Searching for the French Revolution, Mandela, and Beyond

It was the late 1960s as a political science graduate student at the University of Chicago and something of a “lost soul” that I found myself caught between the rigorous internal demand for academic achievement, which had driven me to that prestigious institution, and the belief that I would certainly be happier if I could be more like the hippies and other “free spirits” then subverting the very idea of achievement, instead putting forth the strange notion of “living in the moment.” In retrospect, my strategy for dealing with this dilemma may not make much sense, but at the time I seem to have thought that I could somehow gain entrance to the world of freedom through an academic examination of counterculture politics. Having been a marginal participant in the celebrated events at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, it seemed only natural to conceive of doing my doctoral dissertation on that self-proclaimed apostle of freedom, Abbie Hoffman. At the very least, I

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felt I had a good title. Having studied Erik Erikson’s work on Martin Luther at SUNY Binghamton as part of an undergraduate honors thesis on psychology and politics, I would call my dissertation “Young Man Yippie.”

I never did finish that dissertation, though I did do a lot of work on it, spending extensive time interviewing Hoffman himself and many of those close to him, including his mother. But I never could figure out how the chapters that I drafted on topics like “Work and Play in Building a Political Movement” could somehow be squeezed into the “literature gap” that a doctoral dissertation is supposed to fill. More to the point, four years of analysis helped me to finally come to terms with the emotional meaning of completing a PhD as a person whose parents had not, except perhaps for a night-school course or two, gone beyond high school. Both my American-born and Bronx-raised parents were children of Polish Jewish immigrants.

Having put aside my Abbie Hoffman dissertation in the mid-1970s, it was not until 1979 that I felt I was “ready” to resume academic work. But, this time, I thought that I would be better served picking a subject area from which I was more personally removed than recent American cultural politics. I don’t know how many times I sat biting my nails at my desk thinking about how absurd it was to try to write about someone who supposedly stood for doing what you feel like doing when writing that damn thesis was the last thing I felt like doing. This time around I would study, of all things, the French Revolution, though I knew almost no French. In the fall of 1979, I enrolled as a history graduate student at UCLA.

But, there was a method to this madness, at least in my own mind. For the link between the political polarization and violence that emerged in 1960s America and the polarization and violence that characterized the French Revolution was seemingly baked into the semantics of modern politics. The connection was that the use of the key terms “left” and “right” originated in the first revolutionary assembly of 1789, when the most fervid revolutionaries began to congregate to the left of the speaker’s rostrum while the more conservative representatives gathered to its right. Soon the two factions began to be identified as the “left” and the “right.” In search, it would seem, of a sense of some continuity, I leaped naively from the commonplace idea that the French Revolution witnessed the birth of modern politics to the wild and quite improbable idea that

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if I could somehow understand what had led to polarization and violence in the French Revolution, I would then be able to understand what led to the polarization and violence of the 1960s!

Though this idea may have helped jump-start me back into the academic world, it was quickly relegated to the wayside as I enthusiastically embraced the exciting new role of historian, enthralled by the quest to absorb all the particularities and details of the Revolution; matters that, I felt, tended to be of minimal interest to what I saw as the theoretically-obsessed political science discipline that I had abandoned. I had finally, in my mid-30s, “found myself,” and for the next 30 years, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that I ate, slept, and breathed the French Revolution. As a French revolutionary historian and the author of a completed doctoral dissertation, I maintained the interest in political psychology that I had embraced as an undergraduate and that had continued through my political science graduate student years. Though usually not directly focused on psychohistory, everything that I published on the Revolution was informed by the conviction that an analysis of the emotional experiences and feelings of historical actors is almost always central to an understanding of their motivation. In particular, the extensive work that I did on political justice and the treatment of political opponents in the early Revolution always paid significant attention to the important role of emotion in shaping historical outcomes. Specifically on the one hand to the role of the urge to punish and, on the other, of the urge to reconcile and forgive.

In Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution (2009), I employed a more full-throated psychohistorical approach. Revisiting the legendary events of summer 1789 that have been studied by countless historians, I determined, based largely on letters written by National Assembly representatives, that many of these representatives had, to some degree, been traumatized by the violent threats launched against them by Louis XVI. Indeed, the intense fear generated by these threats was enough to produce something akin to modern-day PTSD, even though no actual attack on the Assembly ever occurred. Furthermore, I suggested that those deputies who had been traumatized proceeded to act like trauma victims in the coming months. I further suggested they were fluctuating, in what Judith Herman has called the “dialectic of trauma,” between actions that reflected a denial of what had happened to them and actions that reflected the

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fear that the conditions that had brought on their trauma would be repeated. All of which, I argued, induced a pattern of incoherent and inconsistent policy decisions, which significantly undermined any possibility for successfully stabilizing the Revolution and avoiding what is often presented as a more or less inevitable drift into violence and terror.

After 30 years of studying the Revolution, and perhaps guided by some residual attentiveness to the abstract theorizing that I had previously scorned, I felt the urge to learn something new. Of course, I hadn’t learned all the particularities of the French Revolution and I probably hadn’t read more than a fraction of the thousands of books that have been written on it. But I guess I felt that I had read enough of them. In any case, I have turned my attention in recent years to the study of the end of apartheid in South Africa and to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Here again, as in my earlier shift from 1960s America to the French Revolution, there was a kind of method to my madness, but one this time which seems to have had more substantive weight.

The key element of continuity here is the presence or absence of negotiation, accommodation, and compromise, ideas and practices which were, of course, sorely absent from the French Revolution. By contrast, South Africa provides a stirring example of a negotiating process which generated a workable compromise that has led to a relatively peaceful and more or less successful democratic society. Of course, South Africa has huge problems, most notably appalling economic inequality and systemic political corruption. But it is a functioning democracy in which, at least in comparison to the days of apartheid or to common projections of what might follow apartheid, political actors are not killing or imprisoning each other. In Israel/Palestine, however, we have a seemingly intractable conflict which, in many respects, makes the French Revolution look almost dainty. While the heralded Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 just as negotiations between Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and the white South African government were coming to fruition, the two negotiating processes, both of which were to some extent the product of the same post-Cold War moment, obviously went in very different directions. As two graduates of a visionary Jewish/Arab school near Haifa recently put it: “We are no longer naïve. We know that peace is far away.”

Any analysis of why South Africa has proven to be more

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amenable to the processes of conflict resolution than Israel/Palestine would evidently have to take into account a multitude of factors (see Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians [2005]). In my own preliminary efforts to examine this question, psychological factors like trust, projection, ideological intensity, and trauma have been prominently featured. However, as a newcomer to South African and Middle Eastern history, I also devoted myself to more mundane yet rewarding endeavors like learning basic historical background, but not Arabic, Hebrew, or any South African languages. Thus, in exploring research topics on Israel/Palestine, for instance, I have focused on the British mandatory period in Palestine (1920-1948) when documents were especially likely to be in English.

Indeed, this structure helped lead me to the fascinating case of Lewis Namier, a well-known historian of 18^th century Britain who, as an ardent Zionist, served as political secretary of the Zionist Organization in London from 1929 to 1931. Although Namier’s historical work reflected an idealization of what he regarded as the pragmatic and non-ideological nature of 18^th century British politics, this intellectual stance contrasted sharply with his militant Zionism and the abrasiveness and pugnacity that seem to have been dominant features of his personality. Called upon to play an important role in negotiations with the British government in establishing British policy in the aftermath of serious Arab rioting in 1929, Namier seems to have had a hand in exacerbating tensions in Palestine, thereby providing us a small window into the dynamics of the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I have maintained a consistent interest in psychological issues regardless of the particular subject matter upon which I have concentrated at any particular time. More specifically, working on this essay has led me to a sharper understanding of one of the key factors, which may have been driving my consistent focus on issues of conflict and conflict resolution. For growing up as the oldest child in a family of constantly bickering parents, I was fairly explicitly assigned the role of what family systems theorists like Nathan Ackerman call that of “mediator.” As memories of playing that role, and in particular memories of generally siding with my mother against my father, flood back into consciousness, it remains to be seen to what degree this personal knowledge may enhance my future historical work.

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