Contemporary Authors

1. Panarchy : political theories of non-territorial states https://lccn.loc.gov/2015023566 Panarchy : political theories of non-territorial states / edited by Aviezer Tucker and Gian Piero de Bellis. New York : Routledge, 2016. xxi, 259 pages ; 24 cm. JC336 .P36 2016 ISBN: 9781138884847 (hbk) 2. The legacies of totalitarianism ; a theoretical framework https://lccn.loc.gov/2015027391 Tucker, Aviezer, 1965- The legacies of totalitarianism ; a theoretical framework / Aviezer Tucker. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2015. x, 260 pages ; 24 cm HX45 .T83 2015 ISBN: 9781107121263 (hardback) 3. Plato for everyone https://lccn.loc.gov/2012040648 Tucker, Aviezer, 1965- Works, Selections Plato for everyone / Aviezer Tucker. Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2013. 256 pages ; 23 cm B395 .T83 2013 ISBN: 9781616146542 (paperback : alk. paper) 4. The Oxford handbook of philosophy of social science https://lccn.loc.gov/2011036789 The Oxford handbook of philosophy of social science / edited by Harold Kincaid. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, c2012. xviii, 657 p. : ill. ; 26 cm. H61 .O95 2012 ISBN: 9780195392753 (alk. paper) 5. The global 1989 : continuity and change in world politics https://lccn.loc.gov/2010024612 The global 1989 : continuity and change in world politics / edited by George Lawson, Chris Armbruster, Michael Cox. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010. xix, 317 p. ; 24 cm. E860 .G646 2010 ISBN: 9780521761246 (hbk. : alk. paper)9780521147910 (pbk. : alk. paper) 6. Recent themes in the history of science and religion : historians in conversation https://lccn.loc.gov/2009022161 Recent themes in the history of science and religion : historians in conversation / edited by Donald A. Yerxa. Columbia, S.C. : University of South Carolina Press, 2009. viii, 146 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. BL245 .R43 2009 ISBN: 9781570038709 (pbk : alk. paper)1570038708 (pbk : alk. paper) 7. A companion to the philosophy of history and historiography https://lccn.loc.gov/2008007601 A companion to the philosophy of history and historiography / edited by Aviezer Tucker. Chichester, U.K. ; Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xii, 563 p. ; 26 cm. D13 .C627 2009 ISBN: 9781405149082 (hbk. : alk. paper)1405149086 (hbk. : alk. paper) 8. Retribution and reparation in the transition to democracy https://lccn.loc.gov/2005009626 Retribution and reparation in the transition to democracy / edited by Jon Elster. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2006. ix, 341 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. K5250 .R48 2006 ISBN: 0521829739 (hardback)9780521829731 9. Our knowledge of the past : a philosophy of historiography https://lccn.loc.gov/2003060237 Tucker, Aviezer, 1965- Our knowledge of the past : a philosophy of historiography / Aviezer Tucker. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004. vii, 291 p. ; 24 cm. D13 .T85 2004 ISBN: 0521834155 10. The philosophy and politics of Czech dissidence from Patočka to Havel https://lccn.loc.gov/00009015 Tucker, Aviezer, 1965- The philosophy and politics of Czech dissidence from Patočka to Havel / Aviezer Tucker. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, c2000. xii, 295 p. ; 24 cm. DB2228.7 .T83 2000 ISBN: 0822957280 (alk. paper)0822941244 (pbk. : alk. paper)

• (Editor) A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography - 2010 Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, United Kingdom
• (Editor, with Gian Piero de Bellis) Panarchy: Political Theories of Non-Territorial States - 2015 Routledge, London, United Kingdom
• Plato for Everyone - 2013 Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY
• The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel - 2001 University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA
• The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework - 2015 Cambridge University Press, New York, NY
• Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography - 2004 Cambridge University Press, New York, NY
• Murder in Prague: Inspector Mazal Mystery - 2013 CreateSpace,

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aviezer-tucker-14611419/

  Aviezer Tucker
  Associate at Harvard University
  Harvard University Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs
  Greater Boston Area 374 374 connections
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  Specialties:
  1. Geopolitics, Energy Policy, Post-totalitarianism, Central-East Europe.
  2. Formal epistemology, social epistemology, philosophy of the historical sciences, political Theory and Philosophy,
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  Experience
  Harvard University
  Davis Center Associate
  Company NameHarvard University
  Dates Employed2014 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs LocationGreater Boston Area
  I conduct theoretical and empirical research on post-totalitarian countries and co-teach at Harvard's study abroad program in Prague. I finished a book on the politics, legal reforms and continuities, and theoretical implications of post-Communism.
  I continue to consult on energy policy, politics and social problems and solutions globally.
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  Episode 62: Getting Totalitarianism and Grading NATO's Strategy
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  The University of Texas at Austin
  Assistant to the Director, The Energy Institute
  Company NameThe University of Texas at Austin
  Dates EmployedSep 2011 – May 2014 Employment Duration2 yrs 9 mos LocationAustin, Texas Area
  See description See more about Assistant to the Director, The Energy Institute, The University of Texas at Austin
  The University of Cologne, Germany
  Visiting Professor
  Company NameThe University of Cologne, Germany
  Dates EmployedMay 2012 – Jul 2012 Employment Duration3 mos LocationCologne Area, Germany
  See description See more about Visiting Professor, The University of Cologne, Germany
  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
  Visiting Research Fellow
  Company NameMax Planck Institute for the History of Science
  Dates EmployedFeb 2012 – Mar 2012 Employment Duration2 mos LocationBerlin Area, Germany
  Gvirtzman Memorial Foundation
  Fellow
  Company NameGvirtzman Memorial Foundation
  Dates EmployedSep 2008 – Aug 2010 Employment Duration2 yrs LocationPrague, The Capital, Czech Republic
  See description See more about Fellow, Gvirtzman Memorial Foundation
  Charles University in Prague
  Adjunct Professor
  Company NameCharles University in Prague
  Dates EmployedOct 2009 – Jun 2010 Employment Duration9 mos LocationPrague, The Capital, Czech Republic
  See description See more about Adjunct Professor, Charles University in Prague
  VSCI - Vysoka skola Cevro Institut
  Professor
  Company NameVSCI - Vysoka skola Cevro Institut
  Dates Employed2009 – Jun 2010 Employment Duration1 yr 6 mos LocationPrague, The Capital, Czech Republic
  See description See more about Professor, VSCI - Vysoka skola Cevro Institut
  Queen's University Belfast
  Lecturer
  Company NameQueen's University Belfast
  Dates EmployedDec 2005 – Aug 2008 Employment Duration2 yrs 9 mos LocationBelfast, United Kingdom
  See description See more about Lecturer, Queen's University Belfast
  Australian National University
  Australia Research Fellow
  Company NameAustralian National University
  Dates Employed2003 – 2005 Employment Duration2 yrs LocationCanberra, Australia
  See description See more about Australia Research Fellow, Australian National University
  Woodrow Wilson Center
  fellow
  Company NameWoodrow Wilson Center
  Dates EmployedNov 2004 – Dec 2004 Employment Duration2 mos LocationWashington D.C. Metro Area
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  Education
  Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs
  Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs
  Degree Name Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Field Of Study Politics
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1998 – 1999
  I conducted research on transitional justice with Jon Elster.
  See less See less about Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
  University of Maryland College Park
  University of Maryland College Park
  Degree Name PhD Field Of Study Philosophy
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1988 – 1992
  Tel Aviv University
  Tel Aviv University
  Degree Name BA Field Of Study History Grade Magna cum Laude
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1984 – 1988
  ironi daled
  ironi daled
  Grade Summa cum Laude
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1978 – 1983

• Independent Institute - http://www.independent.org/aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=1581

  Aviezer Tucker
  Send Email
  Aviezer Tucker is Assistant Director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Maryland.

  Professor Tucker has been IMESS Fellow at the University of Tartu (Estonia); Grantee of the Gvirtzman Memorial Foundation (Prague) when he taught at Charles University and CEVRO College; Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Queens’ University, Belfast; Research Associate, Social and Political Theory and Philosophy program, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University; Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars; Research Associate, Editor & Adjunct Professor, New York University; Visiting Professor, Long Island University; Visiting Professor, Trinity College; Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Columbia University; Assistant Professor, Palacky University (Czech Republic); Research Fellow, The Prague Central European University; and Lecturer and Teaching assistant, University of Maryland.

  A contributor to numerous volumes and encyclopedias, his books include The Legacies of Totalitarianism, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography, The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence: From Patocka to Havel, and A companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography. His articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science; Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; History Today; The Independent Review; Science, Technology, & Human Values; Philosophia: The Philosophy Journal of Israel; Public Administration Review; Political Studies; Perspectives on Science; Scientia Poetica; History and Theory; Critical Review; International Educator; International Studies of Philosophy; East European Constitutional Review; Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies; Explorations in Knowledge; Journal of Applied Philosophy; Telos; and History and Theory. And his popular articles have appeared in the Prague Post, Times Higher Education, Budapest Sun, Christian Science Monitor, Houston Post, and Jerusalem Post.

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Aviezer-Tucker/e/B001HO4NR4

  Dr. Aviezer Tucker writes about philosophy, history, politics, science and technology studies, and their interdisciplinary interactions. He lives near Boston MA and in Prague, Czech Republic.
  A CV and complete list of publications are available here:
  http://www.slideshare.net/AviezerTucker/cv-45579056

• Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies - https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/about-us/people/aviezer-tucker

  Aviezer
  Tucker
  GVIRTZMAN MEMORIAL FOUNDATION FELLOW

  Center Associate
  Expertise philosophy of historiography and history, political philosophy and theory, intellectual history and history of ideas
  Current Project
  Legacies: A Political Theory of Post-Totalitarianism
  Foreign Language
  Czech
  French
  Hebrew
  Education
  Ph.D
  , Philosophy
  , University of Maryland, College Park
  Selected Publications
  The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge UP, 2015).

  Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge UP, 2004).

  The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence: From Patocka to Havel (Pittsburgh UP, 2000).

  A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

  Panarchy: Political Theories of Non-Territorial States, ed. Aviezer Tucker and Gian Piero de Bellis, (Routledge, 2016).

QUOTE:
fun introduction for any interested in breaking into the philosophy realm.
Plato for Everyone
The Bookwatch. (July 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
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Aviezer Tucker

Prometheus Books

59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 14228-2197

9781616146559, $21.00, www.prometheusbooks.com

PLATO FOR EVERYONE is a pick for any general lending library interested in easy philosophical reviews of his works, and rewrites his dialogues as accessible short stories holding modern settings. It handles five such Plato classic dialogues and turns them into modern writings any can readily absorb, creating a format and focus that will help even students challenged by Plato's ideas or basic philosophy as a whole. It's a fun introduction for any interested in breaking into the philosophy realm.

QUOTE:
book's most important contribution is in the discussion of long-lasting legacies of totalitarianism as the effects on the ways people think and argue
Tucker, Aviezer. The legacies of totalitarianism: a theoretical framework
S. Mitropolitski
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1240.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Tucker, Aviezer. The legacies of totalitarianism: a theoretical framework. Cambridge, 2015. 260p bibl index ISBN 9781107121263 cloth, $99.00; ISBN 9781316447093 ebook, $80.00

53-3731

HX45

2015-27391 CIP

Tucker (Harvard Univ.), author of books on the philosophy of politics, offers a political theory of post communism that examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, justice, the rule of law, public institutions, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse. He argues that the transition from late totalitarianism to post totalitarianism in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interests, its liberation, and the transmutation of its privileges into rights most significantly, property rights. He criticizes existing middle-range transition theories emphasizing the waves of democratization, the importance of civil society, and elite pacts. Besides providing original explanations regarding post-totalitarian social and political development, the book's most important contribution is in the discussion of long-lasting legacies of totalitarianism as the effects on the ways people think and argue and of their use of language. In the final chapter, Tucker examines some of these legacies, the promotion of the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions, and the divorce of language from reality achieved through using dialectical language that identifies between opposites. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.--S. Mitropolitski, University of Ottawa

QUOTE:
accessible and entertaining for students and general readers, both nonphilosophers and philosophers
Plato for everyone
Reference & Research Book News. 28.2 (Apr. 2013):
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9781616146542

Plato for everyone.

Tucker, Aviezer.

Prometheus Books

2013

256 pages

$21.00

B395

Tucker (philosophy, U. of Texas-Austin) transforms five of Plato's dialogues with Socrates into short stories in modern US settings, aiming to make their universal themes more accessible and entertaining for students and general readers, both nonphilosophers and philosophers. The Euthyphro becomes a story about an evangelist who wants to disown his son from his church for having a girlfriend; the Crito focuses on the question of whether a US citizen who considers a war to be unjust should avoid military draft by moving to Canada; the Meno considers the meaning of "cool" during a college spring break; the Apology becomes a story about a teacher accused of corrupting students by their parents; and the Phaedo relates Socrates' last day in a hospice as he suffers from a chronic disease and chooses to die. There is no index.

([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)

A Companion to the philosophy of history and historiography
R. Hudelson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 46.10 (June 2009): p1947.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
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46-5535

D13

2008-7601 CIP

A Companion to the philosophy of history and historiography, ed. by Aviezer Tucker. Wiley-Btackwell, 2009. 563p bibl index afp (Blackwell companions to philosophy, 41) ISBN 9781405149082, $200.00

Although central to much of 19th-century philosophy, the philosophy of history moved to the margins in the 20th century, existing as a specialty for historians of philosophy and as a preserve for supposedly disreputable speculations about the course of history. Its place as number 41 in the "Blackwell Companions to Philosophy" series may reflect the position of the field on the margins of philosophy, but this volume does a fine job of showing the field's connections to many of the central concerns of contemporary philosophy. The volume includes 50 essays arranged in four parts. Essays in part 1 provide overviews. Part 2 offers more detailed studies of a variety of problems including evidence, explanation, and narrative. Part 3's essays draw connections with philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, geology, archaeology, and other specialty areas. Part 4 offers essays addressing the traditional schools and issues of philosophy of history and historiography, as well as valuable essays on postmodernism, Muslim philosophy of history, and philosophy of history at the end of the Cold War, among other topics. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/ researchers.--R. Hudelson, University of Wisconsin--Superior

Hudelson, R.

QUOTE:
This is a most remarkable book. It is also a difficult book, and not because the text is unclear or badly argued. On the contrary, the scholarship of the book is impeccable--...If the book is difficult, it is because Tucker wishes to apply to historical writing the most advanced models of how to assess the probability of claims to knowledge developed in contemporary logic and philosophy of science. This is where the great merits of this book are to be situated, and this is also what a review trying to do justice to Tucker's brilliant book will have to focus on.
Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography
Frank Ankersmit
CLIO. 35.2 (Spring 2006): p245.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
http://www.ipfw.edu/engl/clio.html
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Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. By Aviezer Tucker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 291 pages.

This is a most remarkable book. It is also a difficult book, and not because the text is unclear or badly argued. On the contrary, the scholarship of the book is impeccable--even though the readers of chapter 2 of this book will sometimes raise their eyebrows when seeing what Aviezer Tucker writes about the history of historical writing since the sixteenth century. If the book is difficult, it is because Tucker wishes to apply to historical writing the most advanced models of how to assess the probability of claims to knowledge developed in contemporary logic and philosophy of science. This is where the great merits of this book are to be situated, and this is also what a review trying to do justice to Tucker's brilliant book will have to focus on.

But before getting to this, I should begin with a remark about the background against which the book should be read. This is so-called "constructivism" as developed by Michael Oakeshott, Jack Meiland, and, especially, Leon Goldstein. The main idea here is that we can never check our hypotheses about the past against the past itself, since the past is no longer there. So the evidence the past has left us is all there is. It follows that our attempts to explain the past should, in fact, be interpreted as attempts to establish the probability of the evidence, given what background knowledge we have of social, economic, cultural, or political reality and the hypotheses about the past that are presently discussed by historians. A critical remark, at this stage, might be that precisely on the basis of the constructivist thesis, it may not be easy to draw the line between background knowledge, on the one hand, and these hypotheses, on the other. For on the basis of the constructivist thesis, background knowledge, pretending to be knowledge of the past, should always be interpreted, instead, as being already a hypothesis about the past. This might pose a problem for Tucker's argument, since the technical apparatus he uses for establishing the probability of the historical presupposes that background knowledge and existing hypotheses can be evaluated separately. But since I do not believe that the cogency of Tucker's main argument depends on the acceptability of the constructivist thesis, I shall not press this point here.

In trying to grasp what Tucker is doing in his book, one had best start with an old and venerable distinction made by nineteenth-century historicists, such as Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, and so forth. And since Tucker insists that his argument is a philosophical account of historical practice as developed by Ranke two centuries ago, the distinction may be congenial to him. The distinction I have in mind here is the one between Geschichtsforschung, on the one hand, and Geschichtsschreibung, on the other. The former is the domain of historical research, that is, where historians attempt to establish what exactly happened in the past, and what may have caused it to happen. When this has been done, the historian will try to integrate the results of historical research as well as he can within an interpretation or representation of the past (for example, a book or an article). Hence, historical research is, so to say, the "hard" part of the practice of history, whereas Geschichtsschreibung, or historical writing, is its "softer" and more interpretive dimension.

One might say, then, that Tucker focuses on historical research. And, not only that. For one of the most fascinating aspects of his book is his effort to stretch this dimension of historical research as far as possible and to see, next, how far this may take one into the domain customarily reserved for historical writing. This is what he most brilliantly does in chapters 3, 5, and 6. But Tucker is very well aware that there are limits to this, as he explains in chapter 4. He shows that there is a dimension to historical writing that stubbornly resists fitting into the framework of "scientific historiography" as sketched in chapter 4. So what historians say on this will always be undetermined or "vague," to use Tucker's own terminology, and here we will always be at a loss when having to pronounce on the "probability" of their hypotheses about the past.

Tucker avoids speaking out clearly about what we should do about this. Perhaps he would suggest that all we can do is to try to move as far as possible with the instruments of "scientific history" into this problematic domain. For example, at the end of chapter 6, Tucker recommends that historians, along with Murray Murphey, abandon the humane scholarship "which has defined the appropriate working unit as the single scholar rather than a team of scholars" (250). Teams of scholars might succeed in solving historical problems that are too complex for the individual scholar. The idea is that there is an epistemological dimension to the sociological datum of the number of historians working on some topic: their sheer number may initiate a kind of epistemological "take off." For the discussion with other historians investigating the same topic will introduce an extra epistemological constraint in historical research, which is absent as long as the historian has only the past itself as his "discussion-partner." This is what Tucker has in mind with his metaphor of historical practice "bootstrapping" itself: the discussion with other historians and the rules guiding this discussion are, so to speak, the bootstraps with which the historian may lift himself out of the epistemological morass of the past itself, much in the way that Baron Hieronymus von Munchhausen claimed to have done in his famous book of 1786, Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande: Feldzuge und lustige Abenteuer des Freiherrn von Munchhausen (Wonderful trips by water and by land; campaigns and delightful adventures of Baron von Munchhausen).

But it cannot be taken for granted that this will be successful for all the kinds of problems that historians customarily deal with. The further one moves away from historical research into the domain of historical writing, the stronger the gravitational forces of this historical "morass" will grow. So what to do then? One might be tempted to conclude that historians should simply stop asking themselves the intractable questions that Geschichtsschreibung provokes, in agreement with the Wittgensteinian adage that one should remain silent on what one cannot speak about. I should add that I do not think that this is what Tucker would recommend. Another possibility--which would be my option and probably his as well--is to conclude that other instruments will have to be devised in order to come to grips with what goes on in this field of historical writing so strangely inhospitable to the "scientific historian."

The book's most important chapter, as Tucker himself writes in his introduction, is chapter 3. In this chapter, two theoretical instruments are proposed for assessing the probability of the historian's hypotheses about the past. The first theoretical instrument is the Bayes theorem and the second the notion of the common cause. The Bayes theorem was developed by Thomas Bayes, an English clergyman and mathematician living from 1702 to 1761. I shall not present here a formulation of the Bayes theorem, since this will not be very helpful in this context, and I will give, instead, an example. Suppose that there is a disease and that there is a test for finding out whether one has the disease or not. But the test is not foolproof. The test will be negative in some cases even when people actually have the disease. Moreover, the test may also be positive for people not having the disease. Suppose now that an individual has reason to think that he might have the disease. He decides to see his family doctor and have the test. Suppose the test is positive. The Bayes theorem will then enable him to accurately calculate the chance that he actually has the disease, given the test's being positive in his case.

Now, how to apply this to history? In order to answer this question one is required to conceive of the practice of history as the proposal of hypotheses about the past based on new evidence--for example, documents that were not known, or were used for the support of hypotheses proposed by previous historians. The argument then is as follows. Let us call the probability of a hypothesis we wish to examine given new evidence and everything else we know, its "posterior probability." Let us call the probability of a hypothesis given everything else we think we know, our web of beliefs, its "prior probability." Let us call the probability of the new evidence given the hypothesis its "likelihood," and finally, let us call the probability of the evidence whether or not the hypothesis is true, its "expectancy." The classical Bayesian formula then is:

Posterior = (prior x likelihood)/expectancy

Wesley Salmon, Elliott Sober, and Tucker himself deny that it is possible to come to grips with computing an approximate value for the expectancy. They also deny that hypotheses are examined in isolation from each other. So, they compare the prior x likelihoods of different hypotheses that share the same body of evidence.

Tucker further claims that the hypotheses historians typically use are common cause hypotheses, and that the evidence usually consists of information which preserves similarities between contemporary traces of past events. Now, since the hypotheses proposed by historians will often be hypotheses about causes, nobody will argue that there should be some invincible barrier between the issue of Bayesianism on the one hand, and that of causality on the other. Tucker might even appeal now to his constructivism and say that all of historical writing is a discussion of the probability of causal hypotheses about evidence given certain background knowledge. But the problem is that this is not, it seems to me, what Tucker has in mind when he starts discussing here causes and/or common causes. For causes now no longer express a relationship between (hypothetical) things in the past and the evidence of them that the past still has left, but rather a relationship between these things themselves in the past (that is, how we normally use the term "cause"). I cannot construe Tucker's manner of speaking about causes in any other way.

To be sure, this does not mean that I should have any reservations with regard to what Tucker writes about causes and/or common causes in chapter 3. The problem is, rather, how these abstract and theoretical arguments are to be applied to historical practice. And this question has a double aspect: (1) is the Bayesian approach, as advocated here, a model that ought to be adopted by historians?, (2) is the Bayesian model to be taken as a theory of actual historical practice? When I corresponded with Tucker about these issues, he sent me the following clarification of his view of causal analysis in historical writing:

my original claim in Our Knowledge of the Past,
beyond Salmon and Sober, is that in the historical
sciences this [the attribution of causes (F. A.)] is done
in three stages, and I will use your example of
writing a history of Weimar architecture to illustrate
it. A historian begins with an examination of the
evidence, Weimar buildings in German cities,
catalogues of architectual drawings of the period, etc.
in the context of European architecture in France,
Russia, etc. Certain similarities within the evidence
will emerge, say the use of functionalist style. The
historian will first ask, is this similarity more probable
given a common cause, causal links between the
various architects, or given separate causes? What
I call the common cause hypothesis or separate
causes hypothesis. Is it more probable that some
architects introduced functionalism or proto-functionalism
like cubism and others were influenced by
them, or did several architects invent functionalism
separately? The relevant considerations for this comparison
would be whether there were good social-informational
links between architects in Weimar,
did they go to the same schools, exhibitions, subscribe
to the same artistic magazines, etc. Another
consideration would be whether functionalism solves
technical problems in such a superior fashion that
any rational architect would invent it independently,
as agriculture and boat buildings were invented by
humans independently?

Stage two: suppose the historian decides to go with
the common cause hypothesis: the social networks
were dense, architectual magazines had wide circulation,
and there is more than one rational way to build
buildings, given the technological possibilities of
Weimar science. Next, the historian has to decide
between five types of causal nets, one common cause
(one inventor of functionalism), several co-inventors,
mutual influences of contemporaneous architects, or
combinations of mutual influences and one or more
inventors. A study of the evidence would lead the
historian to the Bauhaus school and several co-inventors
who were the teachers of all the main functionalist
architects. Finally, the historian will ask
what is the content then of the architectual theories
and methods of the founders of Bauhaus and then
examine their writings and milieu, etc., concluding
with a proto-functionalism that merges with cubism.
This explanation is excellent and most illuminating. In the first place it strikingly demonstrates the strengths of Tucker's argument. Recall the distinction between historical research and historical writing that was made above. And then it must be observed that Tucker has penetrated here with his causal model deeply into the domain ordinarily attributed to historical writing. Until now social economic history was believed to be the only historical subdiscipline where a rigorous causal analysis would be all one needs--whereas cultural or intellectual history would inevitably bring us to the domain of historical writing. So Our Knowledge of the Past is indisputably a most powerful and successful plea for what its author calls "a scientific historiography." This is where the book is an invaluable contribution to contemporary historical theory and where the book demands intensive discussion by both historians themselves and historical theorists.

All the more so, since one may still have one's hesitations with regard to some of Tucker's main claims. In the first place, reading Tucker's own clarification of his theoretical proposals reinforces the impression that Bayesianism is not yet satisfactorily integrated into his account of the practice of history. For I would find it hard to say where exactly Bayesianism comes in his argument about the emergence of Weimar architecture. It is much the same with the book itself. So it is to be hoped that Tucker will tell us some more about this in the future. Next, there is the issue of (sets of) hypotheses about the past being comparable. A condition of this being possible is, of course, that a set of hypotheses whose relative probability is investigated should all be hypotheses about the same phenomenon. One cannot compare a hypothesis about quasars with one about quarks. It is no different in historical writing. And then one is confronted with the problem that this condition is only rarely met in historical writing--or, to put it more dramatically, that the question of what a certain historical phenomenon actually is, is unfortunately a large part of what all actual historical writing is about. For example, all historical writing about the French Revolution since Edmund Burke could be said to be a continuous debate about what the Revolution actually is, or rather, was. Of course, Tucker might now say that this is precisely why historians tend to get entangled in the kind of impasse he discusses in chapter 4, and why they should stop asking themselves these kinds of useless questions. But this would be a rather draconian solution and not likely to be adopted by historians (nor by Tucker himself).

I come to the conclusion that Tucker's book marks a new stage in our thinking about the nature of historical writing. One of the main results of this penetrating and courageous analysis of historical writing is that it suggests a new way of situating history in the encyclopedia of the sciences. For Bayesianism and the notion of the common cause will allow a "scientific" approach to historical writing sidestepping the problem of historical laws--the rock on which the Hempelian "covering law model" so hopelessly and ignominiously foundered half a century ago. As Tucker writes:

the best explanation for the absence of covering laws
from historiography is that they are simply just not
there. For example, the best explanation for the independent
diaries of soldiers of the same unit that state
that on a certain date their unit came under heavy
bombardment and therefore panicked and retreated
is that indeed they came under heavy bombardment
and therefore panicked and retreated. There is no
need for further knowledge of psychology or human
nature under fire. Had this explanation of the retreat
depended on psychological theories, it would have
been indeterminate, since under fire soldiers are
known to retreat out of fear, become paralyzed with
fear and stay put, or become emboldened with rage
and charge forward. (187)
Indeed, Bayesianism and the notion of the common cause permit us to decide about the probability of causal claims in the absence of covering laws.

This is where history differs from science: it offers causal explanations of individual events ("tokens" in Tucker's terminology), whereas science is interested in "types." This justifies a new division of science, distinct from the influential neo-Kantian division, into the "historical sciences of tokens" (textual criticism, comparative linguistics, historiography, evolutionary biology, geology, and archeology) and "sciences of types," like physics or psychology.

One last merit of the book needs to be mentioned. In the last few decades, philosophy of history has become a kind of "ghetto" in contemporary philosophy, and no sensible philosopher would risk his academic reputation by venturing into this seedy intellectual slum (with some rare exceptions such as Arthur Danto). But by using an established model from epistemology and the philosophy of science for understanding history and by demonstrating how this model may help us to deal with "the historical sciences of tokens," Tucker has most powerfully suggested how to move philosophy of history out of its ghetto and right into the center of the city of contemporary philosophy.

Frank Ankersmit

Groningen University

Groningen Netherlands

Ankersmit, Frank

QUOTE:
the central thesis of the present book is that consensus on historiographic beliefs in an uncoerced, heterogeneous, and sufficiently large group of historians is indicative of the knowledge of history, although consensus neither guarantees knowledge nor is a necessary condition for knowledge.
Tucker, Aviezer. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography
James G. Colbert
The Review of Metaphysics. 59.2 (Dec. 2005): p457.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
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TUCKER, Aviezer. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 291 pp. Cloth $70.00--Aviezer Tucker's philosophy of historiography is epistemological as opposed to the philosophy of historical interpretation, which is ethical, political, and aesthetic. What is presented in textbooks and other popular accounts as "history" is historiographical interpretation, the end product of historiography. There are no pure empirical facts in historiography. Historiographers do not observe historical events but study them inferentially from what can be observed. Evidence may confirm some theories more than others; or theories may explain evidence more or less well, or both.

Neither history, nor historiography, nor other fields of inquiry have essences that determine method, Tucker tells us. However, scientific historiography has been successful, and its progress can be studied empirically and descriptively, as distinct from a "phenomenological" (p. 3) approach focused on historiographers' own and often misleading self-awareness.

Critical cognitive values about sources first emerged--other than in juridical evaluation of conflicting testimony--in biblical scholarship and were then extended to classics by Friederich August Wolf. Simultaneously, there arose a scientific quest for an extinct common ancestor of European and Asian languages. All these disciplines used evidence to infer a common cause, not directly knowable, as does evolutionary biology. Leopold Ranke, son of a lawyer, descendent of Lutheran ministers, student of theology and philology, is the key figure in developing the paradigm of historiographical method inspired on the methods of biblical scholarship and classical philology. The Rankean paradigm is closer to realism, realism "is a better explanation" (p. 257) of the Rankean paradigm than constructionism.

Traditionalist historiography, which is guided by the fact that something has been handed down, is the target of critical historiography. Tucker affirms that historiographical traditions are not causally connected with the events they write about and that traditionalist consensus can only be maintained by coercion. Underdetermined constructionism "is the best explanation" (p. 258) of traditionalist historiography.

Perhaps the central thesis of the present book is that consensus on historiographic beliefs in an uncoerced, heterogeneous, and sufficiently large group of historians is indicative of the knowledge of history, although consensus neither guarantees knowledge nor is a necessary condition for knowledge. Indeed, Tucker prefers the label of "uniquely heterogeneous" (p. 28) for the group likely to possess knowledge. Unique heterogeneity tends to exclude the possibility that a consensus based on something other than knowledge like cultural, gender, or ideological bias make them "less probable than the knowledge hypothesis" (p. 30). Disagreement among uncoerced, heterogeneous, competent historians is a sign of historiographical opinion rather than knowledge.

When historians agree in their historiography, they agree on evidence and theory. Sometimes there is not enough evidence to rule out all but one historiographical hypothesis. Underdeterminism (as opposed to indeterminism or determinism) holds that evidence plus theories constrain historiography to a finite range of outputs. Historiography may be underdetermined in three ways: because the evidence is limited, because theories and hypotheses manage to cover more evidence by sacrificing economy and clarity to scope, and finally because they are ad hoc interpretations of vague underdetermined theories.

In studying the relation between historiography and evidence, the present work follows Quine's 1985 "Epistemology Naturalized." Quine and Duhem insist that evidence is not sufficient to choose between scientific theories, since different and incompatible theories may use the same evidence. Quine stresses that theories are wholes some of whose parts have close links to empirical observations, while some parts simply depend on other elements of the theory. Quine and Duhem may not have the last word on science, since scientists tend to find agreement on the basis of simplicity and avoid ad hoc hypotheses. But their underdeterminism thesis could still hold for historiography.

Fidelity is the degree to which a piece of evidence preserves information about its cause. But the cause is contained in a hypothesis, so that the degree of fidelity depends on correctly identifying the cause or "on the hypothesis it is produced as evidence for" (p. 121). The Donation of Constantine has fidelity as evidence about medieval church-state relations, but not about Constantine's relations with the Church.

The criteria for the best theories are consilience, simplicity, and analogy. Greater consilience is the character of explaining more different kinds of evidence. The value of theory is the product of its consilience and its simplicity. While the simple theories of a historical school will be consilient, the factoring in of necessary ad hoc interpretations, which are mutually inconsistent, reduces its value to zero.

Colligation is the grouping of particular historical events as part of one large event. Thus the effort is to understand a context--given background information and theories--as one whole rather than as an instance of general principles. Scientists deal with complex properties of unique events by reducing them to lower level simple properties, but Tucker is not convinced that we know what a historiographic reducing theory would be like.

A critic might say that Tucker offers mainly a phenomenology of the philosophers of historiography. I suspect that this will limit the book's appeal: too much epistemology for historians, too little historiography for nonspecialist philosophers.

Tellingly, the history developed at greatest length is the history of a method, biblical criticism. Those who hold that method is dictated by what is studied may well think that Tucker leapfrogs over what is studied into the reflection upon the studying.

One wonders how useful Tucker's basic signs of historical knowledge really are. Further, there is not likely to be consensus about new theories. A popular consensus such as that the earth is round is frequently traditional, not based on any kind of scientific understanding. More importantly, one could argue that scientists, not to mention mathematicians, are homogeneous qua scientists. Physicists are people who think like physicists, whatever their religion or politics.

Finally, if George Washington is not a fact, but a hypothesis (however solid), because we can't know him directly but rather by reports, it would seem that George W. Bush is a hypothesis for most of us. This odd use of "hypothesis" does not reflect something specific to historiography, but a peculiar epistemology.--James G. Colbert, Fitchburg State College.

Colbert, James G.

QUOTE:
learned study of the interplay of philosophy and politics, enriched by the author's close personal connections to the Czech Republic
On balance, this book is insightful, well-written, authoritative, and informative. I recommend it for educated readers, for Czechophiles (like me and Tucker), for scholars of democratic transitions from communism, and for related course adoptions at the graduate level.
Aviezer Tucker. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel
Michael S. Cummings
Utopian Studies. 13.1 (Winter 2002): p247.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Pennsylvania State University Press
http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_utopian_studies.html
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Aviezer Tucker. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel.

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. xii + 295 pp. $20.00 (paper).

WAS IT TOO GOOD to be true when in 1989 the communist government of Czechoslovakia collapsed in a "velvet revolution" with few casualties, and playwright-philosopher and former jailed dissident Vaclav Havel took over as elected president of the new democratic republic? Sadly yes, replies Aviezer Tucker in a somber assessment of the historical roots and the first decade of post-communist rule in a land that soon split into the Czech and Slovak republics.

In a learned study of the interplay of philosophy and politics, enriched by the author's close personal connections to the Czech Republic, Tucker suggests that the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same. He shows how a powerful alliance of the old communist elite with new, post-communist elites has marginalized visionaries such as President Havel and bred a corrupt polity, stagnant economy, and culture of cynicism ("He who does not steal from the state," goes a popular Czech aphorism, "steals from his family"). During a journey that will challenge readers but also reward them, Tucker not only explains what has gone wrong in the former Czechoslovakia but also offers valuable insights into philosophy, politics, and modern life. By journey's end, he even offers a glimmer of hope for the Czech people.

The introduction asserts that "Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 dissident movement was a rare historical moment when philosophy and politics united" (1), and that "Charter 77 is the fulcrum of this book" (3). This purposely "apolitical" movement of a few thousand Czechs for human rights originated in the mid-1970s in response to the growing repressiveness of the post-1968 Czech regime and to the 1975 Helsinki Covenant on Human Rights, signed by the Czech government. The book's organization gives equal attention to (a) the historical-philosophical roots of Charter 77, especially the phenomenology of the martyred Czech philosopher Jan Patocka and the tragedies of recent Czech history, and (b) Charter 77's legacy and impact on post-communist Czechoslovakia.

The toughest going for readers untrained in philosophy will be the early chapters on the philosophical roots--from Plato through Kant and Dostoyevsky to Husserl and Heidegger--of Patocka's and Havel's versions of phenomenology. Because this philosophy stresses subjective individual experience over objective reality or metaphysical essences, its methods and conclusions are subject to wildly varying uses and interpretations. Given the "vagueness and uncertainty of the phenomenological method" (11), it is not surprising that there have been "a number of mutually inconsistent interpretations of the texts of Patocka and Havel" (4). Tucker argues that the philosophies of Patocka and his protege Havel are humanistic and inspiring in their promotion of a just society in which individuals, through sacrifice, might live in truth, love, and authenticity. However, these philosophies also suffered from inconsistencies and basic flaws that would prove fatal in the practical world of post-dissident Czech politics after 1989.

Tucker faults the Charter "77 dissidents' backward-looking rejection of modernist features such as science, technology, rationality, consumerism, and liberal-democratic politics. Patocka, Havel, and their followers failed to grasp that these very features of modernity can be liberating, so long as they operate in a context of democratic and legal accountability for leaders and so long as they are used to promote authentic public goods such as social welfare, education, and ecology. Tucker faults the dissidents for accepting at face value the communists"claim to being scientific socialists, when, he asserts, the latter were neither scientific nor socialist.

An even deeper political flaw was these philosopher-activists' tendency to eschew consequentialist morality in favor of an absolutist ethics. This refusal kept Havel's Civic Forum, the stepchild of Charter 77, from winning, keeping, and effectively using power for its admirably just, universalist ends. "Needless to say, none of the dissidents were prepared to take power" (170). And unfortunately, in the new game of post-communist Czech politics, Civic Forum "attracted a large number of opportunists who perceived a chance for upward mobility" (186). Tucker shows how a naively idealistic President Havel has been easily outflanked by political opponents representing special interests that are all too willing to use unseemly means to achieve their dubious ends.

Havel has spoken out against such betrayers of the revolution: "There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves, but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all" (175). But as an anti-party "philosopher-king" averse to the use of state power, he has proved ill-equipped to take forceful action against them. Czech politics since the Velvet Revolution has been all about political parties, the "greasing" (bribing) of them by special interests, and the use of official positions for "tunneling," or managers' stripping firms of their capital assets for personal gain. Although a top layer of communist bureaucrats was removed from office, "the old nomenklatura in the state bureaucracy, financial institutions, large state industries, the legal system, the military and police, and the education system has remained mostly unchanged and united" (216).

Tucker explains how the alleged "privatization" of state enterprises since 1989 is nothing of the sort, and he shows how Czech political parties make unethical deals to shut out their competitors. The single strongest predictor of how well someone is doing in the new Czech economy is previous membership and rank in the pre-1989 Communist Party elite. Indeed, many Czech observers believe that the Velvet Revolution, ostensibly begun spontaneously by students and performing artists, was actually planned and triggered by the Communist Party elites themselves, who calculated that they would do even better under a new system of market economics and competitive political parties. Some critics describe the new system as one of "communism without Communists."

In a characteristically pithy formulation, the author cautions against an overly harsh view of contemporary Czech society: "The immediate prospects of Czech society and politics appear to be more boring than bleak. A bunch of crooks in suits cheating their voters is nothing exceptional in world politics" (241). Complimenting the dissidents for having helped preserve and develop Czech culture in the 1970s and 1980s, Tucker offers a ray of hope for the Czech future: "once the younger generation attempts to reconstruct their national identity and history, they will have at least something to be proud of in their national and cultural history" (249).

Tucker looks ironically at the "the West," and specifically the United States, as an ambivalent beacon of hope for many anti-communist Czechs. Some of the funnier passages in the book concern the lavish applause heaped on President Havel when he addressed the U.S. Congress in 1990. The Washington Post wondered why the philosophically clueless Congresspersons had applauded when Havel described his dissident experience as having taught him one great lesson, that "Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim" (182). The Post quipped that anything put differently from the way Marxists would put it, no matter how esoteric, merited Congressional praise. A Post reader opined that "what Congress thought it heard when President Vaclav Havel said `consciousness precedes being' was `Confucius precedes Beijing,' meaning that the spirit of China transcends the temporal existence of Marxist dogma" (182)!

I found Tucker's periodic assertions of his own normative views refreshing and challenging, although some readers may resist his arguably ethnocentric depiction of the Jewish people as a more inspiring historical model than the Czechs. Others may doubt that the author is a truly "detached critical observer" (18) of Czech dissidence when he also describes himself as inspired by his dissident Czech wife, who gave him "the romantic adventure of a lifetime" (x). And still others may shrink from chastising the Czechs for surrendering to their oppressors rather than fighting in 1938, 1948, and 1968; for had the Czechs stood up to Hitler, then Stalin, then Warsaw Pact tanks, how many thousands of Czechs would have died, and with what prospects?

I missed two things in this very good book. Tucker recognizes that Havel is first and foremost a playwright, not a philosopher, yet barely mentions Havel's plays or their impact on his fellow Czechs. There has scarcely been a more brilliant self-examination of the psychology of self-doubting and compromised dissident leadership than Havel's autobiographical Largo Desolato, nor a more maddeningly insightful dramatization of stiflingly corrupt bureaucracy than The Memorandum.

Second, Tucker never gives the reader a feel for life in the street, the pub, or the countryside as experienced by Czechs today compared with the last decade of communist rule. Each time my wife (an actress born in Prague) and I return for a visit to the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we feel a palpable if anxious energy of freedom and opportunity in the air. Simple things like more fresh vegetables, a burgeoning market in arts and crafts, innovations in politically provocative image-based theatre, the beginnings of customer-friendly service, and, among our mostly professional Czech friends and relatives, new notes of hope in the traditional Czech symphony of despair--all of these signs help us to balance the very real and chronic problems identified by Tucker.

On balance, this book is insightful, well-written, authoritative, and informative. I recommend it for educated readers, for Czechophiles (like me and Tucker), for scholars of democratic transitions from communism, and for related course adoptions at the graduate level.

Michael S. Cummings
University of Colorado-Denver
Cummings, Michael S.

NOTE FOR EDITOR: the following reviews are from publisher page--full reviews could not be copied, but each is well over 1000 words.

Satterwhite, James. American Historical Review. Feb2002, Vol. 107 Issue 1, p306. 2p.
“This is a valuable work, well worth reading. “James Satterwhite, American Historical Review, February 2002
Fawn, Rick. Slavic Review. Fall2003, Vol. 62 Issue 3, p587-588. 2p.
“Impressively covers many disciplines . . . Impressively far-reaching in scope . . . Tucker deserves commendation for delivering such an insightful and stimulating work.”--Rick Fawn, Slavic Review, Fall 2003

By: McBride, William L. Ethics. Jul2002, Vol. 112 Issue 4, p875. 4p.
“At least two books for the price of only one lurk within this volume’s covers. There is, on the one hand, an introduction to the philosophical thought of Jan Patocka, with its roots in Husserl, Heidegger, Plato, and some of the other usual philosophical suspects. On the other hand, there is an informed analysis of the underlying thought and some of the principal political moments of the so-called Velvet Revolution and its aftermath . . .” William L. McBride, Purdue, Ethics, July 2002

"Plato for Everyone." The Bookwatch, July 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA337720684&it=r&asid=c5cb8194e5d096585e1423a170f438d3. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Mitropolitski, S. "Tucker, Aviezer. The legacies of totalitarianism: a theoretical framework." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1240. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661862&it=r&asid=e7f4cc8c001b3ee3cdedd83d6abaadd6. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. "Plato for everyone." Reference & Research Book News, Apr. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA324602334&it=r&asid=beb909b3a8274e8a72eaa285c708d2e0. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Hudelson, R. "A Companion to the philosophy of history and historiography." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2009, p. 1947. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA266631800&it=r&asid=5233d531fee4382659a05a06a646ffd6. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Ankersmit, Frank. "Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography." CLIO, vol. 35, no. 2, 2006, p. 245+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146390244&it=r&asid=1d96a1b34ce02504e94c6009fdb7f304. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Colbert, James G. "Tucker, Aviezer. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 59, no. 2, 2005, p. 457+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA140306208&it=r&asid=f24395ada0ce785ead2b4af70e321c1d. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017. Cummings, Michael S. "Aviezer Tucker. The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel." Utopian Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002, p. 247+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA91397765&it=r&asid=40d5b2973a09c7d03f88d6c437abc21c. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/picking-up-the-pieces/
  Word count: 1964

  QUOTE:
  The author provides a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the essential features of the post-communist social order as it has evolved over the past 25 years. He discards familiar (and misleading) teleological language that for too long depicted post-communist history in comforting terms as part of an overarching “transition” to democracy and market society,
  The Legacies of Totalitarianism is a powerful book.
  Picking up the Pieces
  By Stephen E. Hanson

  144 0 8

  SEPTEMBER 24, 2016

  WHEN THE SOVIET EMPIRE collapsed, many observers feared that the implosion of an enormous nuclear superpower might engender an era of global chaos. In retrospect, however, the quarter century between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Russian annexation of Crimea may well be seen as a period of relative geopolitical stability. Now multiple crises have engulfed the entire European continent and beyond: massive refugee flows, devastating terrorist attacks, the rise to power of avowedly illiberal elites in Hungary and Poland, the “Brexit,” and of course the continuing violent conflict in Ukraine itself. Ironically, it was not the end of communism, but the disintegration of post-communism, that has ushered in a time of deeply unsettling global uncertainty.
  Aviezer Tucker’s new book The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework is thus timely. The author provides a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the essential features of the post-communist social order as it has evolved over the past 25 years. He discards familiar (and misleading) teleological language that for too long depicted post-communist history in comforting terms as part of an overarching “transition” to democracy and market society, which never made much analytic sense in the former Soviet republics, and which now looks problematic even for understanding contemporary trends in the EU member states of East-Central Europe. Instead, Tucker forces us to look anew at the dominant political, economic, legal, and cultural trends in East Europe and Eurasia as a distinct type of social formation: one that emerged from the rubble of an essentially totalitarian system.
  In an era when the field of Soviet history is dominated by a “revisionist” interpretation of Bolshevik power as nothing more than a variant of 20th-century authoritarian modernity, it is bracing to encounter such a forceful defense of the central arguments of the totalitarian school about the nature of Leninist rule. Yet Tucker makes these arguments stick. Leninist regimes, he points out, were far more brutal than even the worst authoritarian regimes in the capitalist world:
  For example, Argentina and Hungary have similar population size. Under the authoritarian Argentinean Junta, about 13,000 people, or about a tenth of a percent of the population, “disappeared,” were murdered for political reasons by the state. In Hungary, 600,000 citizens were deported to Soviet labor and prison camps in 1945, following the Soviet occupation. About 200,000 of them did not return and are presumed dead.
  In the vast majority of communist countries, Leninist elites pulverized civil society in a way never even imagined by pro-market dictators like Pinochet and Marcos. In line with Marxist-Leninist ideological prescriptions, and in a way quite unlike statist industrialization efforts in the capitalist world, Leninist regimes truly did “expropriate the bourgeoisie,” leaving almost all of the economy under direct or indirect state control. And Marxism-Leninism itself was in comparative perspective a far more dogmatically enforced, all-encompassing worldview than the ramshackle, syncretic ideologies built around various charismatic leaders in the Third World during the Cold War. In Tucker’s view, then, theorists like Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who saw Nazism and Soviet Leninism as fundamentally similar regime types, actually provide a more accurate starting point for the analysis of post-communist societies than ordinary political science models built on the assumptions of rational choice theory.
  In sum, Tucker argues that we should understand post-communist social change from 1989–2014 as fundamentally shaped by the legacies of Leninism — not simply as a form of “state socialism” with distinct features that varied widely from place to place, but as a truly totalitarian system. Its collapse left in its wake a distinct kind of institutional and cultural environment in which “justice,” in every sense of the term, was in extremely short supply.
  In a series of powerful chapters, Tucker shows how efforts to reckon with the fundamental unfairness of communist rule in post-totalitarian Europe and Eurasia ran aground due to the scarcity of functioning state institutions, non-corrupt judges, and well-trained lawyers. The absence of both strong civil society organizations and entrenched capitalist elites in most of the post-communist world meant that members of the nomenklatura and opportunistic members of the Leninist party and secret police were typically able to convert the elite status they had during the period of Soviet rule into similarly powerful positions in the post-communist political economy. Efforts to purge those who collaborated with Leninist totalitarianism through lustration were frequently turned back by judges, who had been themselves trained and promoted in the communist period. Attempts to provide restitution to those whose property was seized by the Leninist state suffered from the difficulty of tracing clear property rights back through two generations or more of state monopolistic control over the economy. In the most extreme case, that of Russia itself, no attempt to restore pre-1917 ownership rights over private assets was ever even tried.
  The best one could do to restore a sense of justice to those dispossessed by communism, Tucker argues, was to dispense “rough justice” — that is, to impose broad policies of lustration, restitution, and (very rarely) prosecution of the perpetrators of communist crimes, in full knowledge that under post-communist social conditions, the targeting of such policies could hardly be very precise or refined. In many cases, Tucker argues, rough justice was better than nothing:
  Post-totalitarian retributive justice […] made a contribution to the moral regeneration of devastated and disillusioned peoples, as the existence and example of the dissidents helped in the slow regeneration of civil society. […] In the long run, such moral regeneration should […] allow an increase in the scope and accuracy of justice in the future.
  Similarly, it is true that the mass privatization of state property often benefited unscrupulous members of the former nomenklatura — but in East-Central Europe, at least, such policies did leave the bulk of assets in private hands.
  Tucker’s resurrection of the totalitarian model for understanding some of the major struggles over positions, assets, and authority in the post-communist world sheds a great deal of light on just why these battles have been so prolonged, emotional, and inconclusive. Far from restoring “normal” European democracy in East-Central Europe and Eurasia through a rational process of “transition,” 25 years of post-communism have left in their wake societies that are still politically cynical, economically divided, and pervaded by Euroscepticism — precisely the factors that have been utilized by populist politicians to undermine liberal constitutional democracy in much of the region. In Russia, the core of the Soviet empire where the legacies of totalitarianism were most pervasive, Tucker argues powerfully that Vladimir Putin has essentially reconstructed a new totalitarian state.
  The accursed question thus naturally arises: What is to be done? Why has political mobilization in support of real democratic inclusion in the post-communist world been so difficult? Toward the end of his otherwise fascinating book, Tucker tries to assert an even more sweeping claim: that there are also legacies of totalitarianism in intellectual life that inhibit any effective critique of post-communist venality and populist political manipulation.
  Here, I think, the author stretches his central concept too far. A chapter documenting the high levels of corruption undermining true freedom of inquiry at many East European universities makes for sobering reading, to be sure. But Tucker’s insistence that EU efforts to standardize educational credentials and to promote vocational training represent a form of “new totalitarianism,” comparable to Stalinist central planning, is ultimately unpersuasive. Certainly, those of us who work in Western academia today have good reason to complain about the plethora of often misguided regulatory directives imposed upon universities in the name of the public good. Yet this sort of “oppression” hardly compares to the wholesale massacres and arrests of opposition intellectuals carried out by the Nazi and Soviet security services. Ultimately, Tucker’s insistence that the acolytes of “new public management” are as totalitarian in their aspirations as Brezhnev-era party nomenklatura undercuts his earlier argument to take seriously the distinctiveness of post-totalitarian legacies.
  Another chapter delves into influential and widely assigned texts by left-leaning political theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek, attempting to show how their continuing indebtedness to Marxian “dialectical” thinking leads each of them, in different ways, to deny the legitimacy of modern democracy. Yet the attack on Habermas is too selective to be persuasive; Tucker never mentions, for example, Habermas’s passionate support for postwar German “constitutional patriotism.” The influence of Derrida and Žižek, however faddish their books have been for a time in certain quarters of the humanities, can hardly be compared to that of the great 20th-century theorists of totalitarianism such as Vladimir Lenin, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The simple fact is that in a truly pluralistic society at least some political theorists will always be attracted to antiliberal theoretical positions, and one cannot extinguish such intellectual trajectories without destroying pluralism itself.
  In the end, the only reliable antidote to totalitarian forms of theorizing and politics, it would seem, is a robust defense of the liberal democratic alternative. Yet Tucker’s evident distaste for all forms of bureaucratic standardization — whether of the Soviet or the Weberian variety — lead him away from any clear-cut endorsement of existing democratic institutions in Europe. Indeed, the European Union itself, which for the entire quarter century of post-communism has been the most powerful single institutional force for securing representative democracy in East-Central Europe, is oddly absent from most of his book; it appears only occasionally as the progenitor of stultifying schemes such as the Bologna Process. At a moment when a newly formulated intellectual framework for the European project is sorely needed, Tucker concludes instead that “only dissidents can save us now”: “While managerial neo-totalitarianism in Europe has destroyed academic freedom, academic standards, and the usefulness of academics as critical checks on the power of the state, neo-dissidents must pick up the task of telling truth to power.”
  No doubt Tucker is correct that the moral conscience and heroism of dissidents under Leninist rule were critical in preserving democratic ideals through the darkest decades of the 20th century. It is less clear, however, that a call for “living in truth” today, unconnected to any particular institutional strategy for defending political pluralism in practice, will suffice to preserve democracy in the increasingly turbulent 21st century.
  These critiques of Tucker’s prescriptions for improving the parlous state of politics in today’s world notwithstanding, The Legacies of Totalitarianism is a powerful book. It brings the insights of the greatest original analysts of Stalinism and Nazism to bear on issues of the gravest possible contemporary import. It recasts the experience of the past 25 years in Eastern Europe and Eurasia to highlight even more clearly the crucial importance of understanding the impact of historical and institutional legacies in the region. Perhaps most importantly, this book resurrects political theory as more than simply a vehicle for the passive analysis of texts, showing why clearly articulated philosophical principles must be at the core of contemporary efforts to defend ideals of democracy. Anyone interested in the future of European, Eurasian, and global politics will profit greatly from reading it.
  ¤
  Stephen E. Hanson is the Vice Provost for International Affairs, director of the Reves Center for International Studies, and Lettie Pate Evans Professor of Government at William & Mary.

• Notre Dame Philosophical Review
  https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/our-knowledge-of-the-past-a-philosophy-of-historiography/
  Word count: 2621

  QUOE:
  offers a complex, powerful and welcome addition to the philosophical consideration of historical practice. Three points stand out: first, his careful elucidation of what it means to invoke the consensus of a disciplinary community as a warrant for knowledge (ch. 1); second, his historical account of the emergence and consolidation of a paradigm for historical practice, identified with Ranke, which links this decisively not only with its predecessor disciplines but also with its most significant successor, evolutionary biology (ch. 2); and, finally, the Bayesian explication of the “normal science” component in historical practice, what Tucker calls “scientific historiography” (ch. 3).
  AVIEZER TUCKER

  Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography
  Tucker, Aviezer, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 291pp, $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521834155.

  Reviewed by John H. Zammito, Rice University
  According to Aviezer Tucker, modern historiography is “scientific,” and Bayesian probability theory explains why. He offers a complex, powerful and welcome addition to the philosophical consideration of historical practice. Three points stand out: first, his careful elucidation of what it means to invoke the consensus of a disciplinary community as a warrant for knowledge (ch. 1); second, his historical account of the emergence and consolidation of a paradigm for historical practice, identified with Ranke, which links this decisively not only with its predecessor disciplines but also with its most significant successor, evolutionary biology (ch. 2); and, finally, the Bayesian explication of the “normal science” component in historical practice, what Tucker calls “scientific historiography” (ch. 3). Less compelling, in my view, are his account of historical disagreement (ch. 4) and his discussion of the limits of historical knowledge (chs. 5-6).

  A science, for Tucker, is progressive, i.e., it develops new evidence and new knowledge. This is the case, in his view, for modern historiography. “Through the historical development of historiography the web of historiographic beliefs has expanded and the connections among its units grew complex. By now, new historiography should fit old historiography as well as new evidence” (120). Tucker conceives “science” in only a somewhat post-positivist sense because he still cannot abandon the fact-value dichotomy and he still cannot escape privileging universality as the ultimate talisman of theory. Thus he contrasts the physical sciences favorably with the historical sciences (including evolutionary biology). Post-positivism must, in my view, resolutely dispense with such positivist hangovers. Specifically, I cannot find plausible Tucker’s sharp discrimination of “historiographic knowledge” from “historiographic interpretation” (2; 10-12; 142). For Tucker, interpretation falls under value theory, but “scientific historiography” is entirely cognitive. “Too many philosophies of historiography confuse questions of knowledge with questions of value,” he writes (12). To reduce the former to the latter is surely inadequate, but to hold them totally distinct is an inverse error, the “final dogma” of positivism.

  Tucker argues that a disciplinary community may make plausible claims to collective knowledge if three constraints are satisfied: the consensus must be uncoerced, it must involve a large number of participants, and a significantly heterogeneous group must reach a unique common judgment. While the claim to knowledge is contingent and fallible, it nevertheless is the best explanation of the consensus. Once this consensus is achieved, a disciplinary community achieves “normal science” or a paradigm, in Kuhn’s terms. For Tucker, historiography attained this in the early nineteenth century in Germany under the auspices of Ranke. Historiography did not achieve its paradigm autochthonously, however; instead, it adopted a successful paradigm from predecessor inquiries – biblical criticism, classical philology, and comparative linguistics. Tucker makes the important point that evolutionary biology followed historiography in adopting the essential features of this paradigm and deploying them to constitute its own “normal science.” This account strikes me not only as sound but also as dramatically important both for defending the ongoing cogency of disciplinary historical practice and for integrating critically and constructively the epistemologies of historicism and naturalism, which I consider a foremost task for philosophy today.

  For Tucker, the essential task of the philosophy of historiography (as distinct from speciously metaphysical “philosophy of history”) is to establish “whether historiography is determined, indeterminate, or underdetermined” (9; see 45; 256ff). His argument is: “Historiographic core theories constrain the possible range of interpretations, but parts of historiography are still underdetermined” (21) -- largely for lack of sufficient evidence (146-7). Hence the discipline entails elements both of determinacy and of underdetermination. Indeterminacy, on the other hand, is simply not a reasonable characterization (258). Tucker has little patience with “historiographic skepticism,” as he characterizes postmodernism’s aesthetic or linguistic reformulations of the epistemology of historical practice. Against the tradition from Hayden White and Roland Barthes through Frank Ankersmit, Tucker insists: “The form or style of historiography do not affect its relation with the evidence, its epistemic status” (92). For Tucker, the proper object of study is the practice of historical inquiry, not its ultimate product, hence historical “textbooks” are irrelevant. His stress on evidence is certainly important, and sophisticated “textualist” theorists like Ankersmit have no interest in dismissing it. But the converse dismissal is unwise. The construction of working historical texts (monographs, articles, review essays) is not irrelevant to the epistemology of history. In minimizing this aspect of practice, Tucker underestimates the arguments not only of philosophers like Raymond Martin, but of astute historiographic theorists like Evans or Elton or Jordanova, who try to explain from the inside what historians do.

  The discipline of history is faced with the irretrievable absence of the past. There are only traces in the present which become “evidence” only under a theory. “Explanations of descriptions of events in paradigmatic historiography are … the best explanation of a range of evidence, given background information and theories” (188). Consequently “the actual theories and methods that historians use habitually are about the transmission of information over time, from event to evidence” (21), i.e., “inference from evidence to a common cause” (21). “Historians are interested only in particular types of causal chains, the ones that preserve information” (94), but “the selection of evidence according to its information-preserving qualities is theory-laden” (106); only theory elucidates how evidence shows information-preservation or fidelity. “Historians must use theories to know where to search for relevant evidence, to recognize relevant evidence once they discover it, and to interpret nested evidence to generate the kind of evidence that is useful for them” (95). Thus, “confirmation and explanation require more than historiography and evidence; they require theories that connect historiography with evidence and identify the evidence as such in the first place” (93).

  The theoretical core of “scientific historiography” is “inferring the information-causal chains that connect the cause, the alleged source of the information, with its effects, the alleged receptors of the information” (74). The decisive role of Fred Dretske’s information-theory of epistemology is clear in this formulation. Equally central is Tucker’s fervent Bayesianism. Bayesian theory establishes “the degree of probability the evidence confers on the hypothesis,” hence it is central to “warranting claims based on partial evidence” (96). Four times Tucker affirms that Bayesianism “is the best explanation of the actual practices of historians” (96; see 21; 120; 134). Clearly historians do not actually calculate Bayesian probability; presumably it is tacit in their reasoning. That is, even if not quantifiable precisely, the order of magnitude of difference in the probability of separate causes relative to a common cause can be sufficient. Tucker acknowledges: “Historians do not quantify fidelities… Since there is no set of algorithms for evaluating fidelities, historians exclude evidence that does not achieve a threshold of fidelity for whatever reason” (121). Hence the importance of corroborating evidence (114). “Historians .. must bootstrap their evaluations of the fidelity of particular evidence by other evidence” (123). The distrust of an uncorroborated evidential claim is “taught as part of the historiographic guild’s right [sic] of passage” (123).

  True, “the immediate, primary, subject matter of historiography is evidence and not events” (18), but only in the sense that without the evidence, the very possibility of description of events vanishes. A better starting point is Tucker’s statement that his philosophy of historiography divides matters “into evidence, hypotheses, and theories about the transmission of information from events to evidence” (240). The theories which raise historical practice to “scientific” status concern the transmission of evidence, but the hypotheses which preoccupy historians have to do with the descriptions of events the evidence can warrant.

  Tucker contends that philosophy can discriminate in historical practice a “scientific core” but that historical practice is not altogether a normal science. Rather, it is a compound of “normal science, the Rankean paradigm, and traditionalist science” (167). The sorts of questions that can be determinately answered in historiography are not sufficient to address the pragmatic concerns that drive historical inquiry, and therefore historians must supplement “scientific” with “traditional” concerns, develop hypotheses, however tentative or vague, which supplement cognitive with “therapeutic” values. A characteristic feature of this historiographical practice is that it achieves ad hoc accuracy at the expense of theoretical scope. The latter element in historical practice, in his view, accounts for the considerable disagreement among practicing historians.

  Tucker holds such conflict of opinions cannot be reduced to “ideological or cultural biases or economic and social interests” (141). Instead, the notion of underdetermination plays the major role in Tucker’s theory of historical practice. “Cognitive values may not be sufficient for discriminating among some historiographic hypotheses, and inconsistent evidence may not disprove some historiographic theories because historians add different ad hoc hypotheses to save them” (146). That is no license for radical incommensurability, or the indeterminacy thesis regarding historical knowledge (179; 258). “Insufficient evidence does not imply that historiography is indeterminate, that anything goes, because the evidence may still be sufficient for eliminating many improbable hypotheses, while conferring equal probability on several competing underdetermined historiographic hypotheses” (142). Thus, “once the requirements of the cognitive values are satisfied, there is ample space for personal interpretations, value judgments, and expositions of value-laden meaning and significance” (42). Here is where, according to Tucker, historical practice supplements “knowledge” with “interpretation.”

  Faced with underdetermination, historians split into schools constituted by interests and affiliations which are extra-scientific, and “the subsequent academic politics of interschool rivalry leads historians to deny, suppress, or misrepresent the social and semantic fragmentation in historiography” (168), which is in fact “criss-crossed by divisions between vertical school-theories and horizontal subfields” (169). Tucker asks whether this “traditionalist,” underdetermined dimension of historiography can ever be rendered “scientific,” i.e., included in “normal science,” so that historical practice might more closely approximate the physical sciences. He examines the attempts of comparative history to develop “a historiography that can determine accurate theories of broad scope without an increase in complexity by broadening the evidential base to include information-preserving effects of similar processes that originated across historical space and time” (153). He concludes, pessimistically, that its “difficulties … demonstrates [sic] the entrenched reasons for historiographic underdetermination” (153). For Tucker, “unique hypotheses limit the scope of scientific historiography because they cannot form together a theory of history that would connect disparate confirmed hypotheses of limited scope to form a large scope simple theory of social change” (261). But it is not clear that the discipline of history is after a “general theory of social change” (164). In fact, Tucker recognizes that “most practicing historians are not grand theoreticians. They confront a limited range of evidence and attempt to explain it while being inspired in their precise ad hoc modeling by their interpretation of a vague theoretical background” (163-4) drawn largely from philosophy and social science.

  Tucker makes two important and overlapping distinctions between historical practice and the natural sciences. First, in natural science, “evidence is idealized to fit the theory” – he calls this “standardization”-- whereas in historical practice, “theories … are modified ad hoc to fit particular evidence” (21; see 164). Second, Tucker distinguishes the pursuit of a common cause type from the pursuit of a common cause token (101). He writes:

  The sciences are divided neither into human sciences and natural sciences according to their subject matters, nor into ideographic [sic] and nomothetic sciences according to the purpose of their inquiries, but between sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes and sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes. (260)
  What both these overlapping distinctions indicate is that there is something distinctive, after all, to the concern with concrete individuals (“tokens”) – not only in historical practice, but in all the allied pursuits, including evolutionary biology in the natural sciences. What needs to be captured in the latter fields is not some universal generalization but rather the concrete instance or path (event or process). Of course, no concept can ever express fully a concrete particular; nor can there ever be a complete description: all scientists “describe and explain only aspects of events that fit their theories” (242).

  Still, in appraising the fit of evidence with theory, historical practice “is not substantially different from biology, geology, or physics” (8). A “colligatory concept” in historiography is not epistemologically different from a theoretical term in physical science: “There is no difference between the use of such theoretical concepts to explain evidence and the use scientists make of theoretical, unobservable concepts to explain a range of evidence… Neither the atom nor the Renaissance are directly observable; they are extremely useful and well-confirmed theoretical concepts” (138). Thus, “another advantage of the Bayesian interpretation of historiography is the elimination of apparent historiographic anomalies when compared to science” (137). In keeping with the Quinean formulation that “historiography, as a science, is holistic, it presents a net of beliefs, connected to evidence at its rims” (120), Tucker argues that in historical inquiry epistemological confidence does not translate directly into any ontological fixity. Tucker argues there is no epistemological difference (i.e., relative to evidence) between ontological realism and constructionism in scientific historiography: “determined constructionism … fits determined historiography as evidence just as well as a realist interpretation” (257). Where constructionism seems more persuasive than realism is in the not-insignificant domain of underdetermined historiography.

  One final, admittedly irascible point: Tucker acknowledges that “the philosophy of historiography must rely on the cognitive values and theories of historiography to discover the historical emergence of the conditions of historiographic knowledge, the self-same cognitive values and theories” (47), yet Tucker nonetheless believes philosophers are able to theorize more clearly what historians are about than historians themselves. To whom is “philosophy of historiography” addressed, I wonder, and why? Philosophers often express impatience with historians for not being interested in their treatments of history. They complain that “historians who deny the use of theory are unaware of the theoretical underpinnings of their own practices” (83). To call historical practice scientific “is not to imply that all historians who have practiced successfully the critical method have understood the theoretical foundations for their methods” (83). “It is possible to use a method with confidence both following an understanding of the theory behind it, and because it has worked thus far” (83). This second, guild-practice model is distasteful to Tucker: the contention that historiography might be an art to be learned by a prolonged apprenticeship rather than through theoretical inculcation he dismisses as “esotericism” (19). Since “the professional self-consciousness of historians … is often false,” philosophy must always ask “what historians or scientists are doing, not what they think they are doing,” lest the “meek acceptance of historiographic self-consciousness” make the practice appear “more rational and coherent that it actually is.” Philosophy undertakes not a “phenomenology of disciplinary practitioners,” but a description of “what [the discipline is] actually like.” (4-5) Actual historiographical disputes often fail to satisfy the rigorous requirements for competing explanations (192). “Historians do not realize that their opponents explain a different topic and use different comparison situations” (194). With so much that we don’t understand about what we are doing, how fortunate for us that we have philosophers to make it all clear!

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/plato-for-everyone/
  Word count: 519

  QUOTE:
  By supplying a strong dose of philosophy with a spoonful of sugar via storytelling, Tucker delivers a valuable, thought-provoking work of philosophy that’s fun to read and, even more importantly, makes Plato’s philosophy accessible to everyone.
  Book Reviews

  Plato for Everyone

  Reviewed by Elizabeth Millard
  February 26, 2013

  For those who aren’t steeped in philosophical study, the type of questions posed by a major philosopher like Plato can seem difficult to grasp without a knowledgeable guide. Fortunately, former professor Aviezer Tucker, author of Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography, offers excellent navigation through the most thorny of arguments.

  Tucker takes five of Plato’s best-known dialogues and rewrites them as short stories, with contemporary settings and characters. Not only does this help to remove some of the challenges that come up with ancient cultural references in the original works, but the strategy also provides some entertaining storytelling as well.

  For example, Plato’s “Euthyphro,” an early dialogue meant to spark discussion about the definition of piety, is recast as a story about a televangelist who plans to disown his son for having a girlfriend.

  The classic “Apology,” which gives Socrates’s defense speech at his trial, is told in a universal way that could be applied to any situation in which someone must fight for justice. Here, it’s put in the context of a high school teacher fighting against suspension after three parents accuse him of trying to corrupt their children. Addressing the school board, the teacher delivers a speech of memorable eloquence mixed with humility that references school plays, evil, and the nature of good.

  Although he includes numerous colorful characters, at the center of every story is Socrates, much as he was in the original works. Tucker plays with his persona somewhat, but still manages to let Socrates stand in for the reader in the same way that Plato intended.

  Best of all, through his lively use of language, realistic dialogue, and contemporary situations, Tucker brings Plato’s subversive, humorous, and intellectually stimulating arguments to a wider audience. “Lost in translation, readers often miss much of what the ancient readers would have found poignantly relevant,” he writes. With such a fresh approach, Tucker creates an ancient-to-modern translation kit that will be valued by anyone who’s interested in diving into Plato’s provocative dialogues.

  By supplying a strong dose of philosophy with a spoonful of sugar via storytelling, Tucker delivers a valuable, thought-provoking work of philosophy that’s fun to read and, even more importantly, makes Plato’s philosophy accessible to everyone.

  Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

• Democracy Digest
  http://www.demdigest.org/tag/legacies-of-totalitarianism-a-theoretical-framework/
  Word count: 478

  QUOTE:
  brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the essential features of the post-communist social order as it has evolved over the past 25 years

  Legacies of Totalitarianism – all too evident in CEE

  totalitarian legaciesIronically, it was not the end of communism, but the disintegration of post-communism, that has ushered in a time of deeply unsettling global uncertainty, notes Stephen E. Hanson, director of the Reves Center for International Studies at William & Mary.

  Aviezer Tucker’s new book The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework provides a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the essential features of the post-communist social order as it has evolved over the past 25 years, he writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

  He [Tucker] discards familiar (and misleading) teleological language that for too long depicted post-communist history in comforting terms as part of an overarching “transition” to democracy and market society, which never made much analytic sense in the former Soviet republics, and which now looks problematic even for understanding contemporary trends in the EU member states of East-Central Europe…..Leninist regimes, he points out, were far more brutal than even the worst authoritarian regimes in the capitalist world:

  For example, Argentina and Hungary have similar population size. Under the authoritarian Argentinean Junta, about 13,000 people, or about a tenth of a percent of the population, “disappeared,” were murdered for political reasons by the state. In Hungary, 600,000 citizens were deported to Soviet labor and prison camps in 1945, following the Soviet occupation. About 200,000 of them did not return and are presumed dead.

  applebaumIn the vast majority of communist countries, Leninist elites pulverized civil society (right) in a way never even imagined by pro-market dictators like Pinochet and Marcos, Hanson notes, adding that Tucker shows how efforts to reckon with the fundamental unfairness of communist rule in post-totalitarian Europe and Eurasia ran aground due to the scarcity of functioning state institutions, non-corrupt judges, and well-trained lawyers:

  The absence of both strong civil society organizations and entrenched capitalist elites in most of the post-communist world meant that members of the nomenklatura and opportunistic members of the Leninist party and secret police were typically able to convert the elite status they had during the period of Soviet rule into similarly powerful positions in the post-communist political economy. Efforts to purge those who collaborated with Leninist totalitarianism through lustration were frequently turned back by judges, who had been themselves trained and promoted in the communist period. Attempts to provide restitution to those whose property was seized by the Leninist state suffered from the difficulty of tracing clear property rights back through two generations or more of state monopolistic control over the economy. In the most extreme case, that of Russia itself, no attempt to restore pre-1917 ownership rights over private assets was ever even tried.

• Aspen Review Central Europe Online
  http://www.aspeninstitutece.org/en/article/3-2015-what-s-old-is-new/
  Word count: 1867

  What’s Old Is New

  Benjamin Cunningham

  Aviezer Tucker, The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework, Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  Better known for being misquoted on the likelihood of history repeating itself, philosopher George Santayana also noted that “chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.” Such reasoning has seen the word and its assorted derivations—chaotic, chaotically— deployed as a vague catch-all term to describe the atmosphere in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe. If Aviezer Tucker is to be believed that this era was not some period of anarchy, but rather representative of a definite, distinct order, we have yet to begin thinking seriously about: post-totalitarianism.

  Totalitarianism—distinct from authoritarianism in that the scope of atrocities is wider, the rulers are seeking to transform society and culture with coercion and the reduction of everything to politics—was a uniquely horrible innovation of the 20th century, making its successor, post-totalitarianism, equally original. Even if you disagree with Tucker’s eventual conclusions, the forthcoming The Legacies of Totalitarianism goes a long way to dispel the conventional, often unspoken and always flawed, thinking that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are mere facsimiles of the West that have fallen behind on the continuum of historical progress.

  Definitions are important here and Tucker is quick to distinguish between various totalitarianisms. Though he touches on the Nazis and fascist Italy, his thinking is primarily trained on Central and Eastern Europe, where totalitarianism lasted some 50 years and has receded since. Tucker divides that period into two phases, the revolutionary stage—where true believers sought to upend the old order with violence and terror— and late totalitarianism—a thoroughly conservative mindset bent on maintaining the existing system by exploiting opportunism.

  Post-totalitarianism, as one might guess, is what came next, and Tucker seeks to construct a common framework of characteristics inherent in such societies. While there is a partial replacement of the elites from the late totalitarian era (especially in media and politics), late totalitarian elite also transform their former political power into personal wealth. Victims of totalitarianism are poorly compensated while perpetrators hardly punished, and the government exercises weak control over the state bureaucracy. Corruption thrives, the rule of law suffers, and the still-nascent civil society is mangled in the process.

  The importance of this book comes amid a dearth of original, big picture theorizing about this period. Francis Fukayama’s The End of History was a philosophy of history that filled a space vacated by theory and philosophy during this unique time. Elsewhere, ideological combatants re-appropriated arguments from the past— criticisms of socialist economies by Austrian school economists from the early 20th century, or attempts to distinguish social democracy from purer Marxism that had already codified as far back as the 1930s—as a means of reacting to and explaining the changes.

  With the benefit of a few decades hindsight, Tucker’s work moves to begin filling this chasm in political thought. There are some explanations for this gap in thinking about post-totalitarianism and chief among them is the very real intellectual divide caused by the Iron Curtain. What makes Tony Judt’s epic Postwar so very epic, is that it still remains among the few globally accessible texts that analyze Eastern and Western Europe (in the old sense of the terms) on an equal footing. A more common dynamic is the one that emerges from The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, published in 2003. That book includes one Central European thinker, Georg Lukács, and categorizes him under “Western Marxism.” More pervasively, as Tucker points out, Western academics were unlikely to have seriously dealt with the writings of dissidents like Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, and censorship prevented thinkers from the post-communist world from keeping abreast of international trends in political philosophy. After 1989, it was difficult for both sides to catch up with the other and the resulting dialogue saw people talking past one another.

  Tucker begins the book by arguing that the shift from late-totalitarianism to post-totalitarianism really amounts to the late-totalitarian elites adjusting rights to their interests—which is most clearly manifested in their rapid acquisition of private property. A three-chapter mini-opus on justice, with an emphasis what Tucker calls “rough justice,” paves the way to a payoff with what he terms “the new politics of property rights.” In brief, Tucker argues that justice is rare, and comprised of both depth and scope. The more commonly accepted justice is, the broader its scope and the shallower, or less invasive, its nature. Post-totalitarian justice required action that was both wide- ranging and deep. Furthermore, the lack of precision instruments made it inaccurate. The noxious combination of expansiveness, intrusiveness and lack of precision results in rough justice. All this leads to a fascinating discussion about various visions for property rights based on historical and consequential theories as perceived by both conservative and radical thinkers. This deliberation is worth the price of admission on its own.

  Though the good far outweighs the bad, breaking new ground—which this book does—is also fraught with risk and there are a few misses. A chapter on the totalitarianism of today’s higher education is interesting, but also feels a little peripheral. Those more firmly rooted in academia, many of whom will no doubt read this book, might feel otherwise. However, to this reader it is as exciting as, well, listening to a friend gripe about the internal machinations of their workplace. Also, though Tucker correctly blames the gap between (again, in the old sense of the terms) Eastern and Western European thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century for the scant theorizing on post-totalitarianism, there are some intellectuals who had or have a foot in both worlds. Though Ernest Gellner, whom Tucker knew well, makes a brief appearance, neither Václav Bělohradský nor Leszek Kołakowski (for example) are mentioned in the book.

  Tucker does deliver an eloquent Kołakowskian censuring to some people you might have heard of—Habermas, Derrida and Žižek—in a blistering chapter titled “Short Circuiting Reason.” This is meant to trace the continuation of “totalitarian thinking” in the present, and the chapter comprises the rawest philosophizing in the book, which also dabbles in ethics, law, sociology and the like. Make sure your library card is up to date when you take on this section with references to a bevy of the new classics by the aforementioned Judt and Fukayama, Sheldon Wolin, André Glucksmann, Jan Patočka and Hannah Arendt, blended with the old masters—Plato, Rousseau, Heidegger and Kierkegaard—along with a cameo by Reaganite neo-con Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Her presence is bound to harm the book’s sales in Central America, which is still bleeding from Kilpatrick’s ideological folly.

  Tucker contends there are two major legacies of totalitarian thinking; “the assault on language as a way of representing and referring to the world” and “subversion of reason through the systematic and repetitive use of logical fallacies.” He traces these to the late-totalitarian period when true believers were no more, but Marxist and Leninist slogans were nevertheless in widespread use “in the form of decontextualized quotations.” In short, the words ceased to have meaning. The affiliated gap between ideology and reality, he argues, was even more extreme for Western totalitarian thinkers, as, rather than experiencing real totalitarianism, they imagined it—and then, out of necessity, resorted to more extreme attacks on language to make up the difference. Though specific in its target, this comes across as a rationalist critique of post-modernism, and Tucker seeks to draw attention to the nefariousness and general absurdity of anything where up can be made to be down and down up. In his accounting, though a sort of full-on post-totalitarianism is unique to the places and people persecuted by all-encompassing regimes, fellow travelers nonetheless continue to be born and bred among us. If the war for hearts is over, the fight for minds is still very much on. History has not ended, or as the unconsciously totalitarian William Faulkner put it “the past is never dead, it isn’t even past.”

  Wittgenstein once noted that it would be possible for a serious philosophical work to consist entirely of jokes, and while Tucker stops short of that, bolts of humor brighten what is an otherwise dense (in a good way) text. “Democratization, unlike puberty, can be and was reversed,” Tucker writes—though both, he might agree, are best realized expeditiously. Later he jests about some of the benefits of post-totalitarian living: “To paraphrase Heidegger, only dissidents can save us now. This will be the one truly positive legacy of totalitarianism (maybe together with public transportation).” Though they rarely do so, Prague residents might do well to toast Gottwald or Novotný on their next night tram home from the hospoda.

  As a nightcap, Tucker calls for a resurgence of dissidence and dissidents in today’s non-totalitarian society. He draws a parallel between two landmark years—1848 and 1968—where grand philosophical systems (and idealism) collapsed, spurring a cascade of events that eventually led to a catastrophe. Much like in the days before the First World War, Tucker argues, the abandonment of “truth and morality in the dissident project” has left a void that has been filled by a technocratic elite that not only helped march the world into the 2008 financial collapse, but continues to impede civil society today under the guise of management-driven economic growth.

  In post-totalitarian Central Europe the failure of liberal constitutions to take hold along with global recession opened a space that illiberal politics sought to fill. Tough the times of post-1989 had a purpose, after 2008 they did not. “When the pie began to shrink for no apparent reason and with no hope for future growth, this tolerance declined, and various demagogues and crooks could enter politics with a single promise, to fight corruption,” Tucker writes. Readers of this journal might recognize such patterns, to a greater or lesser degree, in people named Orbán, Fico, Babiš and Kaczyński. In Tucker’s estimation the only way to push back is via dissidents (including perhaps your everyday greengrocer) who “resist if not stop” the trend and “set a personal example for others to follow.”

  There are things to quibble about in this ambitious book, and one suspects that it is the quibbling-to-come that Tucker most looks forward to. Not all the chapters will appeal equally to all readers (at least they did not to this one) but it makes it more than convenient that most of them can stand on their own. Taken as a whole, there is a progression, and in making a case for the emphasis on integrity in affairs of state, the book concludes as close to truism as there is.

  Politics is far too important to be left to the politicians. Whether ordered by totalitarians, post-totalitarians or the standard thieving, lying egotists of today’s mature democracies, the powerless possess potential power in any era.

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