Visitors to our country are often better able to understand our society than we are: Think of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Paul Johnson, the great British historian who died last week, did just that in his A History of the American People (1997). He begins the book by writing, “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.” Many AEI scholars have written on this idea over the years. Writing for the American Spectator in 2006, James Q. Wilson says, “In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville discussed American exceptionalism in Democracy in America, and he is still correct. There was then and there continues now to be in this country a remarkable commitment to liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, and laissez-faire values.” In 2013, Charles Murray published American Exceptionalism: An American Experiment, and many other AEI scholars have published on the topic here.
Paul Johnson gave AEI’s third Boyer lecture (now the Irving Kristol lecture) in 1979. Titled, “The Things That Are Not Caesar’s,” Johnson commented, “When the state begins to do the things that are not Caesar’s, it inevitably begins to neglect Caesar’s primary duties. It is not a question of the state taking on additional roles; beyond a certain point, it is a question of alternatives—of either/or.” It was also in 1979 that Johnson was made a resident scholar at AEI and the first individual to hold the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Communications in a Free Society. While at AEI he wrote Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties (1983) and participated in many events including AEI’s New Atlantic Initiative.
Johnson wrote “big” books. His first book, The Offshore Islanders: England’s People from Roman Occupation to the Present (1972), was a survey of 2000 years of English history. Johnson also wrote A History of Christianity (1976) and A History of the Jews (1988). He was a vivid writer of many interests. He painted watercolors and wrote beautifully about art and music. Among his many books is a collection of his art columns called To Hell with Picasso! (1996). Originally a man of the left and editor of The New Statesman, he broke with its socialist ideas and later became an influential adviser and teacher to Margaret Thatcher.
In writing about America in A History of the American People, Johnson said this:
America today, with its 260 million people, its splendid cities, its vast wealth, and its unrivaled power, is a human achievement without parallel. That achievement—the transformation of a mostly uninhabited wilderness into the supreme national artifact of history—did not come about without heroic sacrifice and great sufferings stoically endured, many costly failures, huge disappointments, defeats, and tragedies. There have indeed been many setbacks in 400 years of American history. As we have seen, many unresolved problems, some of daunting size, remain. But the Americans are, above all, a problem-solving people. They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar to and dominate. They will not give up. Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency and their democratic skills, they will attack again and again the ills of their society, until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed. So the ship of state sails on, and mankind still continues to watch its progress, with wonder and amazement and sometimes apprehension, as it moves into the unknown waters of the 21stcentury and the third millennium. The great American republican experiment is still the cynosure of the world’s eyes. It is still the first, best hope for the human race. Looking back on its past, and forward to its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity.
Today we recollect on the scholarship of a great man, and pay our regards to a brilliant historian. May he rest in peace.
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