Alexander Hamilton, portrait by Daniel Huntington (1865)

American culture has long prided itself on defiant statements of liberty. “Live free or die”, runs the official motto of the state of New Hampshire. “Don’t tread on me”, warns the rattlesnake of the Gadsden Flag. According to this mythology, Americans are willing to sacrifice their lives before losing their cherished freedoms.

Alas, as the last several years have shown, Americans are all too ready to trade away their freedoms for a greater sense of physical safety — in this, of course, they are no better nor worse than the rest of us — and the greater the apprehended threat to their safety, the deeper they’ll nestle into the protective arms of the state.

As Carol Vanderveer Hamilton points out in an interesting essay posted on George Mason University’s History News Network, Alexander Hamilton sounded a prescient warning about this in Federalist No. 8:

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.

Hamilton was talking about standing armies, and of the hostilities and despotisms that might ensue if the American confederacy collapsed into a collection of squabbling and independent states — predictions which formed part of his tenacious advocacy of a constitution that would bind the states together under a robust federal government. He also warns of the temptations of militarism, of undue deference shown to soldiers:

The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors.

Hamilton ends No. 8 on a hopeful note, yet one that would sadly prove mistaken:

If we are wise enough to preserve the Union we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation. Europe is at a great distance from us. Her colonies in our vicinity will be likely to continue too much disproportioned in strength to be able to give us any dangerous annoyance. Extensive military establishments cannot, in this position, be necessary to our security.

Given his overriding emphasis on ensuring the ratification of the constitution, there may have been an element of political misdirection in such predictions. Hamilton, after all, was no radical democrat or libertarian, but a man aristocratic in temperament and hard-headed in policy — see my National Post essay on his embrace by modern “national greatness” conservatives – a supporter of a powerful federal government and a sophisticated financial system, who would ultimately become an advocate, ironically, of one of the things that Federalist No. 8 opposed: a standing army.

“Pardon me,” a newcomer asked Rubin, “what is your name?”

“Lev Grigorich”

“Are you an engineer too?”

“No, I’m not an engineer, I’m a philologist.”

“Philologist? They even keep philologists here?”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

Ah, when an average day’s roundup of intelligentsia would almost always yield a philologist or two amongst the catch! Not so today. Philologists are as rare as hen’s teeth; if one does turn up in the system, the government’s policy is one of immediate release. It’s a question of maintaining the breeding population, you see.

But seriously, where have all the philologists gone? I ask not because I grew up in a world filled with philologists, and now notice their absence. I’ve never met a philologist, not once in my life; I haven’t spotted one across a campus; haven’t heard one on the radio nor seen one on TV. From the day I was born, I’ve lived in an effectively philologist-free environment.

Over the years, however, I’ve stumbled across evidence that such people did exist, and that, in fact, their numbers were not insignificant when compared to other academic professions. For one thing, they frequently turned up as characters in literary novels usually written by (or about) continental Europeans. For another, famous people who one had been brought up to think of as philosophers turned out on later inspection to be philologists. Nietzsche a philosopher? Wrong.

In fact, as I recently discovered from a review in the Times Literary Supplement (of Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History), philologists were once considered rather hip:

In 1848, the year of revolutions, a “National Assembly” was convened at Frankfurt, to discuss unification of the German lands, civil rights and a constitution for a future Reich. The strangest thing about the assembly was its seating plan. Delegates were placed in a semi-circle facing the Speaker, but there was one seat in the centre of the semi-circle, directly opposite the Speaker, set apart from all the others. It was reserved for Jacob Grimm. Can one imagine a British durbar to decide the future of the Empire, deliberately and symbolically centred on a professor of linguistics, also known as a collector of fairy tales? But Grimm was not a mere linguist, he was a Philolog, and by 1848, as Joep Leerssen points out in his exceptionally wide-ranging study, philology was a combination of linguistics, literary history and cultural anthropology with the prestige of a hard science and the popular appeal of The Lord of the Rings. Grimm was there to speak, not for the nation, for there was no German nation, but for an imaginary Deutschland which he had very largely created in an unmatched though repeatedly imitated feat of “cultural consciousness-raising”.

More prosaically — when they were not creating nations out of thin air — what philologists generally did was to study historical texts, and by painstaking linguistic and contextual analysis, to discover the authoritative original text (or Ur-text), now cleaned of centuries of copyist errors, translator distortions, and the fabrications of forgers. This, of course, was a tremendously useful service for historians, who now no longer had to decide to accept or reject as a whole the documentary evidence they required to write history. In The Historian’s Craft, medieval historian Marc Bloch described the importance of the change:

True progress began on the day when, as Volney put it, doubt became an “examiner”; or in other words, when there had gradually been worked out objective rules which permitted the separation of truth from falsehood. The Jesuit Papebroeck, in whom the reading of The Lives of the Saints had instilled a profound mistrust of the entire heritage of the early Middle Ages, considered all Merovingian charters which had been preserved in the monasteries to be forgeries. No, replied Mabillon. There are unquestionably some charters which have been retouched, some which have been interpolated, and some which have been forged in their entirety. There are also some which are authentic, and this is how it is possible to distinguish the bad from the good. That year, 1681, the year of the publication of the De Re Diplomatica, was truly a great one in the history of the human mind, for the criticism of the documents of archives was definitely established.

Given how important this function is to the writing of accurate history, one should not be surprised to know that the profession has not, in fact, vanished. But — and this quite apart from philologists’ newfound and almost Hobbit-like ability to vanish into the background — it has begun to change. Rather than searching for an individual and authoritative Ur-text, some philologists have recently argued for an acceptance of the essential mobility of certain texts (particularly medieval ones), insofar as such texts have been continually and intentionally re-written, their meanings linked not to any original intent but more to the moment of their performance. This approach is sometimes referred to as the New Philology, and the key book here is Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (1989) (published in 1999 by Johns Hopkins as In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology).

There’s no cause for worry, then. Philologists do still exist, and the species seems to be evolving at a healthy pace. But good luck catching one.

We moderns have a habit of assuming that major historical transitions are often painless and always unidirectional, with the forces of “progress” clearly identified and arrayed against the forces of “reaction”. The printing press, for example, is universally acknowledged to be a Good Thing in history, while its failed opponents are dismissed as a dour set of anti-intellectual clerics in the Catholic Church. Yet as Jacob Burckhardt pointed out in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the reaction against the printing press also sprang from some of the most literate and urbane people in Europe, including the bibliophile and pro-Humanist Pope Nicholas V. In founding the Vatican Library, Nicholas sent agents to scour the monasteries and palaces of Europe for classical and religious manuscripts, collecting 1,500 volumes in total. Where originals could not be obtained, cardinals and princes commissioned copyists — the Florentine librarian Vespasiano da Bisticci assembled a team of twenty-five to copy two hundred books for Cosimo de’ Medici’s Laurentian Library. And the books thus produced, writes Burckhardt, were works of art:

The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V, Poggio, Gianozzo Manetti, Niccolo Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts, with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. Federigo of Urbino ‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book.’

Nicholas V’s relationship with books was both personal and aesthetic. According to 19th-century German historian George Voigt, “It was his greatest joy to walk about his library arranging the books and glancing through their pages, admiring the handsome bindings, and taking pleasure in contemplating his own arms stamped on those that had been dedicated to him, and dwelling in thought on the gratitude that future generations of scholars would entertain towards their benefactor. Thus he is to be seen depicted in one of the halls of the Vatican library, employed in settling his books.”

In the most obvious sense, what this depicts is the attitude of an elite who were able to afford the commissioning of such beautiful volumes, while the masses wallowed in illiteracy. But in another sense, which should not be forgotten, it depicts a love of learning and a reverence toward books – a reverence encompassing both their literary and their physical natures. So while we have gained immeasurably and indisputably from the diffusion of literature enabled by the printing press, we have also altered our relationship to books. Perhaps that too has been generally for the better, but surely not completely so. In their easy availability and their cheapness, how precious do our books seem now?