A History of Our Own Times [antikvár]

Foreword Midway through A History of Our Own Times, Ford Madox Ford tells of attending a dinner party in the Holborn Restaurant during the great coal strike of 1893, along with the labor leaders Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, the Manchester socialist Charles Rowley, and the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, and of how, while the others fulminated against the capitalist system and called for its destruction by force, Kropotkin's total rejection of violence and his attitude of objectivity bordering on quietism "seemed to drive [them] mad." The same kind of detachment. Ford wrote, characterized Kropotkin's history of the French Revolution, which "differed from all other histories of that and indeed of all other periods in that it is a projection not of sea-green incorruptibles and blood-gorged monsters whether of reaction or of advance but one of the blind natural forces, the sudden slants of world necessities and the economic vicissitudes on the top of whose tides those historic figures were helplessly borne to death or triumph." Then, with a sudden shift to the enterprise upon which he was himself engaged. Ford added: "If you consider what I have been writing above— and, indeed, all the matter of this work—you will see that it is all an affair that can in the end be best, if however faintly, realised along the lines of Kropotkin's work. The times have gone by when we can understand anything at all if we say that any conscious human action brought about any given state of things. Since then to write history in any other spirit has become a work of supererogation." This is an interesting but rather puzzling interjection. It poses the problem that every historian must confront in his work, that is, the relationship between structures and personalities in the historical process, and it appears to solve it by opting for the most unconditionally materialistic of interpretations. Yet even if this was Ford's private view of the way in which history worked (and one suspects that this was only intermittently so), it was not perceptible in the way in which he wrote the history of his own time. Nor could it have been, given the invincible humanism of his values and outlook and the fact that he was so deeply engaged in the political and social movements and causes of his time that he was constantly interrupting his narrative to define his position for his readers—