Excavations

To interpret the reign of Peter Mogila with precision is difficult. It has been argued that Mogila sought to create an "occidental Orthodoxy," and thereby to disentangle Orthodoxy from its "obsolete" oriental setting. The notion is plausible. But however Mogila's motives are interpreted, his legacy is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, he was a great man who accomplished a great deal. And in his own way he was even devout. Under his guidance and rule the Orthodox Church in West Russia emerged from that state of disorientation and disorganization wherein it had languished ever since the catastrophe at Brest. On the other hand, the Church he led out of this ordeal was not the same. Change ran deep. There was a new and alien spirit, the Latin spirit in everything. Thus, Mogila's legacy also includes a drastic "Romanization" of the Orthodox Church. He brought Orthodoxy to what might be called a Latin "pseudomorphosis." True, he found the Church in ruins and had to rebuild, but he built a foreign edifice on the ruins. He founded a Roman Catholic school in the Church, and for generations the Orthodox clergy was raised in a Roman Catholic spirit and taught theology in Latin. He "Romanized" the liturgies and thereby "Latinized" the mentality and psychology, the very soul of the Orthodox people. Mogila's "internal toxin," so to speak, was far more dangerous than the Unia. The Unia could be resisted, and had been resisted, especially when there were efforts to enforce it. But Mogila's "crypto-Romanism" entered silently and imperceptibly, with almost no resistance. It has of course often been said that Mogila's "accretions" were only external, involving form not substance. This ignores the truth that form shapes substance, and if an unsuitable form does not distort substance, it prevents its natural growth. This is the meaning of "pseudomorphosis." Assuming a Roman garb was an alien act for orthodoxy. And the paradoxical character of the whole situation was only increased when, along with the steady "Latinization" of the inner life of the Church, its canonical autonomy was steadfastly maintained.

- Father Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology (1937)

I'll warn you right off that the subject of this post--the transformation in Russian Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century--is inside baseball even for me; I'm no more than an interested amateur, and left the church years ago. But the worldview implied in the idea that Orthodoxy was corrupted by a malignant Latin "pseudomorphosis," as many people have recognized, is of fundamental importance to anyone who wants to understand the development of Russian thinking in general and national consciousness in particular. (It is important that Florovsky's characterization, which was perhaps deliberately provocative, has not been popular, even if its ideas have been.)

A brief, textbook, historical overview. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire (and specifically after the Council of Florence in the 1430s-'40s, which briefly united the Eastern and Western churches), the Russian Orthodox community ruptured its ties with the other Orthodox churches and retreated into itself. Over a period of two centuries Russian Orthodoxy developed in what some have characterized as an anti-intellectual, ritualistic, and superstitious direction; illiteracy and ignorance of basic doctrine were, apparently, widespread among the clergy. During the reigns of Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645-1676) and Peter the Great (1682-1725), theologians and clerics educated in the Ukraine came to Russia and initiated a series of "modernizing" church reforms, the most famous of which provoked a schism in the church. These Ukrainians were trained at the Kiev Mohyla Academy, which was organized along Jesuit lines by Petro Mohyla in the early part of the century, in the context of the intense interconfessional debate in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

This narrative has been the standard one since at least the nineteenth century--and Florovsky only reformulates it slightly. Muscovite churchmen, he says, were aware of the need for reform; the crucial question was whether it would be a Latin or a "Slavono-Greek." The latter proved inadequate, and the former won out, bringing to Russia the fateful pseudomorphosis. Florovsky, curiously enough, does not seem to posit the retention of traditional Muscovite religion as either a possible or a desirable alternative. Everything, for him, boils down to what was truer to the organic essence--the "soil"--of Russian religion. (He is unapologetically associated with Toynbee and Spengler.)

But this is an unsustainable position. What "soil" could there be in a national religious tradition whose apocryphal founding myth involves a barbarian king rejecting Islam and Judaism because he likes wine and pork and accepting Orthodoxy because of its pretty churches? Centuries of habit do not turn accidents into substance. The truth is, Russian religion--and Russian enthonational consciousness--has always been sustained and nourished by the grafting of foreign tissues onto its body. It thrives when it is forced to confront and absorb the alien and unfamiliar; it stagnates when it turns around and insists that it was always one and indivisible, and must be kept that way at all costs.

The words of a Russian writer express this better than I ever could:

Kostomarov once rightly noted that the "Schism hunted for tradition and attempted to adhere as closely as possible to it; yet the Schism was a new phenomenon, not the old life." Therein lies the Schism's fatal paradox: it did not embody the past, but rather a dream about Old Russia. The Schism represents mourning for an unrealized and unrealizable dream. The "Old Believer" [Starover] is a very new spiritual type.

Division and split wholly constitute the Schism. Born in disillusionment, it lived and was nourished by this feeling of loss and deprivation, not by any feeling of power and possession. Possessing nothing, losing everything, the Schism, more with nostalgia and torment than with routine and custom, could only wait and thirst, flee and escape. The Schism was excessively dreamy, suspicious, and restive. There is something romantic about the Schism.

The writer? Georges Florovsky.

The Castle of Printing

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian.

If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095, the era of the first Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards. There is no other circumstance in the work that can lead us to guess at the period in which the scene is laid: the names of the actors are evidently fictitious, and probably disguised on purpose: yet the Spanish names of the domestics seem to indicate that this work was not composed until the establishment of the Arragonian Kings in Naples had made Spanish appellations familiar in that country. The beauty of the diction, and the zeal of the author (moderated, however, by singular judgment) concur to make me think that the date of the composition was little antecedent to that of the impression. Letters were then in their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators, and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was his view, he has certainly acted with signal address. Such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour.
- Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), preface to the first edition

This is certainly a strange way to begin a book about giant ghosts and spooky castles. The idea that one should preface a book with a disavowal of authorship is, of course, an old one; Cervantes himself did it. But this opening gambit is generally taken as an opportunity to reinforce--not to undermine--the tone and setting of the work. After all, the European imagination had more than its share of mysterious Moors and manuscripts found in Saragossa, and could have provided the text with a more fitting backdrop.

Instead, we get an "ancient family" and a few pages of vague textological speculation--what amounts to a parody of a scholarly apparatus. (Perhaps, as the introduction notes, this could be an echo of the heated debates over the Ossian poems.) At issue here is the gap between the story's actual date, its date of writing, and its date of printing; what establishes it as literature is the separation of the first from the second and third. If the style is the "purest Italian," it cannot be the Sicilian dialect of a medieval chronicle of events--which means that the text, in the messy world of pretend authorship, was composed with intention.

In fact, by rearranging these dates, Walpole is able to make the book into a foil for the familiar Enlightenment narrative of printing driving out ignorance and superstition. (Hence the reference to "turning their own arms on the innovators.") If the Gothic is really about things rather than characters or events (as, it seems, many people have argued), then the preface is about a physical object challenging the deterministic causation implied by the printing narrative. Printing leaves room, it seems to say, for dreamlike fantasies as well as the moralistic realist fables left behind by the withdrawal of superstition from literature.

It seems somehow crucial that the very end of the play contains two references to written documents:

Jerome blushed, and continued. “For three months Lord Alfonso was wind-bound in Sicily. [blah blah blah]. What could a friendless, helpless woman do? Would her testimony avail? - yet, my lord, I have an authentic writing - ”

“It needs not,” said Manfred; “the horrors of these days, the vision we have but now seen, all corroborate thy evidence beyond a thousand parchments. Matilda’s death and my expulsion - ”

.... In the morning Manfred signed his abdication of the principality.

On the one hand, an "authentic writing" is unnecessary to establish a legal claim founded ultimately on the dream-logic of the Gothic novel. On the other, an abdication needs to be signed anyway! The introduction to my Oxford Classics edition claims, rather fancifully, that The Castle of Otranto is actually about English bourgeois anxiety over entailed property. Scenes like this make the interpretation look plausible.

So how do we reconcile this fascination with handwritten authenticity with the book's interventions in the debate over the nature of print? One way is to interpret the former as a parodic way of affirming the claims of the materialists: the signed abdication links the universe of fantasy to that of verifiable, evidence-based historiography, completely muddying the waters between superstition and science. Yet it may still be a question of oppositions. The parchment and the authentic document belong to the Gothic era. They are of a piece with the castle, while the printed "translation" belongs to the neoclassical and the modern. These two interpretations don't seem to be reconcilable--as with so many things in this frustrating and convoluted novel.

The Foucauldian Eye

In the Jesuit colleges, one still found an organization that was at once binary and unified; the classes, which might comprise up to two or three hundred pupils, were subdivided into groups of ten; each of these groups, with its 'decurion,' was placed in a camp, Roman or Carthaginian; each 'decury' had its counterpart in the opposing camp. The general form was that of war and rivalry; work, apprenticeship and classification were carried out in the form of the joust, through the confrontation of two armies; the contribution of each pupil was inscribed in this general duel; it contributed to the victory or a defeat of a whole camp; and the pupils were assigned a place that corresponded to the function of each individual and to his value as a combatant in the unitary group of his 'decury' (Rochemonteix, 51ff). It should be observed moreover that this Roman comedy made it possible to link, to the binary exercises of rivalry, a spatial disposition inspired by the legion, with rank, hierarchy, pyramidal supervision. One should not forget that, generally speaking, the Roman model, at the Enlightenment, played a dual role: in its republican aspect, it was the very embodiment of liberty; in its military aspect, it was the ideal schema of discipline. The Rome of the eighteenth century and of the Revolution was the Rome of the Senate, but it was also that of the legion; it was the Rome of the Forum, but it was also that of the camps. Up to the empire, the Roman reference transmitted, somewhat ambiguously, the juridical ideal of citizenship and the technique of disciplinary methods.
- Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Foucault makes this suggestion--one of those aperçus which make it easy to see why he is so admired--and then leaves it at that. It interrupts the flow of the narrative, to be sure, and in general Foucault is not very fond of the "A was influenced by B's ideas on X" style of intellectual history. There's no real reason why a history of discipline should delve into the pervasive Roman posturing of the eighteenth century, or, indeed, into its implications for "citizenship." Yet it might nevertheless be worth asking whether something connects the two in any integral way.

Contractarian-republican citizenship appears in Discipline and Punish primarily as the abstract foil to the material functioning of disciplinary apparatuses. It is what "loses," or at least ends up irrelevant, in the carceral system. One Roman antecedent, in other words, ends up driving out the other. In some ways, this is a fine argument--aesthetically, these two modulations of the Roman heritage seem to contradict one another, and when they are appealed to it is usually in radically different registers.

If, however, we follow a line of thinking first sketched out by Michael Warner in the early '90s, it becomes possible to identify a different sort of link. Warner suggests that the public sphere, with all its implicitly and explicitly Roman rhetorical tropes, was founded upon a principle of surveillance (of public figures, state agencies, etc.). The Foucauldian word-choice is never followed up on, but the meaning is actually quite closely related. Not only does the public sphere employ the same sorts of investigative techniques as other disciplinary apparatuses, it also depends on classification, constructions and dispositions of space, and particularly a sort of panopticism.

Of course, the number of categories at the disposal of the public sphere was limited, principally to the various permutations of the tyranny/liberty (and, in spatial terms, East/West) opposition. The Roman model, in both the case of the camp and that of the public sphere, was only an imperfect prototype for a coming carceral system. In the political sense, that system was democracy as it was built and imagined by late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans. The melding of the public-sphere and political-juridical apparatuses meant that the policing function of the former became generalized to every level of society, distributed as much within state agencies as within those of "civil society." The discourse of the civic, which is effectively the only constant ideological foundation of modern democracies, conceives of the citizen as constantly monitoring and shaping the activities of the government and of politicians; the very same rhetoric needed only slight modification to become applicable to the Soviet party-state. (Naturally, political delinquency serves very much the same function as Foucault's delinquency: it is a conceptual space in which various threatening political actors are enclosed in order to make them useful to the dominant political order).

I've tried out the exercise above not because I think Foucauldian interpretations of politics are either novel or fashionable, but because I think the internal structure of his ideas is appealing in a way that transcends his subject matter. The decline of Foucauldian scholarship over the past decade (which has proceeded despite the English publication of his brilliant and under-mined lectures) has not been a very thoughtful process; too often the questions we flatter ourselves with asking in a new way (about materiality, for instance, which seems to be the topic du jour) have already been asked by Foucault. I look forward to the day, ten or twenty years hence, when we'll be able once again to lean on his work without askance glances.

The Functionalist Delusion

The Russian tsar was not the master of slaves. Rather, the language of mastery and servitude was a habitual part of everyday Muscovite political expression, a means of polite interaction. Finally, the foreigners misunderstood the meaning of this discourse by imposing an idealized concept of slavery on it. To them the master was all-powerful and the slave powerless. Yet for the Muscovites the language of servitude implied mutual obligations: the "master" protected the "slave" and the latter served the former.

The underpinnings of Muscovite autocracy, then, are to be found not in natural slavery but rather in the deep structure of the Muscovite worldview and the practical utility of a patrimonial state. Unlike the Europeans, who believed government should be limited so that men could perfect themselves, Muscovites held that the rule of the tsar had to be nearly untrammeled if the sinful ways of men were to be checked. But the fit of this model to the Muscovite worldview was not the only anchor of Russian political culture. The patrimonial state also provided the Muscovite elite with an effective means of maintaining and expanding their realm. It allowed the Russian court to avoid dangerous political infighting, to extract fiscal resources from the tsar's subjects, to mobilize the manpower necessary to staff the administration and army, and to resolve conflicts involved in state-building. In the end, Muscovite rule was not, as the foreigners thought, a faulty, deviant, or illegitimate form of government imposed by a ruthless king, but rather a logical adaptive strategy that permitted the Muscovite elite to build an empire under the most trying of conditions.
- Marshall Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748

Arguments like this one are becoming increasingly common in Russian--and presumably other non-Western--historiography. Confronted with the awkward necessity of choosing between a politically untenable determinism (Russians will always be slaves!) and its factually indefensible denial (Russians have always had a functioning civil society!), historians in these fields have understandably found the "functionalist" line of thought particularly appealing. The antinormative pluralism characteristic of the twentieth-century humanities in general combines here with a vaguely Rortyan pragmatism, yielding something nearly anyone can agree with without compromising herself.

Or at least that's how it's supposed to go. Unfortunately, functionalism is satisfying neither from a historical-empirical perspective nor from a political one. On the one hand, it is a convenient way of telling factually-irrefutable just-so stories, since the very survival of the Muscovite state is held to constitute prima facie evidence that autocracy "worked." Given the impossibility of true historical counterfactuals, there can be no question of arguing that it could have worked "better" if things had been otherwise. (Implicit here is a contrast with Poland, where it "didn't work"--but where the standard of living today is probably much higher.) This means that as an engine of explanation, functionalism is as useless as narrowly-conceived homo oeconomicism.

On the other hand, from a political point of view functionalism is more, not less, problematic than either of the alternatives it was supposed to escape. Both Cold Warriorism and ideological "revisionism" at least acknowledge that autocracy is in some way a problematic or contestable condition. Functionalists, regardless of their intentions, end up appropriating the view of the Empire as it is conceived, defined, and imagined by the state. In effect, the claim that autocracy worked because it permitted the effective administration and control of internal conflict as well as external expansion is identical to the claim that the Great Terror worked because it drove the Trotskyite-Zinovyevite counterrevolutionaries out of the Party. It is the crudest and most naive possible conflation of justification and results.

Perhaps one explanation for the popularity of functionalism is the so-called "state school" and its hypnotic repetition of arguments about "challenges facing the state," "gathering of the Horde lands," and so on. State-school historians have been particularly influential in the West, where they were never rejected for ideological reasons. Due to the early exposure of Western historians of Russia to their work, some sort of identification may have taken place between the voice of Solovyev and that of "the Russian people" as a whole. That's all speculation--but it seems important to ask where such an obviously flawed explanatory technique could have possibly come from.

In attacking the functionalist argument I am, of course, simply continuing my fairly rudimentary critique of prevailing trends in the field. (Admittedly they are less prevailing than they were ten or fifteen years ago.) What brings functionalism together with the other themes I've written about, though, is its implicit endorsement of a kind of irredentism about the Russia whose history we are writing. More than almost any other field, Russian history is plagued by confusion about its object of study: the whole landmass of northern Eurasia? The Russian state, in its various imperial incarnations? The culture and religion produced by people who identify with either of these? (Such confusion of course stretches back to the concept of Rus' itself.) Most historians, I think, think of it as an amorphous combination of all three, so that it becomes possible to construct a narrative in which Russia is both the subject and the object, the hero and the quest. This alone makes functionalism appealing, for it serves to define the joint between the three concepts. And that is why it must be abandoned if any reevaluation of the field is to take place.

The Problem of Dualism in Russian Historiography

But does difference really have to be sacrificed to equality? Is otherness always hierarchical? Is sameness the only alternative to inequality? These are the central questions of most studies of representation, the questions which the majority of authors answer with a resounding "no" and which they consequently present as moral challenges to their readers. According to Johannes Fabian, who is particularly interested in temporal otherness, "the absence of the Other from our Time has been his mode of presence in our discourse-as an object and victim. That is what needs to be overcome." (In this particular discourse "the Other" stands for non-Western humanity, and "our" refers to the West in general and anthropology-as Western science of the Other-in particular.) In Edward Said's characteristically clear formulation, "perhaps the most important task of all would be... to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective." The real question is thus not "whether" but "how," even though the "knowledge-is-power" assumption held by the same authors would seem to make the whole endeavor quixotic. The most determined effort to construct difference-cum-equality has come from postmodernist anthropologists who experiment with polyphony, dialog, and "coevalness" in an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to author texts without assuming authority over them." ... Like most Romantic paradigms, this one discerns the seeds (vestiges) of perfection on our side of the looking glass. If "ours" is the "expansive, aggressive, and oppressive" culture of "blood, death, and horror," "in which social and cultural continuities appear to be fractured and individuals, abruptly wrenched from their human and spiritual contexts, are no longer able to recognize or realize themselves"' (let alone respect differences), then our salvation lies in our others, who are by definition the opposite of death and alienation. Depending on who "we" are, this group may include peasants, women, or proletarians, but towering over them all are the remote "natives" who have the longest history of nobility and exoticism. ... If "knowledge and power are one," the native knew about it long before Foucault; if "the dogma of investigator neutrality" is "naive, unnecessary, and improbable," he does not want anything to do with it; and if the ultimate human value is the promotion of diversity and "affirmation of the Other," the native is sure to be its most passionate and consistent champion. ... Do all attempts to rescue the native from otherness-as-inferiority have to result in the triumphant return of the noble savage? Perhaps so. Perhaps this is an "eternal moment in human culture." Perhaps as long as we are not fully whole - and hence a little savage - someone else will always have to bear the burden of our backwardness.
- Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (1994)

It was, of course, an accident that Slezkine's book was published in the same year as Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe, yet the similarities between the two are still striking. Both books are now considered classics, models for how one ought to be writing Russian history nowadays. Both books deal with the troubling nature of cultural border-marking. Both books take up the question of the emergence and development of disciplines (especially anthropology) and reintegrate it into the broader story of culture. And--far and away the most important parallel--both are preoccupied with the vexing dilemmas of dualism. Wolff's Enlightenment creates itself as civilized by finding in Eastern Europe an ideal uncivilized Other; Slezkine's procession of Cossacks, bureaucrats, Romantics, Leninists, Stalinists, and environmentalists confronts the "small peoples" only to immediately impose upon them the dualistic raw/cooked baggage of its civilization. Whether framed as civilized/barbaric, Western/Eastern, enlightened/superstitious, or technological/natural (the list could be continued indefinitely), this opposition is always the same.

There is one difference between the two books. In Slezkine's case, it is always Russia that fits into the left-hand slot; in Wolff's, it is the West. Somehow, though, it doesn't seem to matter. What is truly important is the establishment of the opposition. Once that is done, Westerners and Slavophiles of all sorts can experiment with reversing the polarities as much as they like. While this recognition in itself is already substantial historiographical progress, both writers also show some Derridean awareness of the mechanism by which the opposition is constructed--a clear-cut case, if there ever was one, of the potentially beneficial influence of Big Theory. So now that we've read both books, we know how arbitrary the whole business is. It would seem that our work here is done.

Or is it? Here Slezkine seems to offer us a more honest evaluation. He can only throw up his hands helplessly at the impossibility of ever overcoming the dualism problem; we know exactly where the leaves cover the spike-pit, and yet we walk into it anyway. Meanwhile the need for resolution appears urgent (or, at least, as urgent as any historiographical problem can be). For one thing, dualism is a crippling, blinding disease that has kept Russian culture treading the same old hamster wheel for almost two centuries. (Remember that the "+" and "-" designations are arbitrary. Hence it is always possible to produce a polarity-reversal instead of a genuinely constructive response to any cultural fix.) For another, it is a particularly burning problem for historians, who have not yet managed to find an effective rhetorical frame to supersede the old "Russia is and always will be a tyranny"/"Russia is and has been amenable to reform" construct. The next historiographical advance will have to bury the problem for good.

Easy to prescribe, difficult to implement. I have been scratching my head for a while in search of some not-yet-exhausted theory to dragoon into tackling this problem, but I come up empty-handed. Perhaps a Latourian approach would be promising: in our reification of the dualist opposition, we ignore the fact that the rule has always been hybridity. But that almost leaves us back where we started. Alternatively we may be "materialists" and treat dualist ideas as mere idle fancies hovering over the firm, virile facts of grain prices and partible inheritance. But this would be unfashionable and not especially novel. A friend has suggested that Romantic notions of authenticity could be treated as being deliberately adopted in spite of the tacit acknowledgment that they are arbitrary projections. This seems productive, but tying it neatly to the slavophiles and their descendants appears problematic.

My project, so far as I have any sense of it at all yet, involves taking seriously the non-Russian intellectuals on Russian soil in the eighteenth century--especially those employed by the regime and permanently settled in Russia. For them, I'd wager, the whole question was much less well-defined, since their world had different contours. Whether their works can yield any solution to the dualism problem remains to be seen.

The Return of Narrative History

Manhattan sparkled in the crisp October night. Two large bonfires on the Common, thousands of candlelit windows, and a sea of ships' lanterns, like autumn fireflies, lit the tiny city and its harbor. Four weeks earlier, Major-General James Wolfe's British regulars had defeated a force under the marquis de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec, the key to French control of Canada and the interior of North America. When news reached New York City, Lieutenant-Governor James DeLancey declared Friday, October 12, 1759, a day of public thanksgiving.

Church bells across the city proclaimed the British victory. With colors flying, merchant ships and privateers on the East River answered the cannons of Fort George. Evening brought the illumination of the city and a flood of toasts: To His Majesty's health, To the might of British arms, To the heroes of Quebec, To final victory. The drawing rooms, coffeehouses, taverns, and streets of the city filled with joyous New Yorkers celebrating the greatest achievement of British arms in North America.
- Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading With the Enemy in Colonial New York (2008)

This book, for its two hundred twenty-odd pages of text, has fifty pages of footnotes. And they're not slim, lazy footnotes either: they show the signs of massive trans-Atlantic research, covering an extensive variety of works on colonial New York (a field in which one rarely sees more than one noteworthy monograph every couple of years). Even Julius Goebel and Raymond T. Naughton's massive Legal Procedure in Colonial New York is cited in detail. All this is neither surprising nor unusual in a scholarly monograph; what is surprising is that this is a work of what is called--usually with a sneer--"narrative history."

And indeed, the narrative here is well-structured, with character-driven momentum and verve. What's more, it follows on the heels of Jill Lepore's New York Burning, a remarkable book that is only slightly more coy about its fundamental narrative quality. This is disorienting. Previous narrative histories have run more in the vein of Peter Decker's 1964 Brink of Revolution, a paint-by-numbers account of how the nice Continental Congress got the nasty British to repeal their naughty Stamp Act. Such books--and their feel-good early '90s multicultural brethren--have by and large been conspicuously ignored by historians. Narrative is all well and good, the critique runs, but it encourages historical impressionism and conceals the conflicts behind the familiar watershed events. For real historians, analysis must take priority.

It would no doubt be premature to declare a revival in narrative history on the basis of Truxes and Lepore's books. But it is clear that they represent a break in the consensus. Both are sophisticated academic historians who could easily have written high-quality traditional monographs if they so chose. Their books are not the regurgitated Stephen Ambrose pap that passes for mid-eighteenth-century American history on the mass market--and yet they can appeal to a broad (albeit New Yorker-reading) audience. Their reconstructions of the New York of the period will undoubtedly also be useful for any future "analytic" historical work.

In a way, it is possible to look at this as a return to the historian's proper métier. We are, after all, by vocation storytellers and not Rankean robots. We talk so much about narratives and metanarratives and grand narratives that it is sometimes easy to forget what kinds of stories we might want to be telling. With all our excavations and demystifications, we may finally have arrived at the point where we are ready to tell some new stories--ones that we have, however incompletely, decontaminated of legend and stereotype. Even this manner of phrasing betrays a certain naivety, it's true: the "contamination" metaphor is hopelessly inadequate. But I can't deny that I am happier to read through the nuanced and wide-ranging story of Defying Empire than the narrative histories I have sneered at before. History is realizing its Herodotian ambition--becoming interesting.