Analogies, especially to the most morally abject episodes of the 20th century, are liable to being invoked excessively and inaccurately. But silencing an analogy out of regard for the alterity of the past and what is particular and new about the present risks denying the past’s afterlife in the present (as Peter Gordon has also argued), the way it has structured the world we inhabit, the way our very writing, reading, and recalling of it has shaped and continues to shape our own actions — just as a sense of the past shaped British actions.
Analogy is central to empirical inquiry, as Gordon rightly reminds us, but, in the era of colonialism, Enlightenment philosophers, such as Gibbon’s great admirer, Adam Smith, popularized the view of history as a collection of analogies whose study allowed one to discern “general principles” of moral conduct. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Marx described history’s legitimating role in the modern era. “[J]ust as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things […] they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past […] to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise.” Given this historical role of historical analogies, the question is not so much whether to analogize but whether the analogies we invoke serve ethical ends.
Eschewing comparisons to European fascism does not free us to understand our present discontents on their own terms but rather preserves undisturbed the anodyne analogies to ancient Rome and Greece that have legitimized American and British liberal empire since the Enlightenment, when invocations of history began to make history. Worse, it risks promoting myths of British and American exceptionalism. By changing our comparison set, we may more clearly grasp both what makes the present different from what came before and the way the past has habitually been repurposed in a manner inhibiting ethical accountability in the present.
Modern European imperialism was qualitatively different from ancient and contemporary land-based imperialisms (the theorists Eric Hobsbawm’s and Ernest Gellner’s perception of a resemblance between the multinational UK itself and the Austro-Hungarian Empire is more persuasive). The propaganda about a “new Rome” that enabled the racist violence of empire cannot today redeem it. To dispel the idea that a political formation based on racism might nevertheless be a source of pride today, we might instead draw a comparison to the way racist despotisms in modern Europe have been evaluated. Apart from a fringe minority, no one touts the “pros” of Nazism. Since the 1970s controversy around Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), respectable scholars no longer enumerate slavery’s pros and cons either. We have agreed, together, that slavery was a moral wrong that cannot be redeemed. The fact that we have not arrived at such a consensus on the British Empire testifies to the success with which older palliating historical analogies enable it to be continually relegitimized, despite the anticolonial struggles of the last century.
