to be coupled with a study of ‘inner enemies’ in the form of the parochial-quietist and cosmopolitan-universalist strands of German Protestantism. He was rewarded with a monthly stipend that continued until he was called up for military service in the anti-aircraft arm of the Luftwaffe. His appointment in 1942 to a post teaching history at the University of Hamburg was a political preferment made possible mainly by support from the Nazis who ran Frank’s institute. In a letter he wrote to Frank’s deputy, Erich Botzenhart, while he was serving on an anti-aircraft battery in Berlin in 1941, Fischer wrote that he was proud to be lecturing his unit on themes of crucial importance such as ‘Jewish penetration into German culture and politics in the last two hundred years, Jewish blood in the English upper class and the role of Jewry in the economy and society of the USA’.

Fischer appears to have removed the texts of these lectures, along with much else, from the Nachlass he bequeathed to the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. After the war, he lied extravagantly about his past, removing all Nazi and völkisch associations from the picture. He couldn’t deny his membership of the party, which was a matter of public record, but claimed he had been driven to join by economic need. There were, Anderson concedes, other gravely compromised historians, such as Theodor Schieder and Werner Conze, who remained silent about their roles in the formulation of wartime Nazi plans for the occupied East. But Fischer was a public figure in a way that they were not, celebrated internationally as an emblem of integrity and civic courage. His career thus came to embody what Anderson calls ‘a performative self-contradiction’ marked by interlocking reflexes of exposure and concealment. These personal traits need not, of course, cast doubt on the integrity of Fischer’s work as a historian. But Anderson observes that his works, though diligent and painstaking, reveal ‘the same propensity to omission and exaggeration, a loose joint of mind or character’. Always an energetic self-promoter, Fischer acquired an evangelical confidence in the truth of his claims. ‘There does not exist a single document in the world,’ he declared in 1965, ‘that could weaken the central truth that in July 1914 a will for war existed solely and exclusively [‘einzig und allein’] on the German side.’

Of​ all the works produced by the sextet, Fischer’s had the deepest impact, both on public memory and on the historiographical landscape, because they meshed in a way that those of the others did not with broader processes of cultural change. And it was in turn thanks to Fischer, Anderson believes, that complex multi-nation studies of the kind written by Renouvin, Albertini, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt and others made way for the single-country studies (France and the Origins of the First World War, Russia and the Origins and so on) that dominated from the 1970s onwards. Why waste time on the complex prewar interactions of the powers if the issue of responsibility had already been resolved? It remained merely to show how the other states had been drawn into the snares of a German war.

Neither Keith Wilson nor Paul W. Schroeder published a major monograph on the origins of the First World War, but both wrote articles and book chapters that pushed hard at parts of the post-Fischer war-guilt consensus. Wilson’s Policy of the Entente (1985) was a collection of partly overlapping essays whose cumulative thrust was against the received view that prewar British foreign policy was driven by the need to counter the threat posed by German aggression. Wilson proposed that the men around the then foreign secretary, Edward Grey, were focused chiefly on the security of the British Empire (and especially northern India), which was seen as vulnerable to Russian predation. The British Entente with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) were not designed as a counter-balance to German power, but intended, first, to loosen the link between France and Russia and then, when this failed, to tether St Petersburg to a settlement that would minimise the risk of Russian aggression on the British imperial periphery. Britain faced a choice: it could appease Germany and oppose Russia, or it could oppose Germany and appease Russia. Concerned above all with the integrity of the empire, Grey and the coterie of liberal imperialists around him chose to do the latter. From this it followed that Britain went to war in 1914 less to defend France against German aggression than to maintain the entente with Russia. In other articles, Wilson challenged the image of Grey as the golden boy of liberal memory, depicting him as a geopolitically aggressive and manipulative figure prepared to deceive colleagues and the British public alike about the true direction of his policy.

Schroeder is best known for The Transformation of European Politics (1994), a magisterial account of international relations before and after the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, but he also wrote brilliant shorter reflections on aspects of the origins debate. In ‘Embedded Counterfactuals and World War One as an Unavoidable War’, Schroeder critiqued the consensus view that Germany and Austria caused their own isolation through their egregious international behaviour. On the contrary, he argued, the Germans – however irritating their parvenu posturing might on occasion have been to their rivals – were playing by the same rules as everyone else. It was the system that was at fault, not the players. In another essay, the wonderfully titled ‘Stealing Horses to Great Applause’, Schroeder focused on shifts in the system’s logic, arguing that in the last decades before the war, the powers gradually abandoned the principle that Europe was a continental ecology in which every state had a role to play. One consequence of this was the growing conviction among the Entente powers that Austria-Hungary was an anachronistic entity whose interests did not command international respect and whose extinction could be contemplated with equanimity. This was a potentially dangerous mutation, because it removed Vienna’s incentives for trusting the system and amplified the risk of impetuous solo initiatives.

Neither Wilson nor Schroeder escapes criticism, but Anderson warms especially to these two members of his sextet. For this there are several reasons. First, he admires analytically driven writing. Evocation and synthesis are all well and good, but analysis is where the hard work is done. Second: the two men were laconic and self-effacing and refused to play to the gallery. Anderson respects that, just as he abhors the vainglorious gyrations of Fischer. Third: for Anderson, ‘system-level’ explanations are always to be preferred to those constructed at ‘unit-level’ (though he never gives a persuasive account of how a ‘system-level’ explanation might actually work). Here, too, Wilson and Schroeder both get high marks, though the case is harder to make for Wilson. Anderson praises a chapter in Wilson’s Problems and Possibilities (2003) – a slightly scrappy book bereft of scholarly apparatus – for impartially and correctly ‘ascribing imperialist drives to all the Great Powers in precipitating the carnage’.

Schroeder was an American conservative, not a man of the left like Wilson. But in him Anderson detects a kindred sensibility, based in a shared hostility to liberal idealism, disgust at the adventurism of US foreign policy and dismay at the expansion of Nato ‘to the borders of a shrunken, chaotic and humiliated Russia’. Anderson met Schroeder at UCLA in 2010 and the two men began an unexpected email and Skype friendship which lasted until Schroeder’s death in December 2020. This book is rich in critical appraisals of personality – the haughty grandeur of Renouvin, in whose presence his former student Pierre Nora could not remember having sat down; the braggadocio of Albertini; the sinuous manoeuvring of Fischer – but in the final chapter on Schroeder Anderson edges towards eulogy. Schroeder’s ‘strong moral sensibility’, Anderson writes, ‘impelled him to intervene publicly on political issues of his time’. His ‘unswerving decency’ drove him to ask ever more radical questions of his own society, to the point, according to Anderson, where he began to read works by Marxist scholars and to contemplate with equanimity ‘the notion that capitalism might be nearing its end’. Schroeder may have been a conservative, but he would ‘prove more humane in outlook than many a self-declared liberal’. It is at moments like this, when he slips, like Sainte-Beuve, from literary to moral inquiry, that Anderson steps out most boldly from behind the smooth surfaces of his own prose.

Anderson​ offers many criticisms of The Sleepwalkers, my own attempt to make sense of the problem of 1914. The book’s title is wrong, for a start, because the actors of 1914 were awake, not asleep. He takes issue with my presentist analogies. In my work on the 1848 Revolutions, he notes a disturbing sympathy for left-liberals and the ‘liberal metapolitics’ of modern parliamentary representation. Some of these grumbles (analogies, liberals) raise issues of real import, but one higher-order complaint stands out. This relates to my book’s preference for a narrative saturated with contingency over the analysis of systemic causal drivers. Among the missing causal drivers Anderson identifies, the two most important relate to the place of the Balkans in the international system and the presence of imperialism as a force in inter-state relations.

It is absolutely true, as Anderson points out, that the Balkans occupied an anomalous place in the European international system. Because the Ottoman Empire was excluded from the peace settlement concluded at Vienna in 1815, the Balkan peninsula, then still mostly under Ottoman rule, lived under a geopolitical ozone hole. Anderson first articulated this intuition in Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), where he noted that the Balkans were separated from the rest of the continent by their ‘whole anterior evolution’ and identified this as the anomaly that ignited war in 1914. I don’t doubt the value of this insight, and my book would be better if I had thought harder about how to integrate it. But the problem with remote causes of this type is that it is difficult to endow them with the traction that would make them of use in explaining why a continental conflagration was sparked on the Balkan peninsula in 1914, but not in 1911, 1908, 1905, 1878 or earlier. To do that you need to assemble other layers of causation: political change across the Balkan states, Austrian security dilemmas, the Italian war on Libya, mutations in Russian thinking on the Balkans and the Turkish Straits, the changing character of the Franco-Russian Alliance and so on. These causal layers unfold in parallel but in different timeframes. Acknowledging them does not imply a retreat into pure contingency, because each incorporates structural features and path dependencies of various kinds. It seems to me in any case a mistake to think of ‘structures’ as hard and unyielding and events as soft and malleable – the opposite can also be true. But Anderson knows this. In Lineages of the Absolutist State he urged Marxist scholars to attend more closely to the reciprocal relations between ‘abstract’ models and ‘concrete’ instances: ‘There is no plumb-line between necessity and contingency in historical explanation … There is merely that which is known … and that which is not known.’

The same problem of timescales and specificity arises in relation to ‘imperialism’, which is undeniably important as a fundamental pressure on events, but both too temporally extended and too ubiquitous to explain the specific trains of events that led out of peace and into war. Anderson makes an awkward attempt to solve it by invoking Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which proposed a linkage between the outbreak of war and ‘a deeper structural feature of capitalism’, namely its propensity to ‘convert economic competition between firms into military conflict between states’ by means of an ‘uneven development’ that necessarily deepens tensions and instabilities. To mesh the argument with the mechanisms that eventually triggered war in 1914, Anderson proposes that we admix Lenin with a ‘sociology of imperialism’ of the type advanced by Schumpeter, for whom imperialism was ‘an aristocratic atavism’ tending to generate military aggression and expansionist pressures. You can tighten this clunking Leninist-Schumpeterian gearing further, he suggests, if you add to it the notion of the ‘Austrian anomaly’ advanced by the American Laurence Lafore in The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War One (1965). Now we have a differential transmission that can capture the epochal energies of imperialism and focus them on the south-eastern periphery of Europe.

There are several problems here. The first is that by Lafore’s own account, the ‘Austrian anomaly’ cannot carry the explanatory weight Anderson proposes to give it. It is true that Austria-Hungary was in some respects an incongruous entity. As a congeries of nationalities ruled by an ancient dynasty, Lafore claimed, Austria was unable to function like a modern nation-state. It had no ethnic majority, only minorities. Whereas the other powers engaged in ‘decorous meddling’ in the affairs of small states, Austria-Hungary was ‘unique in being a Great Power in whose affairs small ones meddled’. This may be true, but can it explain the outbreak of war? Lafore himself wrote that the Austria-Hungary of 1914 was ‘still well-governed, prosperous, and perfectly solid’. Nor did he see its anomalousness as in any way diminishing the importance of contingency. On the contrary: ‘If either Sazonov [the Russian foreign minister] or Berchtold [his Austrian colleague] had behaved differently, on any of several occasions,’ he wrote, ‘the course of events [in July 1914] would certainly have been different.’ And perhaps the Austrian anomaly was not so anomalous after all. Lafore also spoke of ‘the anomalies of the Russian and German states’. The ‘problem of Austria-Hungary,’ he argued, ‘was in some ways comparable to that of Great Britain.’

The notion that there were ‘normal’ ethnically coherent states and one anomalous outlier raises further questions, because the argument from anomaly can only be made to work if it can be shown that Austria’s behaviour as a power was also anomalous in a way that helps to explain the outbreak of war. It is striking how close Anderson comes at this point to replicating – and implicitly endorsing – the trend of Entente thinking before the war, which came to see Austria-Hungary as an obsolete and dispensable element in the continental system. By contrast, Schroeder observed in an article from 1972 that it was precisely the readiness of the Entente powers to write off Austria-Hungary that helped pave the way to disaster in 1914. Preserving a system based on the balance of power, Schroeder declared, ought to mean ‘preserving all the essential actors in it’. This is an important point because, for Anderson, one of the principal roots of the world’s current troubles lies in the triumph of a state-killing liberal idealism over the quest for a balance of power based on reciprocal self-restraint.

Disputing Disaster is a book unlike any other on the 1914 debate. Anderson digs deep into, between and around the works of his subjects to expose the taproots that feed each project. The result is a monument to a lifetime of reading and writing propelled by the conviction that something is at stake. Fellow Marxists will admire the author’s forensic panache and enjoy the beams of utopian effulgence that dart through the occasional chinks in his text. But even readers who are not ‘unreconstructed Jacobins’ (Anderson’s self-description) will find in it a wealth of sharp and compelling reflections on how and why historians argue as they do, why they rethink, abandon or double down on their positions, and how politics and emotion flow into the writing of history and back out of it into the world.