Parallels in the Past
Analogy features prominently in the way people draw on the past, and it is not hard to see why. Analogy makes the past accessible, and it often validates policies or assumptions in the present. In addition, analogies can be pursued with a minimum of effort, as focusing on a specific episode in the past appears to render unnecessary an extensive background or context. Not surprisingly, political issues are often presented to the public in the same way. Thus Margaret Thatcher’s rethinking of the social security system was attacked as a return to the means test of the 1930s, and even as a throwback to the harsh philosophy of the New Poor Law of 1834. The British National Party, like the National Front before it, is routinely portrayed as a recreation of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s. But analogy has a poor press from historians. The notion that we can read off the essence of a situation today from a parallel in the past confounds one of the central principles of historicism – that the process of change and development renders invalid comparisons across time. The present can only be understood in the light of those processes. Invoking our predecessors’ experience as a guide to conduct all too easily overlooks the difference between their circumstances and ours; it also discounts the processes of change and development which have taken place in the meantime. For these reasons, analogy is routinely condemned as profoundly unhistor-ical by the gatekeepers of the academy. For Keith Thomas, the difference between modern and premodern historical sensibilities is that we study the past in order to experience its difference, whereas our forebears expected it to furnish lessons.1 G. R. Elton, while con-ceding that analogies may have value in prompting new lines of enquiry, insists that they prove nothing.2 David Hackett Fischer in his survey of the historian’s fallacies concedes the possible merit of using the present to illuminate the past, but rejects the reverse procedure as ‘dangerous both to logic and to empiricism’.3
If by ‘analogy’ we mean an assumption of correspondence or equivalence, then these strictures are justified. Historical awareness is indeed profoundly hostile to the idea that one situation can be read in terms of another separated by the lapse of years: past and present are, by definition, different worlds. But analogical reasoning does not rest on a presumption of complete congruence or repetition. The term itself denotes comparison of a more open-ended kind. All human beings engage in almost continuous analogical reasoning as a means of finding their bearings in constantly changing circumstances. Most of the time we do not look for absolute repetition; we refer to our previous experience as much to establish what the present is not as to confirm what it is. All that an analogy lays down is that ‘if two or three things agree in one respect, then they might also agree in another’.4 The whole point of an analogy is that it notes similarities in things which in other respects are unlike. A perfect analogy – usually taken to mean complete congruence – is a contradiction in terms.
By ‘analogical thinking’, then, I mean any use of the past which departs from the sequential mode and sets up a comparison with some episode or set of circumstances in the past. What historical analogy typically reveals is both contrast and convergence. Provided we are open to both, the effect is to liberate our thinking from the rigidities of current discourse, not by prescribing a course of action, but by expanding our sense of the options. The argument of this chapter is that, contrary to most statements on the subject, historical analogy can be an aid to critical thinking. But first, due acknowledgement must be made of the pitfalls of simplistic analogical reasoning.
The long memories of statesmen
In October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy reflected on his reading of Barbara Tuchman’s recently published The Guns of August, a bestselling account of how the Great Powers stumbled into world war in 1914. He told his brother Robert
I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October. If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.5
Analogy counts for a lot in international relations. Foreign policy resembles a narrative of conflict, accommodation and cooperation, an ongoing drama often featuring the same cast, with the addition of new players who must be assimilated into the existing mental framework. Foreign countries are viewed as actors with motives and prejudices extending back beyond the time of the politicians who are actually in power. In relation to the United States or France, for example, the British establishment is not merely dealing with the current president and his administration but is also playing the latest scene in a story which extends back to the Second World War, with many critical points along the way, each of which may strike a resonance now. When a crisis suddenly materialises and quick responses are needed, analogies often provide the easiest way of getting a purchase on the situation. The burden of precedent is intensified by the way in which events in international relations are personalised, with credit and blame attributed to the statesmen involved. Popular knowledge reflects these features in simplified form: in common currency the history of international relations comprises a limited number of critical moments from which the nation emerged with credit or infamy. There is still mileage to be obtained from comparing a British politician to Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill. This compounds the politicians’ awareness of the precedents against which they in turn will be judged. In looking over his shoulder at August 1914, Kennedy was anticipating an invidious comparison which would have tarnished his reputation had the missile crisis not been peacefully resolved.
Another statesman much exercised by analogies with 1914 was Francois Mitterrand. As the Bosnian crisis deepened in 1992, the elderly French president travelled to Sarajevo not only to see the situation for himself but also to dramatise the danger that this Balkan conflict might escalate and draw in other powers. That was why he made the journey on 28 June, the anniversary of Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the same city. As Eric Hobsbawm pointed out, the failure of the international press to pick up the allu-sion to 1914 demonstrated that the outbreak of the First World War was now too remote to feature as part of public memory (though the same could not be said of the war itself, which still functions as a shorthand for pointless slaughter). Mitterrand was attempting to draw on a historical analogy which by 1992 had passed out of use.6
The Second World War, on the other hand, is still very much part of public memory, especially the belief that it could have been avoided if the politicians had only been more perceptive and more coura-geous. That view was strongly advocated after the war by Winston Churchill, especially in the first volume of his war memoirs, The Gathering Storm.7 In the public mind there is probably greater clarity about the precipitants than about the events of the war itself. ‘Appeasement’ is a term which really only has one historical referent, and it remains one of the more wounding insults in the political lexicon. For the generation who had lived through the 1930s and who rose to the top between the 1950s and the 1970s, parallels with the appeasement era were inescapable.
It may seem surprising that the country most preoccupied by the analogy of appeasement was not directly involved in the run-up to war in 1939: the United States took a firmly isolationist stance in international affairs throughout the interwar period. But for a country conducting a global foreign policy for the first time, historical precedent was particularly important. American policy during the Cold War, it has been argued, was obsessed with analogies.8 The rhetoric of appeasement was not only a means of promoting policy decisions to a public familiar with this reading of the 1930s; it also conditioned the thinking of the policymakers themselves. On at least two occasions, the precedent of appeasement influenced American foreign policy. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Harry S. Truman placed the North in the same category as the Japanese, Italians and Germans in the 1930s. In deploying American troops in Korea, he aimed to halt the communists in their tracks, and thus to avoid the supposed weakness displayed by Western leaders in the face of Hitler and Mussolini.9 Truman was explicit about the importance of historical analogy: as he later recalled,
I had trained myself to look back in history for precedents, because instinctively I sought perspective in the span of history for the decisions I had to make. That is why I read and re-read history.
For Truman and his advisors, the 1930s were the most vivid period in history.10
The debate was reprised 15 years later in the Johnson administration during the run-up to the Vietnam War. Once again, the behaviour of a communist adversary was interpreted in terms set by earlier crises: Korea and Munich were the most important. Officials maintained that the world was experiencing a repetition of the dangers posed by the dictators 30 years before, and that World War III was in prospect unless they took decisive action. The ‘domino theory’, which predicted that other countries would quickly fall under communist control if South Vietnam succumbed, drew explicitly on Central Europe’s experience of Nazi expansion in the 1930s. As President Johnson put it in 1965:
Nor would surrender in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country, bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueller conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history.11
Even today, 80 years after Munich, appeasement has not lost its place in political arguments in favour of preemptive war. We do not yet know whether the Munich analogy featured strongly in the discussions of the British cabinet on the Iraq crisis in 2002–2003, but ministers did not hesitate to deploy it in their speeches and articles. In February 2003, Tony Blair compared his opponents to those who ‘saw no need to confront Hitler’.12 It was hardly necessary for him to make the point since it was repeated ad nauseam in the British press.
The problem with the appeasement analogy is that it tends to be given privileged status over any other precedent. During the debates preceding American action in Korea and Vietnam – and again when the British were preparing for action in Suez – the argument for intervention rested on a single parallel which acquired the status of a prescription. Provided there was a threat to the status quo or to a friendly nation, ‘Munich’ appeared to provide a certain guide. As Cyril Buffet and Beatrice Heuser have pointed out, this kind of analogy imposes a monocausal analysis: if the dictator is not compelled to retreat, there will be war.13 No other outcomes could be considered within this frame. Nor was allowance made for the intervening processes of historical change, which made the world of the 1950s and 1960s a very different place from that of the 1930s. It was almost impossible for analysts to take seriously the yawning differences between Central Europe in the 1930s and the Far East in the 1950s and 1960s. Features which were highly specific to the 1930s were treated as general truths. In the case of the analogy between Vietnam and Munich, little account was taken of the disparity between the Vietcong and the Sudeten Germans, or between American military strength and the underprepared British and French forces in 1938.14 The logic of the analogy was that Ho Chi Minh was ‘another Hitler’: he was assimilated to the model of evil dictator, rather than understood as the product of a specific time and place.15 This had the serious consequence of closing the official mind to the full complexity of the current crisis. In both Korea and Vietnam, the Americans failed to grasp the motives of their antagonist or to gauge the likely consequences of going to war – which in each case went far beyond what had been anticipated. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that precedents from the appeasement era were invoked in order to confirm a prior conviction and foreclose argument.16
However ‘Munich’ is a very specific kind of historical analogy. During the post-war era, it expressed an overwhelming consensus about the causes of the greatest disaster in living memory and about the compelling need to avoid its repetition. It was viewed not so much as a take-it-or-leave-it lesson as a profound ‘truth’. Because ‘Munich’ highlighted the responsibility which the leaders of Britain and France had borne for the outbreak of war in 1939, it placed their successors in a moral straightjacket. Those who coun-selled caution or accommodation vis-à-vis the communist powers were at risk of being placed in the same category as ‘the men of Munich’. ‘Munich’ was thus the historical reference point in international relations – justly described as ‘the most powerful and influential political myth of the second half of the twentieth century’.17 Another way of understanding the power of the Munich analogy is to see it as a moral admonition which no principled statesman can ignore. The prelude to the Second World War lends itself well to prescriptive guidance of this kind. Timothy Snyder has written a short and pithy guide to the lessons which might avert the reap-pearance of tyranny today. The ascendancy of Hitler and Stalin, he writes, demonstrates the need for citizens to be vigilant and cou-rageous, and to ‘believe in truth’ – obvious counsel perhaps, but gaining additional weight from the tragic failures between the wars: ‘history does not repeat, but it does instruct’.18
Open-ended analogies
The real merits of analogical thinking become evident in cases which are not morally overdetermined, and which do not impose a monocausal approach. Once those conditions are removed, the effect of drawing a historical analogy is more likely to highlight differences than similarities. The contrast between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is valuable because it makes possible a better grasp of what is distinctive about the present. The post-war reconstruction of Iraq is a case in point. As the troops moved in 2003, U.S. officials made light of the post-pacification problems that lay ahead by citing the astonishing progress which Japan had made under American tute-lage after 1945. In a paper entitled ‘Don’t Expect Democracy This Time’, John W. Dower pointed out that – unlike in Iraq in 2003 – the Americans had enjoyed a number of specific advantages in Japan. Having made an unconditional surrender, the Japanese accorded a degree of legitimacy to the occupying forces, while neighbouring countries were frankly relieved that Japan was under foreign occupation. The transition was facilitated by the ousted emperor’s deft cooperation with the new regime. The American reconstruction of Japan represented the final fling of New Deal idealism, for example in land reform and labour law. Lastly, because Japan possessed no strategic raw materials, American action was not distorted by a compelling economic interest such as oil. None of these conditions existed in Iraq – because both the politico-economic circumstances of the country and the mindset of the occupying forces were so different: as Dower remarks, ‘The United States is not in the business of nation-building any more.’ In fact the Japanese analogy cruelly highlighted what was so unpropitious about the American occupation of Iraq. If heeded before the war, the ‘lesson’ of 1945 might have alerted the Americans to the very bleak prospects for an early disengagement from the country.19
The Japan–Iraq analogy is an example of how illuminating it can be to reflect on the difference between two ostensibly similar situations. But if the variable and contingent nature of historical change is kept in mind, it follows that the most insight will be gained from exploring a range of analogies which bear on the present in different ways. Within the Johnson administration in 1965, only two precedents counted for anything: Munich and Korea, both of them interpreted as supporting military action. Very little account was taken of Dien Bien Phu, the disastrous defeat suffered by the French in 1954. This precedent not only raised the possibility of defeat in a land war; it also highlighted the nationalist and anti-colonial dimension of the conflict. Had the administration kept an open mind while it subjected each of these analogies to rigorous testing, it might have acquired greater insight into the situation in Vietnam. Instead, George Ball, the one official who took up the Dien Bien Phu precedent, was outgunned by his colleagues.20 When critical decisions are required, historical precedents are valuable not because they offer a short cut to certainty, but because they help to keep policymakers open to a more realistic range of outcomes.
Precedent in English local government
Compared with international relations, the role of historical analogy in domestic policy is less emotional and less controversial – and for this reason has attracted far less attention. Domestic policy is not immune from morally laden analogies. For 50 years the slump of the 1930s retained its analogical power as the ultimate cautionary lesson, reaching a climax during the depression of the Thatcher years in the 1980s when unemployment once more became an acute social problem. But domestic policy does not exert the same dramatic pull as foreign policy, nor is it populated to the same degree by larger-than-life villains and heroes. For these reasons the popular grasp of domestic history is weaker, and people are less likely to apply historical analogies to current issues in welfare or education. In this less fevered atmosphere, analogical thinking can yield rich dividends.
One instance is the debate among historians addressing the issue of what needs to be done to revitalise local government in England. They have examined two earlier periods with this question in mind: first, the 1870s and 1880s, when modern municipal government took shape; and secondly, the 1930s, when elected councils made some of the most innovative responses to the slump in London and elsewhere. The mid-Victorian period was when the modern idea of accountable and technocratic municipal authorities came into being. Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain aimed to transform the lives of its citizens by intervening decisively in social welfare and public health. Other cities soon followed. In order to achieve these goals, they were prepared to challenge the shibbo-leths of the day, notably by extending public ownership of utilities: ‘gas-and-water socialism’, as it was disparagingly called. Simon Szreter has identified the preconditions of the great age of enlightened municipalism. Firstly, there was a culture of civic pride and service to the community, initially urged by the Nonconformist churches and then taken up by business leaders like Chamberlain. Secondly, there was a buoyant electoral base, recently expanded by the Second Reform Act in 1867. Thirdly, municipal councils enjoyed financial autonomy, which allowed them to raise rates and take out loans to finance ambitious schemes of improvement. This autonomy was important because it enabled cities to build up programmes finely attuned to local particularities (which in turn stimulated local politics), rather than apply a one-size-fits-all model from Whitehall.21
By no means all late-Victorian councils were paragons of enlightenment. But in the best of them, Szreter claims, the Labour Party ‘will find an extraordinary treasure-chest of parallels and analogies to inspire them’.22 Now, as then, the fundamental requirement is to unlock the energies and resourcefulness of local communities. Low turnout in local elections is profoundly indicative of a malaise of commitment. Local government also needs to be able to call once more on the services of the ablest and most public-spirited. For that to happen, local government must have the freedom to develop policies suited to local circumstances, and it must have much greater financial autonomy vis-à-vis central government. In 1870, local government expenditure was 32 per cent of all government expenditure (rising to an all-time record of 51% in 1905); by 1999, the proportion had sunk to 24 per cent as a result of the ‘capping’ of local rates and limitations on council borrowing.23
In effect, Szreter is singling out the most innovative period in the history of English local government and asking what can be learned from it today. The persuasiveness of this analogy depends on how well the two contrasted conjunctures are contextualised. Can the guiding principles of the ‘civic gospel’ be implemented once more, or have the enabling conditions which made it possible disappeared during the intervening century or so? When Szreter says that history gives a resounding ‘yes’ to the question of whether British society today has the resources to improve itself, the answer can only partly depend on a reading of the mid-Victorian achievement. It requires two further lines of analysis. Firstly, how long the distinctive characteristics of nineteenth-century urban government survived: a restricted franchise, a relatively homogenous electorate, and a culture of deference had all disappeared by the end of the twentieth century, as Tristram Hunt has pointed out.24 Secondly, some grasp is needed of the political forces which emasculated local government in the 1980s, and whether they are still in existence. Szreter says little about the context in which Labour has operated more recently.25 If, for example, the public now values equality of provision between different authorities above municipal independence, a reforming agenda derived from the nineteenth century may be doomed.26 In another History & Policy paper, Jerry White also draws lessons for local government from the past, but he employs a much shorter timescale. His starting point is a comparison between London’s local government now and in the 1930s, during the heyday of Herbert Morrison (‘Mr London’). Between them, the London County Council (LCC) and the borough councils controlled hospitals and health services, emergency services, poverty relief, education, and electricity production – much more than what their successors control today. White pinpoints two periods in which local control of services was dismantled. One of these was (unsurprisingly) Margaret Thatcher’s time in office, when privatisation drained away many of the powers of local councils to special-interest bodies, like housing associations and school governing bodies, which had only a very partial accountability to the wider community. The other period was the creation of the welfare state in the immediate post-war years. The new services brought in by the Attlee government were managed from the top. Aneurin Bevan pushed through the centralisation of the National Health Service (NHS), including the voluntary hospitals, in the teeth of opposition from local interests and their champions in Cabinet. That centralist approach to social services has remained a strong influence in the Labour Party ever since. Labour speaks with two voices, on the one hand introduc-ing executive mayors, but on the other, intensifying the switch to special-purpose bodies, for example in foundation hospitals. White makes the telling point that, far from being a novel and progressive solution, these institutions hark back to the plethora of special-purpose bodies (for sewers, public libraries, etc.) which the reform of Victorian local government was designed to streamline and democratise. The ‘New Localism’, as Labour called these initiatives, was only the latest element in what has become a very substantial democratic deficit. The practical inference to be drawn from White’s work is that centralism is a Labour vice as well as a Tory one, and that this needs to be kept in mind when interpreting the statements which both parties make about the welfare state.27
Both Szreter and White are politically engaged, in the sense that they have strong views about what local government today could and should be like. But their analogies are carefully controlled. They do not suppose that history will repeat itself. Szreter, in particular, brings out how the ‘civic gospel’ of Chamberlain’s Birmingham was just that – a Christian imperative of service which could never be replicated as part of a revived municipalism today. Each writer is concerned to rescue from present-day pragmatism certain principles of governance, which were expressed through specific forms in both the 1870s and the 1930s, and could (in their estimation) be made the basis for further innovation today. There is an element of prescription here, but it is not one which forecloses other options: if anything, there is a morbid sense of what the other alternatives are all too likely to be. The purpose of the analogy is to exhume from oblivion a tradition of English local government which might guide us to a more effective system in the future.
Crises of masculinity: Then and now
The directness of the analogies which Szreter and White draw is refreshing, but their angle on the past is perhaps less innovative than it seems. Ever since Sidney and Beatrice Webb published their magnum opus on English local government in the Edwardian period, it has been clear how modern practice has continued to draw on old models. Analogical thinking is less often acknowledged in thinking about social behaviour and cultural attitudes, where there is less sense of a trajectory linking past and present. Here analogy serves as a means of addressing what is often a near-absence of historical perspective.
Gender relations provide a striking example. Today’s sensibilities about relations between the sexes seem to inhabit a completely different world from 50 years ago. The difficulties which many men experience in the new climate of greater gender equality are commonly summed up as a ‘crisis of masculinity’. The phrase itself is a recent coinage, dating no further back than to the 1980s, and it describes a phenomenon which is also taken to be new. ‘Crisis’ seems the appropriate word to refer to disorienting changes which are affecting men at the same time in quite different spheres. First, men are said to be losing the battle of the sexes. Women have won advancement at the expense of men in the workplace and in public life, and much anxiety is now focused on the extent to which boys’ performance in school is slipping behind that of girls. The balance of power has also shifted within the family: divorce proceedings are more often than not initiated by wives, and child custody is awarded to the mother in the majority of cases. Secondly, the labour needs of the economy are changing to the disadvantage of men. There is less and less demand for the unskilled physical strength of young male school-leavers, while in the professions men can no longer expect their working life to be shaped by the unilinear career in which so much of middle-class masculine identity has been invested in the past. ‘If work used to define masculinity’, writes Anthony Clare, ‘it does not do so any more.’28 Thirdly, masculinity has been redefined by profound changes in sexuality. Gay liberation was the catalyst for opening up a strictly heterosexual male culture to a kaleidoscopic diversity of styles and practices: heady liberation for some, but profoundly disorienting for those whose chief aim is to ‘fit in’. Then there is the AIDS epidemic, at its height a threat to all who were sexually active, but a threat in particular to the time-honoured equation of masculine prestige with sexual ‘scoring’. This tale of woe might be summed up by saying that men are not only losing power and influence, but have forfeited their legitimacy as the dominant sex.29
To a remarkable extent the gender troubles of the 1990s were presaged by those of the 1890s. Indeed, in 1990, Elaine Showalter wrote a popular text on the fin de siècle, Sexual Anarchy, with precisely this premise. During the 1890s, the masculinity of the middle and upper classes was brought into question on two fronts. First, by what the media of the day called the New Woman or, in a rather more precise catchphrase, ‘the revolt of the daughters’: that is, educated young women of the middle class who renounced the protection of home in order to lead independent working lives as journalists or teachers. They lived alone or with a woman friend; they mixed freely without a chaperone – a social trend perfectly symbolised by the woman cyclist; and they claimed intellectual equality with men.30 Second, although the New Woman label was applied only to unmarried women, changes in the status of wives were equally far-reaching. The married woman of the 1890s was the beneficiary of a series of legal reforms over the previous 20 years which had enhanced her rights of property, her rights of child custody, and her right to seek redress against marital assault. Many observers believed that, apart from their legal significance, these changes gave wives a new dignity and confidence, prompting them to seek a separation in some cases.31 At just the time when young men began to have to negotiate with women on more equal terms, the rights of husbands over their wives were becoming conditional. It was a widely held view that patriarchy would never be the same again.
How did men react? Leaving aside a small group of progressive pro-feminists like Edward Carpenter, the dominant reaction during the 1880s and 1890s was to reaffirm sexual difference – to define masculinity in terms which made the least possible concession to the feminine.32 Manliness was given a sharper, more aggressive edge. Physical courage and stoic endurance became the exemplary masculine virtues, ruthlessly imposed on the young, especially in schools. But this was more than a pulling up of the drawbridge in the sex war. Fear of women in the social arena was closely associated with fear of the feminine within. The door was shut on emotional disclosure for men by the new cult of the ‘stiff upper lip’. Above all, the man who engaged in same-sex practices was defined as ‘the homosexual’, degenerate and effeminate – indeed degenerate because he was effeminate. That image became firmly lodged in popular consciousness as a result of the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. And because homosexuality was pathologised in this way, it was obsessively detected – on the streets of the metropolis, in the public schools, and in high places. If any doubt was enter-tained about the devastating consequences of vice, the authority of Edward Gibbon could be invoked: in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) he had famously attributed the decline of Rome to the moral canker at its centre. The British Empire was seen by some to stand in no less a peril.33
The parallels between the 1890s and today are obvious: the general assertion of women’s rights, the rise in female employment, the shifting balance within marriage, and the cultural disorientation arising from ambiguous sexualities are immediately recognisable. Even AIDS was foreshadowed by the highly publicised scourge of syphilis. The fact that these disparate trends coincided during the same decade and caused considerable anxiety among men of varied backgrounds is enough to establish that today’s crisis of masculinity is by no means the first. But the differences are important too. The extent and nature of the male response today is very different. As the principal threat to manhood, the New Woman was only a distant relative of her modern-day sister. The aspiration to gender equality was there, but the scale of women’s advances now dwarfs anything achieved in the 1890s: most of all in employment, especially the employment of married women, but also in education, marriage and parenting.
There was even less similarity in the sexual climate. We live in an era of sexual permissiveness which is truly without precedent. In the 1890s, high culture reflected a preoccupation with deviant sexualities, but the numbers of men who were in a position to benefit from a less conventional sexuality were miniscule; and those who engaged in physical relations of any kind with other men were open to the serious criminal charge of ‘gross indecency’ – the catch-all under which most sexual offenders were prosecuted after 1885. There is simply no comparison with the visible and accessible gay culture we have known since the 1970s, or with the real sense of choice which men now have in defining their sexual orientation. Lastly, commentators today speak glibly of a male backlash, but it is restrained compared with men’s reactions at the end of the nineteenth century. The backlash today extends to campaigns to restore the custody rights of fathers and to reverse the scholastic lead of girls over boys. The fin de siècle, on the other hand, was marked by a sep-aratist masculinity which disparaged and postponed marriage, and which stigmatised deviant males as ‘degenerate’. In fact, the present time is more remarkable for the extent of change and adaptation on the part of men. The phrase ‘new men’ was only occasionally used in the 1890s, but today it is rightly taken to indicate a significant shift in masculinity. Men in the 1890s faced different challenges and responded to them in a distinctive manner.
It is facile, then, to suppose that the gender crisis of the 1890s was replayed during the 1990s. But that does not render the analogy void. Pointing up the differences over time is a useful exercise in a culture which is still inclined to locate men and masculinity outside history: witness the essentialism implicit in the adage ‘Boys will be boys’. Many people today believe that the constituents of masculinity are ‘natural’ and that what has happened in recent years is not a modification of masculinity, but its dismantling. The focus on the 1890s shows that even a hundred years ago the conventions of manhood were understood differently, with the implication that masculinity is not cast in stone. If masculinity has changed since the 1890s, it can change again, without necessarily signalling a total collapse. In that sense it makes a difference to know that today’s men do not face an unprecedented crisis and that an earlier generation experienced a comparable sense of disorientation.
* * * * * * *
Most high-profile historical analogies – like the persistent recourse to ‘Munich’ – are unreliable because of the unequivocal guidance which they purport to give. They assume a near-identity between ‘then’ and ‘now’. They deal in single causes and moral absolutes, and they are usually paraded as the only historical argument with a bearing on the present situation. The case against this kind of analogy can be summed up by condemning it as a form of presentism: it is asserted most vigorously by people intent on validating or discrediting specific options in the present. The implication of these arguments is that historical analogy not only tells us little; it may actually stand in the way of other, more valid insights.
If the balance sheet were completely negative, historians would have no reason to concern themselves with analogy. But fastidious withdrawal is not a responsible option, and for two reasons. First, in thinking about the past, as in other areas, analogy is one of the basic reflexes of the human mind. No amount of refutation will reduce its role as a means of getting a purchase on the unfamiliar. The task for historians is to define the ways in which historical analogy can be used so as to promote real understanding of the present. This brings me to the second point. The genuine benefits of analogy are not as dramatic as popular usage sometimes suggests, but they are by no means inconsiderable. They depend not on a presumed convergence between past and present, but on the demonstration of difference alongside similarity. Correctly applied, analogy enlarges our sense of possibilities, rather than narrowing them down to a single prescription. Finally, analogies must be considered alongside the other modes of historical understanding which have been discussed in earlier chapters. Our readiness to see repetition between past and present must always be qualified by a presumption of difference. Most important of all, whatever point in time is under examination – whether past or present – it must be understood sequentially. In the case of Vietnam, the value of analogical thinking would have been greatly increased if it had not excluded attention to the history of Vietnam itself.
In this situation historians have two public tasks. First, analogies that are based on bad history and merely provide specious support for a particular policy need to be exposed for what they are, before they do too much damage. But secondly, analogies which serve to enhance understanding of the present are a genuine asset to critical debate, and historians should be less reticent about articulating them in public. Measuring English local government against the practices of the past has achieved some publicity.34 On the other hand, public awareness of the relevant historical perspectives on current issues of gender is very poorly developed. Analogical thinking is too prevalent for historians to ignore, and too mixed in its outcomes for them to reject it out of hand. It is a dimension of historical awareness which cries out for more discriminating demonstration.