Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921*
For nearly forty years, historians of twentieth-century diplomacy have argued that the Versailles treaty was more reasonable than its reputation suggests and that it did not of itself cause the Depression, the rise of Hitler, or World War II. Their efforts have had little effect, despite Margaret MacMillan’s best-selling Paris 1919. The distorted view of The Economic Consequences of the Peace and J. M. Keynes’s other works still dominates both the Anglo-American historical profession and the English-speaking educated public, though Zara Steiner pointed out in The Lights That Failed that the Versailles treaty was the mildest of the 1919–20 settlements. Despite scholarly opinion, condemnation of the Versailles treaty continues without cease. The latest addition to an immense literature, The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy, by Edward M. Bennett and the late Norman A. Graebner,
Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder
At a session of the December 1968 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Professor Gerhard Weinberg Suggested during the discussion that the entire history of German reparations needs to be restudied. He further remarked that the key question is not how much but, rather, who paid. Professor Weinberg is of course right on both counts but perhaps a brief second look should also be given to the question of how much. Both the world in general and the historians in particular have tended to be mesmerized by the figure of 132 billion marks. The assumption has been that this sum, by definition outrageous, was brutally imposed at gunpoint upon a prostrate Germany by greedy and vengeful victors. The fact that the 1921 Schedule of Payments soon collapsed and was revised downward by the Dawes Plan is often presented as proof of the unreasonableness of die Allied powers and of their Schedule of Payments. It is not surprising diat world opinion has never penetrated the arcane mysteries of Reparations Commission prose, particularly since die public was meant to be fooled, but there is no excuse for the historians. The relevant documents, memoirs, and monographic studies have been available for thirty and forty years. A close examination of them clearly indicates that Germany was never in fact asked to pay anydiing remotely resembling 132 billion marks and that, in actuality, the London Schedule of Payments of May 1921 constituted a tremendous German victory.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.