|
Historiography
|
PLEASE NOTE:
The following is the abridged text of a lecture delivered by W Bro D. Beagley, PM, 218CC Member, at the Victorian Lodge of Research on 29 June 1999 and published in the VLOR's transactions for 1999 entitled 'Studies in Freemasonry'.
The full text may be obtained by email from the Correspondence Circle Secretary, W Bro Graeme Love. Please be sure include your snail-mail address and sufficient information to identify your masonic standing.
a study of historians' views of Freemasonry in the 18th century.
Delivered in the Lodge by W.Bro.D. Beagley, PM, 218CC Member
on Friday, 25th June 1999
Historical study, for the last few centuries, has been driven by 'Isms'. Marxism, Modernism, Post-modernism, Racism, Humanism, Feminism, all these 'Isms' have provided a theoretical base from which historians have interpreted the events and issues of the world.
While humanity has always examined and questioned how the world came to be as it is, this 'Isms' approach can be seen developing in European scholarship from the Renaissance onwards. The intellectual certainties that had been provided by established religion gradually gave way to the questionings and particular perspectives of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, an evolution that continues today.
This questioning and emphasis on perspectives has created a particular way of looking at the world: as a progression of 'big movements'. Indeed, these are usually more 'Isms': Capitalism, Imperialism, Communism, Colonialism, Fascism, Sexism, Economic Rationalism. These 'Isms' enable historians to place individual details into a much greater context, to explain how single events can fit a pattern of predictable activities and outcomes, and how the decisions of individual people can be predicted or interpreted as the inevitable consequence of their larger social situations. This is historiography, the examination of how the interpretation of history can create understandings and impressions that, in turn, enable further predictions of human activity.
For instance, the most influential 'Ism' of the last century or so has been Marxism. This interprets social movements in terms of the division of society into groups, each of which strives to maintain and increase its power and stability, usually at the expense of, and in conflict with, other groups. From its original interpretation of these groups as wealth classes (wealth producing workers against wealth controlling capitalists), it has led to offshoots such as sexism/feminism (male gender, usually macho and aggressive, against female, usually kept domestic and subservient), colonialism and imperialism (invading society subduing indigenous society, taking its land and destroying its culture) or racism/fascism/nationalism (one ethnic group or culture considering itself superior to another and, thus, entitled to dispossess and destroy the other).
We need only consider recent events in places such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Kosovo, or Rwanda, or social issues such as the Stolen Generation, Women's Liberation, tariff barriers, soccer hooligans or multiculturalism to see how these interpretations are not only a way of understanding such tumultuous events but can even be a cause of them by making people examine themselves and their roles in relation to them.
It can even be argued, from these examples, that these great 'Isms' are often self perpetuating because the particular perspective on the past can become an expectation of the future.
Karl Marx did not originate this historiographical approach of interpreting world history as an opposition of groups striving to survive, though his writings have been the most influential. In the late 18th century, Gibbon's great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire worked from the thesis that Rome fell because Christianity rose. Early in the 19th century the philosopher Hegel "viewed world history as a process of natural selection in which conflict weakened and ultimately eliminated 'political organisms' that failed to adapt to the changing international environment" (Pelczynski, 1990). This view of social adaptation can be seen to derive from the same intellectual movement that led to Darwin's Theory of Evolution and all the social consequences of that 'Ism'.
Freemasonry has been no exception to this type of interpretation, both as a detail in the analysis of these movements in wider society, and as a focus of internal study by its own. For instance, basic structural elements such as the traditional limiting of membership to males, or a definition into British, European and American streams of development can readily be interpreted in these various feminist, imperialist, or nationalist ways.
A typical study in these terms is recent work by Paul Rich on Freemasonry's relation to the British ruling class ethic through the 19th century, especially in its spread through the expansion of the British Empire. In his Elixir of Empire : the English public schools, ritualism, freemasonry, and imperialism (1989), he examines how the elements of clubs, rituals and exclusion permeated this group's culture from childhood to the grave. Boarding schools, military service, careers in the foreign service or great companies of the empire, as well as Freemasonry, he sees as all blending to create and reinforce a lifestyle that led inevitably to attitudes of superiority and automatic authority over the 'less fortunate' non-members of the culture.
This historiographical approach to Freemasonry has placed it firmly in the mainstream of these great social movements, often as a determining influence. Literature on the French Revolution, for instance, has often put Freemasonry at the forefront of specific factors leading to the events and outcomes of that period. As Steven Bullock points out, early commentators such as Abbé de Barruel and John Robison accused Freemasonry of masterminding the French Revolution after being corrupted by the Illuminati. This view remained dominant among many French and European historians into this century, like Bernard Faÿ who argued that the Craft "fostered the revolutionary spirit" and even "prepared and achieved" the late eighteenth-century revolutions. (quoted in Bullock (1996a), p.80)
A typical consequence of this historiographical interpretation of Freemasonry as a major Revolutionary cause is that the Craft has been defined in conspiratorial terms by opponents. After noting such figures as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Danton, Abbé Sieyes and Lafayette, the simple logic is often "These men were Freemasons. These men were leaders of the Revolution. Therefore, Freemasonry led the Revolution." The same logic can, and is, applied to the American War of Independence with Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Paul Revere.
Whether these opponents are of Freemasonry, or of the outcomes of the Revolutions, seems immaterial. They tar Freemasonry with the 'conspiratorial' brush because it is defined as a factor in something they oppose. 'It contributed to what I don't want, therefore it must be wrong!' is another simple piece of logic.
As the 'Great Isms' historiographic approach defines the process of history as 'Great Movements' which require 'Great Influences' to come to bear to create them, then this conspiracy label fits readily. While it is flattering in one way for the Craft to be seen as a 'Great Influence', it is highly misleading simply because an essential premise is wrong.
We know that Freemasonry is not a conspiracy for world domination. There is nothing in its stated tenets to suggest such, or even allow it. There is no reliable historical evidence whatsoever. But the 'Great Isms' approach to historiography, as I have said, requires 'Great Influences'. Therefore, to fit into a particular 'Ism', an influence such as Freemasonry must be defined as a world conspiracy.
And here is the essential problem in historical analysis and historiography. As E.H. Carr explained in his great work What is History?,
| The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts, and a provisional interpretation in the light of which that selection has been made - by others as well as by himself. As he works, both the interpretation and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and perhaps partly unconscious changes, through the reciprocal action of one or the other … [History] is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present. (p. 30) |
In other words, history is as much interpretation by the historian, in the context that s/he consciously or unconsciously maintains, as it is presentation of the facts. Even the selection of what facts to present is an interpretation, well before analysis of them has begun.
Thus, an historiographical stance can determine our view of history even before that history is written. An historian who wants to see Freemasonry as a world conspiracy will be able to see it as such by both the interpretive selection of facts and the analysis, guided by his particular 'Ism', of them. As long as the historiographical approach used requires great social movements - Communism, Capitalism, Nationalism, IImperialism, Evolution and so on - these will require great influences, and individuals become simply drops in an ocean rushed along by these inexorable tides.
It is this aspect, the relation between the individual and the great historical movement, that this paper seeks to address, particularly in regard to recent historiographical analysis of the role of the Craft in the 18th century revolutionary movements in France, Europe and America.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men" wrote Shakespeare in Julius Caesar "which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" (IV, iii, 217-18). But must human activity be such a tide? Does society operate as such an inexorable force or is simply it a numerical collection of individuals?
Marx saw this essential problem of definition and worked from the base that:
| The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. The first fact to be established, therefore, is the physical constitution of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of Nature. … All historiography must begin from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history by men's activity. (p. 69) |
Similarly Carr maintains that:
| Society and the individual are inseparable; they are necessary and complementary to each other, not opposites … Every human being at every stage of history is born into a society and from his earliest years is moulded by that society. (p. 31) |
Carr goes on to identify two major stances in this relation between man and society. The first he relates to John Donne's famous lines "No man is an island, entire of itself ... every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, no. xvii) and represents the idea, to which Carr subscribes, that the influence of society is dominant because individuals can have no existence outside society. " ... the fallacy is to suppose that they existed, or had any kind of substance, before being brought together." (p. 31).
The contrasting stand is typified by the classic individualist John Stuart Mill: "Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance." (A System of Logic, vii, 1) which maintains that each person acts and develops on their own. Society is, therefore, to Mill simply an accumulation of these individual acts, and is a construct of the individuals who have acted.
With these two historiographical approaches in mind, a definition such as 'Freemasonry as conspiracy' can be seen to be purely one of personal interpretation. Does the 'Great Social Movement' drive the individuals to choose certain matching behaviours, or is the apparent tide of events a coincidence of separate actions each chosen for individual, and private, reasons?
Several recent historical studies of eighteenth century societies have addressed this question, and the particular role of Freemasonry, in determining these great historical events. Each has looked at Freemasonry, not as a 'great world movement' but as a feature of a particular society, or even social group within a society, and analysed how the developments in that society are reflected in, or influenced by, the Craft.
Margaret Jacob, through an exhaustive study of Dutch and French lodge records and reports, places those lodges and Freemasonry firmly in the flow of the developing Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (1981) and Living the enlightenment: freemasonry and politics in eighteenth-century Europe (1991) both seek to understand the relationship between the discussion of philosophical concepts in lodge meetings and the immense social changes taking place outside them.
Douglas Smith undertakes a similar examination to Jacob, but of Russia ("Freemasonry and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Russia", Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 1996). The 135 Russian lodges that existed in the eighteenth century have been largely ignored because there was no Great Revolution there at that time. But Smith finds many similarities in the attitudes and actions of the civil and social polity to those of France and other European nations.
Steven Bullock's focus is America where the evolution of a new culture can be traced more readily than in the established European societies. Revolutionary brotherhood: Freemasonry and the transformation of the American social order, 1730-1840 (1996) traces the development of public and personal perceptions of the Craft in the fledgling American state.
All of these studies draw on a major historiographical shift that has occurred over the last few decades since the publication of two major German studies: Reinhardt Koselleck's Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society (1959 in German, 1988 in English) and Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961 in German, 1989 in English). Both works challenge long-held views of the role of the 'public' and the 'private' spheres of thought and action in the burgeoning intellectual and political world of 18th century Europe.
La Vopa's review article "Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-century Europe" in The Journal of Modern History (1992) describes the landmark nature of this challenge. While Koselleck makes a more precise study of Freemasonry's role, it is Habermas' broader social analyses, particularly, that have been most influential in recent scholarship.
Though he saw himself as a Marxist, Habermas challenged the orthodoxy of the 'Great Movements' approach by highlighting the actions and thoughts of 'little people' who would not normally attract the attention of historians. These were not the generals or explorers, or politicians or monarchs, or the great writers or thinkers whose actions and names resonate down the years. Habermas looked at the audiences of those thinkers and writers, the attenders of the salons, the readers of the books, and postulated how their thinking and reading and polite intellectual discourse could have wrought great social changes. The Age of the Enlightenment was, above all, an age of 'genteel sociability', where clubs and societies, coffee houses and salons gave people, especially the newly prosperous and newly literate 'middle classes,' the opportunity to mix, to exchange ideas and to discuss the new concepts of science, politics, and social values that seemed to be blossoming everywhere. Outrim (1995), in a nicely named chapter, "Coffee houses and Consumers: the social context of the Enlightenment", notes
| these new institutions and organizations where ideas could be explored and discussed. Some of these institutions, like masonic lodges, learned academies and societies, were formal affairs, whose membership was carefully controlled. Others, such as public lectures, coffee houses, lending libraries, art exhibitions, operatic and theatrical performances, were nearly all commercial operations, open to all who could pay and thus provided ways in which many different social strata could be exposed to the same ideas. (p. 15) |
Habermas examined the nature of this social interaction and its effect on the changing concept of 'the public'.
| He brought into focus a public sphere of literate men and women who, through their participation in burgeoning discursive institutions of print and sociability, transformed the social and political landscape of eighteenth-century Europe while empowering themselves as autonomous individuals. Goodman (1996), p. 1) |
Of the works noted that look at Freemasonry in these terms, Jacob's are the ones which most directly reflect Habermas' perspective as she meticulously details the meetings of various lodges, though Bullock's use of primary source material like newspaper reports and ephemeral pamphlets give his study a similar feeling of immediacy.
Jacob presents "a cast of interesting, if so-called minor, characters" (p. 20) asserting that
| these lesser-known figures are being put forward for inspection partly because their story needed to be written (new evidence entails the writing of new history) and also because it is time we shift our vision, if only temporarily, away from the major philosophes; not because they have been rendered less important, but solely because we do, or should, know a great deal about them already. (p. 26) |
Her comment that "new evidence entails the writing of new history" is the core of this historiographical reassessment. The assumption, that history is the arena of Major Characters and Great Movements who play out their dramas to create the world that the rest of humanity inhabit, is challenged.
For instance, both Bullock and Jacob look at the relationship between the new ideas of science that were developing during the 17th and 18th century and the social interaction of ordinary people: communication through print and discussion clubs, avenues of social mobility, the exploring of new ways of understanding society and people.
In particular, Jacob asserts that
| the custom in Enlightenment historiography of treating science and natural philosophy, in particular theories about the nature of matter, as simply progressive forces and a-historical ideas, devoid of social content and meaning, requires revision. Because the social meaning of scientific ideas and programmes has not been assessed in relation to the interests of their proponents we have obliterated a fundamental tension now apparent in the earliest manifestations of enlightened culture. (p. 21) |
Bullock confronts this tradition as well, relating the alchemical explorations of Newton in the 17th century and the later studies of nature and science to the political upheavals of that period in Britain with the consequent desire for social stability, and the reflection of these in the Neo-classicist revival in art and architecture. These threads come together in the genteel sociability of the Enlightenment clubs and societies.
Both Bullock and Jacob take these social perspectives into study of particular lodges and describe how the patterns of membership and the public and private presentations of the 'minor characters' involved demonstrate these issues.
They show that the members of the lodges were, by and large, ordinary people: shopkeepers, traders, local officials, military officers and so on. But both Jacob and Bullock note that they could not be considered a microcosm of their society; they represented a particular class of educated and fairly economically secure people. They were the bourgeoisie, the upwardly mobile class of their age, with hopes of further advancement.
| The majority of the new members after 1717 came from the middling ranks just below the nobility and gentry, the expanding group of men who … were unable to live off their estates but still possessed education, financial resources, or professional credentials that distinguished them from the rest of English society. (Bullock, (1996), p. 42) |
Indeed, Bullock even sees an initial elitism evident in the early American lodges which threatened to stifle the stated tenets of fraternity and equality.
| Colonial Masonry was not a middle-class order that embraced a wide range of members. Instead, membership was restricted almost exclusively to men of rank. … Colonial leaders saw the fraternity as a means both to build elite solidarity and to emphasize their elevation above the common people. Masonry's public processions and orations portrayed colonial elites as they wished to be seen, secure in their dignity and open in their sympathies. (p. 51) |
He goes on to demonstrate how this was to change over the course of the century as artisans like Paul Revere were to join and to use the lodge as a stepping stone to further social interaction. But even Prince Hall's late century membership and recognition was seen as part of a social elite.
| Boston's black brothers were not a random sample of the African-American community. Although clearly none ranked in the upper levels of the city's society, the members, like their white brothers, possessed high rank within their own group. (p. 159) |
These details of social standing and interaction are important to the central historiographical approach of Jacob and Bullock because it highlights the role that personal attitudes and motivations could play in determining a particular involvement. And it is the nature of this involvement which brings us to the central issues of Freemasonry's role in the Enlightenment and the eighteenth-century revolutions.
The key to the recent interpretations of this role again draws on Koselleck's and Habermas' pioneering work. Their great contribution to analysis of eighteenth-century history lay in creating an awareness of 'the public' in social discourse. As a result of their work, historians have increasingly considered the perspective of the local, the individual and the 'little people', not just as exemplary of the Great Movements, but as direct contributors to outcomes. As Smith notes, recently historians have "engaged in a broad examination of the Old Regime politics, society and culture in their various local contexts, resulting in the development of new approaches to conceptualizing the changes that took place in eighteenth-century Europe." (p.28)
The concept of 'the public' is a recent one, largely tied to the ideas of mass markets and mass communication. But that it existed in the same terms in eighteenth century Europe is undeniable. One only needs to consider the volume of printed pamphlets and broadsheets that circulated, as well as the popularity that could take them into many reprintings. Masonic historians are well aware of the importance of exposures such as Masonry Dissected (1730) and Jachin and Boaz (1762) in shedding light onto the Craft's own early history. Those are just a drop in an ocean of print on every social, cultural and political subject one can imagine.
All this ephemeral material must have had a market and an enthusiastic one to keep it going. 'The public' and 'public opinion' was even of such concern to Catherine the Great in the much more conservative and restricted Russia that she wrote, staged and published three anti-masonic plays in 1786 (The Deceiver, The Deluded One and The Siberian Shaman, noted in Smith (1996), p. 27). She could easily, if it were simply a question of suppressing particular people and activities, have sent in her secret police. But clearly 'the public' was something that even an absolute monarch like Catherine realised had to be convinced and brought on side.
Yet 'the public' has not been, until recently, a focus of analysis in the Great Movements of the Enlightenment. Smith points out how, at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, 'public' was used to denote an arena for display of the control held by the established order. It was for the 'public entrance' of the Tsar or a 'public meeting' of major figures. He calls it "representative publicness" where the purpose was as much 'publicity' as 'public involvement', where "the function of publicity was to display the power and authority of the autocracy and the social order upon which it was based before an audience of subjects." (p. 29)
The other was largely dependent upon the reading and writing and printing that was noted before, and the two created 'the public' as we know it.
| Unlike the earlier notion of the public, the new public sphere was a literate one and literacy to a great extent determined one's ability to participate in it. … In the second half of the century, the print market reached a level of density able to produce a sense of shared identity among those with access to it. Through the joint acts of subscription and reading of journals and books, these individuals came to see themselves and their relationship to each other in a new fashion, i.e., as members of a new community, that of the reading public. (Smith, p. 29) |
Jacob also recognizes this change of definition of 'public' and its link to the social importance of learning and communication. In both The Radical Enlightenment and The Living Enlightenment she looks in depth at Jean Rousset de Missy, a publisher of sometimes highly radical books and pamphlets and a prominent Dutch Freemason. She goes further than just this consideration of one man or one lodge to suggest that;
| We are on the verge of a major reassessment of the role of the printing press in early modern European culture. Rather than being seen as a mere vehicle for the dissemination of new ideas, its practitioners and technology are being advanced as distinct forces for social change themselves. (p. 25) |
This perception of mass communication, more than anything else, creates and defines the idea of the 'public', changing it from a passive arena for an audience to an active sphere for participation.
Jacob asserts very firmly that she sees an active and contributory role for Freemasonry, but certainly not one that fits the traditional Conspiracy model. In effect she proposes that lodges provided these newly literate and sociable citizens (even if they were a limited cross-section of their community) with the opportunity not only to share ideas of fraternity, equality and constitutional government, but also to practise them. Lodges, especially in continental Europe, enabled brethren to put the newly developed British systems of government - elections, candidates, binding constitutions, votes, changes of leader - into practical operation. By having a formal, and clearly enunciated, basis in the values of benevolence and social improvement, the Craft could be a point of reference. The brethren could experience these social structures, discuss them, contribute directly to their development and, in doing so, gain a yardstick by which their outside political and community existence could be measured.
It is this practising of democracy that made Freemasonry revolutionary, according to Jacob. She maintains that it would not be long before brethren in the absolutist political systems such as France would look at their society and think 'It works in Lodge. Why shouldn't it work in government?'. The role of radical publishers such as Rousset de Missy is given as typical of this way of thinking and challenging.
So, according to Jacob, while Freemasonry did not set out to be subversive and even demanded civil obedience as an essential tenet for brethren, it gave the opportunity for socially subversive ideas to be experienced and for brethren then to take them further outside the lodge, if they wished.
Bullock agrees to some parts of this view, noting that "Jacob rightly points out that brothers saw their fraternity as a model for society" but questions the extent of the influence Jacob claims.
| The vision of an international brotherhood claiming high status because of its benevolent values and its religious connections makes the fraternity less subversive of the eighteenth-century ancien régimes. But, as Jacob also astutely notes, the fraternity's ideals could at times provide alternative points of reference from which to criticize the status quo. (Bullock (1996a), p. 90) |
Instead, Bullock sees the appeal of the lodge as safety rather than challenge. Noting the social standing of the majority of brethren and the reinforcing by lodges of social divisions by maintaining strict limits on entry through fees and admission by proposal, he nevertheless agrees with the role of the lodge as a way of experiencing the new social and political structures. But he feels that the brethren could do this in a safe, non-challenging environment, without upsetting the security of their 'other lives'.
| This ambiguity may not be as exciting or inspiring as Jacob's … celebrations of the Enlightenment but it provides a better understanding of why so many key eighteenth-century figures from royals to radicals found the fraternity appealing - and of how the Enlightenment became a living part of eighteenth-century society and culture. (Bullock (1996a), p. 90) |
Freemasonry could provide otherwise ordinary people, people who were not likely to shake the world, a personal, and internal, sense of great ideas and great understandings, while still letting them exercise the social, or external, virtues of fraternity and benevolence. These two streams, the personal and the public, is what Bullock sees as making Freemasonry unique in the Enlightenment. Other groups might offer one or the other, but
| Masonry remained rooted in both traditions, making available to its members a powerful range of symbols and identifications largely unavailable elsewhere. The resulting popularity of these connections within London's polite and learned social circles formed the final Masonic tradition, providing the fraternity the social cachet its ideas continued to claim even as it spread beyond the aristocratic circles the brothers boasted of so loudly. (Bullock (1996b), p. 48-9) |
And this brings the focus back to the historiography of the Enlightenment. For here is the key change in interpretation of the role of Freemasonry. Traditional historiographies have expected Great Influences on Great Figures and Great Events. Freemasonry, from this perspective, must therefore be either the Great Conspiracy which sought to change the world by such influence or, if not, then a minor and forgettable instance of men dressing up and pretending significance.
It was the fact that virtually all Craft brethren were not Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin or George Washington that made this influence so great. These men would have been Great Figures in any case; their intellects, their charisma, their actions saw to that. (A question that begs asking is whether it was Freemasonry that provided them with their great social ideals or whether they joined because they recognized similar sympathies and beliefs to those they already held.)
What we understand as history is really a choice of interpretations. This is the basis of historiography. As Coleridge described it "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" (Recollections, Dec. 1831) The history of Freemasonry is as subject to this as any other arena of human experience, and especially the roles that Freemasonry has played in the greater arenas of history.
It was the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the revolutionary turmoil of Britain, France and America that saw the genesis of Speculative Masonry, so we must consider that genesis in the same terms and from the same perspectives with which historians consider that period. As we search for ways to keep the principles and tenets of the Craft relevant and vigorous, historiographical interpretations must be studied. From these we can learn how we got to where we are now, and therefore where we might be heading. They are not just the lanterns in our stern, but must be at our bow as well.
Reminder:
COPYRIGHT
Inquiries and requests should be directed
to the Correspondence Circle Secretary:
W Bro Graeme Love, PJGD
by e-mail, or in writing to:
P O Box 2380
RINGWOOD NORTH, VIC, 3134
AUSTRALIA
Return to:
Go to:
VLOR Home Page | VLOR Correspondence Circle | Best of Research Links | Diploma of Masonic History and ideas
Do not forget to visit the
Kring Nieuw Holland
and Holden Research
Circle websites!
Updated: 15 September 2004
