Crane Brinton

Clarence Crane Brinton (Winsted, Connecticut, 1898 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 7, 1968) was an American historian of France, as well as an historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.[1]

Born in Winsted, Connecticut, his family soon moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he grew up and attended the public schools there before entering Harvard University in 1915. His excellent academic performance enabled him to win a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) degree in 1923. Brinton then began teaching at Harvard University that same year, becoming full professor in 1942 and remaining at Harvard until his death.[2] He was McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History from 1946 to 1968.

For many years he taught a popular course at Harvard known informally to his students as "Brunch with Brinton."

Brinton was known for his witty, convivial, and urbane writing and commentary,[3] and was fluent in French. During World War II he was for a time Chief of Research and Analysis in London in the Office of Strategic Services.[4] He was also Fire Marshal for St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which withstood the Blitz with minor damages. After the war, he was commended by the United States Army for "Conspicuous Contribution to the Liberation of France" and was chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows in the late 1940s.[5] Membership during that period included McGeorge Bundy and Ray Cline, who would go on to become quite influential in national security and intelligence.

In the early 1960s Brinton was the dissertation supervisor at Harvard of the young historian Will Johnston.[6] He also served as an advisor for historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

In 1963 Brinton was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was also president of the Society for French Historical Studies.

On February 19, 1968 Brinton testified at the Fulbright Hearings on the Vietnam war as to the nature of the Vietnamese opposition, saying that Americans are sympathetic to a revolution but not a Communist one, and that if Ho Chi Minh had not been a Communist, "The whole story would have been different.".[7]

Brinton wrote a review of Carroll Quigley's book Tragedy and Hope.

Among those his scholarship inspired were Samuel P. Huntington, who cited Brinton many times in his book Political Order in Changing Societies, and Robert Struble, Jr., in his Treatise on Twelve Lights.[8]

Works

  • The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists[9] (1926, 1966)
  • The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History[10] (1930), a detailed account of the political radicals of the French Revolution, Reissued by Transaction Publishers (2012) with a new Introduction - "Crane Brinton, The New History, and Retrospective Sociology," by Howard G. Schneiderman
  • English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1933)
  • A Decade of Revolution, 1789–1799[11] (1934), a study of the French Revolution
  • "The History of Paper Money to the War," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 6, No. 3, September 1934
  • The Lives of Talleyrand[12] (1936), a biography of Talleyrand with a uniquely favorable perspective
  • The Anatomy of Revolution (1938, revised 1965)
  • Nietzsche (1941 by Harvard University Press, reprinted by Harper Torchbooks [The Academy Library] in 1965), a highly critical account of the German philosopher.)
  • Ideas and Men: the Story of Western Thought[13] (1950, 1963), an account of Western thought from ancient Greece to the present
  • A History of Western Morals[14] (1959), an account of ethical questions
  • The Shaping of the Modern Mind[15] (1963), an abridged version of his Ideas and Men
  • "Ideas in History," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 37, No. 4, December 1965
  • The Americans and the French[16] (1968), an attempt to explain the often difficult relations between two longtime allies

References

  1. ↑ "Over the Hill? The Anatomy of Revolution at Fifty", Torbjørn L. Knutsen and Jennifer L. Bailey, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Nov., 1989), pp. 421-431
  2. ↑ Columbia Encyclopedia entry on Brinton Archived 2007-02-02 at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ Reviews of Brinton's History of Western Morals Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine.
  4. ↑ Reference to Brinton's work for OSS
  5. ↑ Time 3 May 1948 article quoting Brinton as Society president
  6. ↑ Roderick Stackelberg, Memory and History: Recollections of a Historian of Nazism (2011), p. 88
  7. ↑ the crimson.com
  8. ↑ For example, in his fifth chapter, "Recourse to the Sword" Archived 2009-09-28 at the Wayback Machine., of the online book Treatise on Twelve Lights
  9. ↑ jstor.og
  10. ↑ books.google.com
  11. ↑ books.google.com
  12. ↑ books.google.com
  13. ↑ questia.com
  14. ↑ archive.org
  15. ↑ archive.org
  16. ↑ hup.harvard.edu
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