Vol. 12 No.

21 8 November 1990
pages 6-11 | 8776 words

Witchcraft
Perry Anderson
Storia Notturna: Una Decifrazione del Sabba by Carlo Ginzburg
Einaudi, 320 pp, lire 45,000.00, August 1989, ISBN 88 06 11509 X
Carlo Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian
of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him
in originality, variety and audacity. He made his debut with a spectacular discovery: the
first, and still only, documented case of a magical fertility and funerary cult in the
countryside of Early Modern Europe, the trances of the Benandanti in Friuli, stumbled
upon unawares by the Roman Inquisition. Next, he transformed the genealogy of
religious dissimulation in the age of the Reformation, by tracing the origins of
Nicodemism theological doctrines sanctioning public concealment of private faith
to the defeat of the Peasants War in Germany and milieux close to Anabaptism, well
before the rise of Calvin, whose attacks on Nicodemism coined the term. There followed
his vivid portrait of the autodidact Italian miller Menocchio, whose cosmology of
spontaneous generation the world born as cheese and worms he referred to a
subterranean peasant materialism. Changing terrain again, Ginzburg then suggested a
new iconographic explanation of Piero della Francescas greatest paintings, linking
them through an unnoticed Aretine Humanist to the abortive union of the Greek and
Roman Churches, and the crusades projected around the fall of Constantinople. The
intellectual unity, and novelty, of these different enquiries can best be grasped in the
essays that make up the recent collection Myths Emblems Clues. Its centrepieces are
two long methodological reflections, the first on the Warburg tradition of art history,
and the second on the heuristics of attribution, from ancient divination to modern
connoisseurship.
Ginzburgs new book, Storia Notturna, more than keeps the promise of this record.
It is by far his most ambitious work to date. Subtitled A Decipherment of the Sabbath,
it advances a vast, dramatic reinterpretation of the central image of the European witch
craze. Far from being simply a phobic invention of the persecutors, confected from
fixed stereotypes of heretical diabolism and garbled scraps of rural magic, the witches
sabbath reflected the deepest mythological structures of popular culture of the age a
network of beliefs and practices rooted in Eurasian shamanism, stretching from Ireland
to the Bering Straits, and running back across millennia past the Ancient World to the
darkness of Indo-European and Ural-Altaic origins. In a polemical introduction
Ginzburg criticises those historians who have concentrated on the authorities and
procedures that set European witch-finding in motion, at the expense of research into
the beliefs of those persecuted as witches Trevor-Roper in the first instance, but also
Keith Thomas, charged with reductionism and functionalism. Against this tradition
Ginzburg sets what he sees as the superior programme of Lvi-Strausss Structuralist
treatment of myths as symbolic systems, whose hidden meaning is generated by
unconscious operations of the human mind even though Lvi-Strausss anthropology
has given insufficient weight to historical research proper. By contrast, Ginzburgs aim
is to combine the morphology and history of the Sabbath its synchronic significations
and its diachronic development in a single, comprehensive reconstruction.
The argument of Storia Notturna is divided into three parts. The first opens
dramatically onto a staccato account of the French pogrom of 1321 against lepers and
Jews, accused of poisoning wells in a plot against Christendom orchestrated by the
Muslim King of Granada. It then moves to 1348 and the massacre of Jews as agents of
a conspiracy spreading the Black Death, which unfolded further east towards the Alps.
In each case, confessions of a phantasmagoric iniquity were extorted, under pressure of

torture. By 1380 the Inquisition was ferreting out Waldensian heretics on the southern
flank of the Alps. Soon afterwards, Ginzburg suggests, the obsessive fears at work in
these persecutions of successive marginal groups were condensed and displaced onto
the spectre of a new sect practising witchcraft in the Alpine regions. With this, other
dread themes surfaced, absent from the earlier confessions. By about 1440, the full
nightmare of the Sabbath diabolism, anthropophagy, animal metamorphoses,
supernatural flight, promiscuity had been incubated in the Christian imagination.
Ginzburg does not pursue the consequences. Breaking off his historical account here,
he switches directly to the meaning of what he terms the folkoric nucleus of the
Sabbath identified with the motifs of nocturnal flying and animal transmogrification.
The second part of Storia Notturna pursues the archaeology of these motifs. It picks
out three cultic origins behind the popular beliefs that went into the compound image
of the Sabbath: ecstatic experiences (for women) of a night goddess surrounded by
animals, and (for men) of a night battle to ensure fertility or prosperity; and ritual
processions (of males) masked as animals. Ginzburg tracks each of these across
formidable temporal and geographical distances, starting out from Archaic Greece and
Gallo-Roman Gaul: the first in Lombardy, Scotland, Sicily, the Rhineland; the second
in Latvia, Dalmatia, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Corsica, the Caucasus; the third in
Germany, Bulgaria, the Ukraine. Through every kind of exotic variation, however, all
betray a common source the voyage to the dead undertaken in the shamans trance.
The journey of the living to the land of death, symbolised in such practices over
thousands of years, constituted the clandestine core of the Sabbath as it took shape at
the end of the Middle Ages.
In the third part of the book, Ginzburg explores possible explanations for the
morphological unity of a folklore extending far into Siberia and Turkestan. He starts by
suggesting that it could have derived from the nomadic migrations which spilt out of
Central Asia in the eighth century BC, bringing the Scythians an Iranian people into
the Caucasus and the steppes to the north of the Black Sea, where Greek traders and
colonists encountered them, absorbing certain shamanistic features of their culture. In
the sixth century, Scythian contingents penetrated south, establishing themselves in
the Dobrudja, where they ruled over a local Thracian population, subsequently joined
by Celtic settlements. Could this Scythian region have been the original scene of a
cultural synthesis, fusing mythological elements from all three peoples into a millennial
substratum of beliefs and customs, capable of spreading across the continent and
surviving in the depths of folk memory from the age of Herodotus to that of Galileo, if
not beyond? Does the remarkable similarity of Animal Style art, whose decorative
forms stretch from China to Scandinavia in a continuum where the Scythian
achievement was outstanding, testify to comparable historical connections? After
dwelling on the plausibility of these hypotheses, Ginzburg then points to the limitation
of all diffusionist explanations, which leave unanswered the question of why external
contact between societies should lead to the internal reproduction of the forms of one
in another. The problem posed by the persistence over time and space of shamanistic
motifs can only be resolved, he concludes, by postulating the existence of general
structural characteristics of the human mind.
To demonstrate these, Ginzburg proceeds to examine in another sudden shift of focus
myths and rites involving lameness. This motif had already been discussed by LviStrauss, who related it to the change of seasons. Rejecting this interpretation, Ginzburg
scours (in the first instance) Greek mythology for every manifestation of a deeper
category which he dubs asymmetrical de-ambulation, in which lameness is only one
variant, along with the wounded leg, the perforated foot, the vulnerable heel, the
missing sandal. Oedipus, Perseus, Jason, Theseus, Dionysus, Achilles, Philoctetes,
Empedocles and a host of other figures display this motif as do Cinderella, the most
far-flung of all folk-tales, and the Chinese crane-dance. Its symbolic meaning is a
journey to the world of the dead. But if the pervasive recurrence of this motif belongs to
a unitary Eurasian mythology, it is anchored in a universal human experience, the selfimage of the body. Asymmetrical de-ambulation is the privileged signifier of contact

with death, because all living beings are symmetrical in form, and among them humans
are specifically biped. The impairing of the capacity to walk amounts to putting a
figurative toe in the waters of extinction. There is thus in the end an ontological
foundation for the symbolisation of the voyage beyond human experience, to the world
inhabited by the dead. Myths dictate the limits of their own variation because they are
constrained by the formal structures of the imagination.
Storia Notturna ends with a brief Conclusion which is in fact more like a coda. Here
Ginzburg suggests that if the image of the witches sabbath could so effectively fuse
clerical obsessions from above and folk myths from below, it was in part because they
shared a common fear of conspiracy whose popular form was the belief that those who
had recently died were moved by resentment towards those who were still living.
Perhaps too, he speculates, there was a psychotropic element in the trances
(hallucinogenic rye or mushrooms) which either contributed to or was projected onto
the whole complex. However that may be, the myths which flowed into the Sabbath all
converged on the notion of a journey to the beyond and back again, of a crossing over to
the world of the dead and returning from it. Ginzburg ends by arguing that the
permanence of this theme, through hunting, pastoral and agricultural societies alike,
may have a simple but fundamental explanation: the voyage to the dead is not just one
narrative among others, but the original matrix of all possible narratives. In the
cauldrons of Walpurgis Night are concocted the ingredients of every human tale.
By any standards, this is a bravura performance. It is difficult to think of any other
historian who combines such polymathic cultural erudition, grasp of textual and visual
detail, and high theoretical aim not to speak of literary skill. The result is a work of
vertiginous effect. There can be little doubt of the audience it is destined to win. To do it
critical justice, however, may not prove so simple. For with all its extraordinary gifts,
Storia Notturna poses a series of difficult problems, concerning the methods it adopts,
the conclusions it reaches, the outlook it suggests. It is best to begin with the first of
these.
Ginzburg tells us at the outset that the procedure of his book was inspired by a
comment of Wittgensteins on Frazers Golden Bough, to the effect that mythological
materials did not need to be set out historically, as Frazer had done (situating them in
an evolutionary sequence), but could equally well be presented perspicuously that is,
he explained, just by arranging the factual material so that we can easily pass from one
part to the other and therewith see the connections. Hence, Wittgenstein went on
here is the motto Ginzburg took for his research the importance of finding
intermediary links, as one might illustrate the internal relation of a circle to an ellipse
by gradually transforming an ellipse into a circle.
For Ginzburg this was the charter for the kind of morphology he was looking for. A
more formalised version of it was to be found, as it happened, in an essay on Polythetic
Classification by the English anthropologist Rodney Needham, which Ginzburg duly
uses. Needham, too, was much impressed with Wittgensteins insights, although he
relied, rather, on the familiar text from the Philosophical Investigations which
describes the notion of a game as indicating no more than a family resemblance,
without any common feature in the set of which it is used, just as the strength of a
thread does not reside in the fact that some one thread runs through its whole length,
but in the overlapping of many fibres. Whereas monothetic classification requires the
presence of at least one common trait in the class identified, polythetic classification
Needham argued merely demands that each member of the set display a large
number of the range of relevant traits, and that these traits are displayed in a large
number of the members. He illustrated the basic idea with three descent systems, the
first exhibiting features p/q/r, the second r/s/t, and the third t/u/v: such was the type
of overlap that sufficed for polythetic purposes.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 1 10 January 1991
I am very grateful to Perry Anderson for the attention he has paid to my book Storia
Notturna (LRB, 8 November 1990). Above all, I am grateful for his lucid, probing,
implacable critical remarks. Storia Notturna has now been published by Radius in an
English translation, with a different title (Ecstasies), and readers will be able to
evaluate the comparative strength of my arguments and Andersons criticisms. I will
limit myself, therefore, to discussing some general issues raised, either explicitly or
implicitly, by Anderson. Our conversations, interspersed with passionate
disagreements, have been for me, since we first met two years ago, a source of
enormous intellectual enrichment. Andersons review gives me the opportunity to
reflect on some of these divergences.
Narrative. Anderson remarks that my historical narratives are based on short,
numbered paragraphs, with minimal connections, which can be compared to scenes or
takes from stage or screen. This is a very effective way of unfolding a story, he goes on.
But it has a particular drawback as a method of writing history: it too often depends on
withholding information. Anderson criticises my decision to represent the conspiracy
ascribed to lepers and Jews in 1321 as a starting-point for the witchcraft persecution, in
so far as I neglected the extermination of the Templars which preceded it. This, he
says, is an especially relevant, and questionable example of my habit of suppressing
general information.
Maybe. But Andersons criticism must not be taken in a literal sense. In fact, I did
mention (Storia Notturna hereafter SN page 26) the persecution against the
Templars, as part of a series of sensational cases in France during the first decades of
the 14th century which helped to spread this fear of conspiracies. I even said that
these are cases that seem to anticipate on a minor scale the conspiracy attributed some
years later to the lepers and the Jews. I could have said more. I didnt, because my
argument about the origins of the Sabbath stereotype was centred on a specific
element: the emergence of accusations against a sect (or a group) conspiring against
society as a whole. Anderson says the charges made against the Templars were in
certain respects closer to the Sabbath stereotype than the lepers and Jews alleged
conspiracy. From the point of view I chose, however, the opposite is certainly true: the
Templars were never regarded as a menace to society as a whole. In my book I never
claim that 1321 was an absolute beginning (a rather meaningless notion, outside
metaphysics). But within my argument, 1321 provided a beginning, in so far as I
regarded the notion of a group or a sect conspiring against society as a crucial element:
much more important, for the development of the Sabbath stereotype, than, for
instance, the isolated charge of idolatry raised against the Templars. What has been
called by Anderson withholding of data I would call selection of evidence. In the past
in ancient Greece, for instance historians regarded completeness that is, the

recording of as much data as possible as one of the goals of their work. Our society
has invented better ways of storing data. Today the main task of historians lies
elsewhere.
Anderson suggests that in order to write effective narratives I have paid a high
cognitive price. I would say the opposite. I sometimes felt a tension between an
aesthetic and cognitive goal, but the latter always had the right of veto. More often,
however, my arguments and my way of presenting them were connected: they provided
mutual constraints (and opportunities). I am ready to admit my fascination with
discontinuous narratives in movies and novels. But for me they have above all a
cognitive implication. Prousts remark on the famous blank in Flauberts LEducation
Sentimentale, immediately after the end of Chapter Five, Part Three (Et Frdric,
bant, reconnut Sncal), as well as Prousts entire oeuvre, imply something more than
a different way of telling a story: they suggest a different way of knowing and writing
history.
Explanation. Anderson rejects on similar grounds my attempt to connect the folkloric
side of the Sabbath to the mythical journey towards the land of the dead. According to
him, the present writer has now taken over Propps conclusion, and generalised it
beyond the wonder-tale, to the farthest-flung corners of Eurasian mythology. The
fascination of the data he assembles is beyond question. But once again, what is
striking is the contrast between the richness and variety of the materials, and the
paucity of the meaning to which they are reduced. Paucity, in reference to the
powerful myth I detect, is probably an inappropriate word. But if Anderson would
accept a change to simplicity, I would say that what is a flaw to him is a virtue to me. A
reduction from complexity to simplicity is, after all, one of the aims of scientific
explanation. I say one of the aims, because I would certainly have liked to repeat on a
much larger scale the experiment I made in an earlier book, The Night Battles: to
reconstruct the way in which a single myth had been lived in different ways by different
individuals. Unfortunately, this time I didnt have enough evidence for this kind of
experiment (SN, p. xxxvii). But the only way to interpret the richness and variety of
materials (to use Andersons words) is to go beyond them.
Depth. To go beyond the evidence suggests a strategy which, according to Anderson,
has gone to extremes in my work, through the implicit assumption that the deeper
something lies, the more significant it must be. I would not reject this motto, although
other metaphors like the meaning is on the surface are more or less equivalent to
it. The point is to reassemble and analyse the existing data in order to build different
configurations. (Even to find the data where nobody is looking for it, as Poe taught us
in his Purloined Letter.) If appearances could be trusted, science would never have
emerged as an intellectual enterprise. But Anderson lightly dismisses the possibility of
going beyond the surface of myths, since he considers them intrinsically impervious to
analysis. He regards their plots, if ostensibly centred on issues related to family
(Oedipus) or knowledge (Prometheus), as an ultimate reality, not as an organising
principle of possibly heterogeneous elements. (A marginal note: the phrase it has been
suggested, which, as Anderson remarks, recurs so often in my book, is always related
to a specific article or book, duly mentioned in the corresponding footnote.)
Anderson is shocked by the claim I made that the most complete version of the
Cinderella fable has been kept in just three cases, less than 1 per cent of the collected
versions around the globe: In such defiance of distributional frequency, he says, it is
difficult not to see a preconceived conclusion. The readers of my book will judge
whether my interpretation of the Cinderella tales is supported or not by the massive
dossier I collected on lameness, monosandalism and bone-collecting. But the idea that
distributional frequency must necessarily be regarded as a guarantee of truth seems
surprisingly naive. The majority principle is a practical device, not a short-cut to the
truth. Truth can be furnished by a single testimony, in the middle of silence,
distortions, lies: an obvious remark, which can be referred to both ethics and evidence.
Morphology. In the introduction to Storia Notturna I explained at length why I chose
first unknowingly, then deliberately a morphological approach in order to

reconstruct the folkloric side of the Sabbath stereotype. Anderson denies any cognitive
value to family resemblances, speaking ironically of their fatuities (but see, on this
issue, E.H. Gombrichs The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic
Likeness in Life and Art). He criticises me for having neglected the problem of
defining the acceptable character range of a class altogether. The result is a
hermeneutic blank cheque, drawn from an uncritical reliance on Wittgenstein.
Strangely enough, Anderson does not mention in this context the critical comments I
made on Wittgensteins Notes on Frazer (SN, pp. xxix-xxx). Having rejected
Wittgensteins alleged superiority of morphology over history, I explained how I
decided to use morphology as a probe, to explore a deep, otherwise unattainable
stratum. This was going to be just a first step, however: at the end, morphology,
although achronic, would have established diachrony. The attempt I made to combine
morphology and history, to write, lets say, a historical figure on my morphological
blank cheque, has not been discussed by Anderson. He simply belittles the connections
between the ostensible subject [the Sabbath stereotype] and actual climax of the book
[asymmetrical de-ambulation]. An astonishing conclusion, given the ubiquitous
presence, in witchcraft trials, demonological treatises, diabolical iconography (see, for
instance, SN, Fig. 19), of limping devils or devils with animal feet.
Relevance. Having dismissed the morphological and morphologico-historical sections
(second and third part, respectively) of Storia Notturna, Anderson concludes: The first
part of the book must be regarded as an effectively independent enquiry, to be judged
on its own merits. The dominant approach, regarding the witch-craze (that is, the
persecution of witchcraft) as the only proper historical topic (as opposed to witches
beliefs and attitudes), is therefore reaffirmed: The fundamental enigma of the
European witch-craze is the pattern of its development in time and space: why it
erupted when it did, whom it attacked, why and how it affected certain zones yet passed
by others, why and when it petered out. In the answer to these historical questions
must lie the key to deciphering the Sabbath. This statement does not imply a direct
criticism of my book. I never claimed to provide, through a decipherment of the
Sabbath stereotype, a key to the geographical and chronological pattern of the witches
persecution (a truly absurd embryological approach). Andersons words must be read,
quite simply, as a tacit dismissal of the questions I asked in my research question he
clearly regards as historically irrelevant. His lack of curiosity about what I called the
ecstatic nucleus of the Sabbath stereotype has been anticipated, four centuries ago, by
the inquisitors attitude towards the Friulian Benandanti: a parallel which, in
Andersons eyes, proves the soundness of his own historical approach. His warm praise
of Trevor-Ropers essay The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries is
based on a complete agreement about the fundamental (not to say exclusive) relevance
of the questions to be asked. Trevor-Ropers disregard for what he called female
hysteria and peasant credulity was undoubtedly consistent with his aggressive
ethnocentric attitude: we may neglect our history and amuse ourselves with the
unrewarding gyration of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the
globe. Perry Andersons superior attitude towards the gyrations of the shaman and his
misery are more perplexing.
Research Programmes and their Fruits. How probable is it that both ecstatic voyages
to the beyond and robust materialist denials of the divine were ancient peasant
traditions in the same Friulian hills existing beneath the surface of a European
Christianity whose own divisions were also traversed by a clandestine movement
profounder than Catholic or Calvinist confessions? This is a very appropriate question,
even if my answer is a bit different from Andersons. Truth is sometimes improbable.
Societies (including our own) can be heterogeneous: a feature easily missed by scholars
who look above all for regularities (as well as by those who look for global
configurations la Spengler a crude morphologist indeed).
Perry Anderson praises the empirical discoveries I made but dislikes the research
programmes which inspired them. Which programme does he suggest, then? As far as I
can understand from his review, it should imply a continuous narrative, a refusal to go

beyond appearances, a rejection of dangerous methods, a hierarchy of historical

relevances aiming to reinforce a pre-existing (ethnocentric) attitude. Above all, no
experiments.
There is a motto I am very fond of. It has been recorded by Walter Benjamin, who
heard it from Bertolt Brecht, when they were both exiles in Denmark after Hitlers
accession to power. We should not start from good old things, Brecht said to
Benjamin. We should start from bad new things instead. For many years I have tried
(successfully or unsuccessfully, I dont know) to follow Brechts suggestion. Am I wrong
in thinking that, in his criticism of my book, Perry Anderson has embraced the opposite
alternative?
Carlo Ginzburg
Bologna
Vol. 13 No. 3 7 February 1991
Carlo Ginzburgs engaging letter (Letters, 10 January) wonders whether my queries
about his hook Storia Notturna (Ecstasies) are not prompted by a conservative
resistance to all historical experiment. By no means. Discontinuous narratives, arcane
readings, diagonal problem-shifters have often shed new light on the past. But they too,
no less than other kinds of history, must answer to the controls of logic and evidence.
Does Ginzburgs use of the method of polythetic classification satisfy these? In my
review I doubted whether its principal outcome, the category of asymmetric deambulation, really unified the fields of Greek mythology and the witches Sabbath. In
his response, Ginzburg expresses his astonishment at such scepticism, given the
ubiquitous presence, in witchcraft trials, demonological treatises, diabolical
iconography, of limping devils or devils with animal feet.
This, however, is an all too apt example of the danger indicated in this kind of
classification: that the classes become infinitely stretchable. Cloven hooves may indeed
signify the devil, but alas, they are symmetrical and worn by satyrs before Satan.
Similarly, while devils are naturally everywhere in witchcraft trials and the lore of the
Sabbath, those with a limp emphatically are not. It is a logic of association, not of
connection, that extends the claim of ubiquity here. Ginzburg has so far demonstrated
no special link between lameness and the Sabbath (or for that matter ecstatic fertility
cults: the limbs of the Night-Walkers are perfectly sturdy).
So little has the Limping Devil to do with the organising phobias of the Sabbath that
when it emerges as a specific motif in popular literature, it is at the antipodes of
supernatural terror. Luis Velezs El Diablo Cojuelo (1641) was written at a time when
the Spanish witch-craze was still active. Its subtitle A Novel from the Other Life,
Translated into This One would seem to promise just what Ginzburg might have
wished, a voyage into the land of the dead. In fact, Velezs fiction is a burlesque survey
of the morals of the living, in which a student on the run from a wanton encounters a
devil on crutches, imprisoned in a flask, who on release lifts the roofs of Madrid to
guide him panoramically over the mores of the city. Before setting him free, the hero
repeatedly enquires what sort of devil he is looking at Lucifer, Satan, Belial? Those
are demons of the higher callings, comes the reply, whereas he is no more than the
spirit of gossip and intrigue, who brings the sarabande and chaconne, serenades and
somersaults into the world. He even explains that the goat-footed devil of the Sabbath
is his enemy, and that if he himself is lame, it is because when all the devils fell from
heaven, the others landed on top of him a nice twist of the ankle to asymmetric deambulation. In Lesages rococo reworking of the tale, Le Diable Boiteux (1707), the
devil becomes the spirit of sexual espiglerie: I am the demon of the voluptuous, or to
put it more honourably, the god Cupid lame since thrown to the ground when
wrestling with the demon of pecuniary gain. Through Lesage, the figure of the Crippled
Devil as dragoman to the satire of manners became a European device, inspiring
collections of sketches down to the era of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. What unifies this
long tradition, from the Baroque through the Enlightenment to the Romantic period, is
terrestrial mockery. Should we enrol it too, as one more secret outing in the perpetual

expeditions of the human mind to the beyond? I hope the suggestion doesnt pull
anyones leg.
Ginzburg ends by taxing me with ethnocentric lack of interest, indeed of respect, for
shamanism. His evidence: I spoke of the merits of Trevor-Ropers famous essay on the
witch-craze; elsewhere Trevor-Roper once used the word gyration in a sentence
disdainful of tribal experiences outside Europe; the same word is used of the trance of
the shaman by myself; and I refer to another scholar, Vilamos Voigt, who uses the word
misery of shamanism to boot: ergo superior ethnocentrism. Should I call this
construction polythetic perversity, or playfulness? Whichever, I am tickled by its
illustration of the method of intermediate links Ginzburg found in Wittgenstein. Of
course, for a more rationalist approach, to honour the merits of a writers essay on one
subject is not quite the same as to assent to all he has written: tribes are not exactly
identical with shamans; the metaphorical use of a term is a little different from its
literal meaning; and to cite an author is not to disagree with him especially if one
expresses a demurrer. One could even object that it is difficult to describe the remark of
a Hungarian folklorist on something familiar from Magyar experience as ethnocentric.
But as I pointed out, the detection of family resemblances permits just such
assimilations, without end.
Protesting my reserve towards them, Ginzburg advocates Brecht s motto that it is
better to start from the bad new things than from the good old ones. Ive always been
puzzled by the popularity of this dictum on the left. Why should we restrict ourselves to
this simpleminded pair what about the bad old things and the good new ones?
Wouldnt it be more advisable to start from the latter: let us say, in Ginzburgs case,
Gellner and Goody rather than Wittgenstein and Lvi-Strauss perhaps further from
fashion, but closer to truth?
Noel Annan (Letters, 24 January), on the other hand, appears to be suggesting that no
one on the left can decently welcome any new intellectual developments if capitalism is
scoring political triumphs. For a historian of ideas, this seems a self-destructive
argument. But it points to one of the weaknesses of his portrait of Our Age the
assumption of a unitary Zeitgeist embracing the worlds of English government and
thought alike, the vision of a single distended generation, with at most a sprinkling of
deviants round the edges. The starting-point of this collective biography is the
transformation of British sensibility among those who mattered by the Great War,
reaction to which moulded the outlook of this moral cohort. Since Annans account
ends, if on a note of debonair deniability, with a repudiation of that outlook, it is
perhaps logical that he should now defend Edwardian values from any responsibility
for the disaster of 1914. Liberal civilisation, he suggests, had nothing to do with the
outbreak of mass killing in 20th-century Europe. Between exclamation marks, the
argument becomes somewhat syncopated. But its gist seems to be this. Of the Great
Powers only England and France could be called liberal, and (are we given to
understand?) their hands were clean. The war itself, for which Germany, Austria and
Russia bear the blame, is not to be connected with the brutalities of inter-war politics
the rise of Fascism of Stalinism. Modern barbarism springs independently from the
migr circles in which Lenin moved and which later instituted Stalins regime and its
antidote Hitler.
One wonders whether, polemical ardours spent, Annan really wants to defend these
contentions in the cold light of day. Does he need to be reminded that Germany,
England, Austro-Hungary and France shared a common rule of law and set of
individual liberties the classic negative freedoms of European liberalism? Russia,
which did not (as I pointed out), failed to last the course of industrial slaughter to no
end. The Great War cost seven million lives. What serious historian seeks to explain the
savageries which followed without relation to its structural and moral consequences?
For the rest, it was Ernst Nolte who discovered that Hitler was the antidote to Stalin
the Judeocide a reactive violence. But not even he imagined that Nazism was conceived
in the Russian social-democratic emigration. Here one must be charitable, and assume
that Annan got carried away at the races. But the horse he was not unsympathetically

 backing, the cause of Isaiah Berlin, is liable to be handicapped by wild cries from the
stand.
Perry Anderson
Los Angeles