Volume 5, Number 1 · August 5, 1965
What Else, Indeed?
By A.J.P. Taylor
The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I
by Laurence Lafore
Lippincott, 282 pp., $4.50
The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914-1920
by Daniel M. Smith
Wiley, 221 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The Great War 1914-1918: A Pictorial History
by John Terraine
Macmillan, 480 pp., $15.00
Once upon a time historians believed, with Ranke, that if they accumulated enough facts they would find the answers and produce a true, immutable version of past events. Now we are less confident. Knowledge breeds doubt, not certainty, and the more we know, the more uncertain we become. Thirty-five years ago, when I was first set to lecture on the origins of what was then called The Great War, I spoke with cheerful confidence. There were many books to read, many sources to study. Once this had been done, it seemed easy to come up with firm explanations. The explanations changed with the years. During the war itself, the explanation was the wickedness of the opposing side. After the war, it shifted to the wickedness of all, or nearly all, the statesmen concerned. The system of 'international anarchy' was supposed to be at fault, though no one explained how a system which had produced an unprecedented period of peace then produced the bitterest of wars. By the 1930s we had taken up with 'economic imperialism,' a version which we derived, unconsciously or otherwise, from a rather inferior tract by Lenin.
Review, 1933 words
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