Bellesiles Fires More Blanks – Embattled anti-gun scholar Michael Bellesiles has written a long, rambling, unintentionally ironic essay, “Constitutional Meanings,” about what history and historians have to say about the meaning of the Second Amendment. Not much, it would appear.
In the first two thirds or so of the essay Bellesiles contrasts objective, disinterested academic scholarship with tendentious “law office history,” history that avoids context and that is written “in the style of a legal brief, in which only supportive evidence is considered and all complications eschewed.” According to Bellesiles, “[h]istorians doubt any case for which all the evidence falls consistently on one side and work on the assumption that the past is pitted with ambiguities and paradoxes.”
This part of the essay asserts that good history has little to say to the present because the past was a different world with different concerns from our own, that it is dead and gone, and that the historian’s job is to explicate its context and unravel its complexity. The search for any “original intent,” he argues, is a fool’s errand, and only “the most ideologically inclined reader” could continue to pursue it.
In the concluding third of the essay, however, Bellesiles has no hesitation about passing judgement on the past — “Clearly, aspects of the Constitution have outlasted their usefulness — the electoral college springs to mind” — or hearing clear messages — even messages about original intent — that the past sends to us. Thus, he asserts that
The continuing efforts of states to control access to and use of guns once the Second Amendment was part of the Constitution seemingly indicates a lack of concern for an individual “right” to own a gun. The absence of notable opposition to such state action, even when it extended to disarming a portion of the population, reveals popular attitudes that failed to see gun ownership as a protected individual right…. In brief, those responsible for its ratification never saw the Second Amendment as a hindrance to either government regulation of firearms or to efforts by the federal government to arm specific groups of citizens.
There is no discussion here of those “continuing efforts” or “state action.”
Just as the past seems to be pretty clear after all, there similarly is precious little ambiguity or complexity in Bellesiles’ present. Thus, when the Senate voted 99-1 to condemn new U.S. history standards several years ago,
they were in keeping with a tradition of anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter has traced back to the 1790s. It is of course ironic that a country founded by a generation obsessed with ideas should prove so uncongenial to them; but, as Tocqueville indicated, that is the nature of American conceptions of equality–the history buff equals the historian.
Those who disagree with pedigreed history, in short, don’t have different ideas; they are “uncongenial” to ideas altogether.
Some inkling of Bellesiles’ conception of sound, responsible opinion, as well as irresponsible opinion, can be seen in his glowing reference to “David Brock’s recent and highly significant book, Blinded by the Right.” Brock “makes evident,” says Bellesiles, that “the far right (and it is inaccurate to call them “conservatives”) is especially good at destroying the careers of those they perceive as threats, even if they have to make things up.”
Making things up does indeed seem to be a problem.
PostScript [7/13/2002 9:45AM] – In the interests of full disclosure I should add that I once practiced “law office history,” and I think it has an undeservedly bad reputation. Or more precisely, what is properly objected to in law office history — tendentious inclusion and exclusion of evidence to reach a predetermined conclusion — isn’t limited to law firms, and in fact may be less prevalent there than in some of the more politicized fields of academic history. Lawyers have a powerful incentive at least to find and weigh all the relevant evidence, especially the evidence that works against them. Of course, some may minimize or hide negative evidence in their presentations, but this unfortunate practice is not limited to law offices. The proper distinction, in short, is not between academic and law office history; it is between good and bad history.
