by Jeffrey Herf

In a very thoughtful "Princeton Diarist: Military Academy" in this week's TNR, Anthony Grafton notes the gap in knowledge of the military in the academy and urges scholars to learn more about it. Grafton is also right that "we humanists know a few important things" such as that language, local history and lived culture are important, there are limits to what violence can accomplish and, yes, there are ways in which many American policies have caused foreigners to not to associate the United States with enlightenment and liberty. We historians of the twentieth century also know that policy makers pick and choose among historical examples to justify policies of the moment and that we tenured professors have an obligation to keep tabs on them if they play fast and loose with the comparisons. However, "we humanists" know other things as well, things that men and women of affairs and many of those who pride themselves as realists do not know. We know based on past experience that there are times and places in which language, local history and lived culture give rise to political movements of extreme fanaticism. Indeed, historians such as Grafton who work on Europe's 17th century and its Thirty Years War, also called the Wars of Religion, know this very well indeed. We humanists know that men and women of affairs, pundits, corporate leaders and rich donors to political parties often find it very impossible to understand the profound otherness of fanatics because in their provincialism and narcissism they think everyone in the world thinks just like them and responds to the same incentives that they respond to. Or, as Andrei Markovits, one of our leading scholars European politics and society argues in his important new book, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, we know that there are sources of anti-Americanism that originate in disdain or even hatred for what the United States is rather than what a particular administration does and that will lead to opposition to American policies even when they are at one with traditions of enlightenment and liberty. As Grafton knows, one result of the war in Vietnam was that within our discipline of history, diplomatic, international and military history became marginalized. So the deficiency of knowledge of military affairs has been a long time in the making. While very few of us have children in the military as Grafton does, many of us have students who have been, are or may be in the military. The year I spent teaching in the Strategy Department at the Naval War College in Newport in 1987-88 brought home to me the points Grafton raises, namely that there is a great deal of learning that goes on within the military and that the military would benefit greatly from discussions with scholars who are not in the traditional fields of international relations and policy studies. The British intellectual historian Stefan Collini has published an important book, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. While I don't agree with some of his assessments, Orwell for example, I admire the clarity with which he poses dilemmas of intellectuals as public figures. On the one hand, our traditions of seeking the truth and conveying cultural traditions impel us to speak out on the issues of the day. On the other hand, there are a host of observers ready to point out that accomplishment and prestige in scholarly and intellectual pursuits does not, by itself, produce good political or moral judgment. The intellectual history of the twentieth century is littered with the tattered reputations of famous intellectuals and scholars who said the most idiotic things about politics. Yet the tension inherent in the role of public intellectual which Collini examines has also produced great writing and essential citizenship. One of the military's finest intellectuals is General David Petraeus. He is now going to take command of the war in Iraq and will be testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week. He has learned and taught a great deal about counter-insurgency to an institution, the United States Army, that did not want to hear about it for a long time. No one can say now if the new strategy in Iraq is going to work. But a great deal of thinking and reflection has gone into it. Yet now we have a commander in Iraq who has learned something from humanists about local culture and language and has drawn on past experience while appreciating the novelty of the moment. And he has a PhD from Princeton to boot. Petraeus and like-minded officers are doing their best to learn from "we humanists." We have a lot to learn from them as well. Neither of us gains from the long divorce between the military and the academy of the post-Vietnam era.