Daniel Rosenberg is an intellectual historian specializing in questions of historical representation. His research focuses on eighteenth-century France and Britain and ranges broadly in areas including the history of language, philosophy, and art.
Assessing the similarities and differences between 1914 and 2014
My late, great colleague Ernest May provided an appropriate antidote. He noted that as a matter of fact, the most common form of analysis used by leaders in crises is historical reasoning from analogies. He urged both analysts and policymakers to be more systematic about the effort. In a legendary course taught at Harvard for many years, he challenged students attracted by a historical analogy to follow a simple procedure: put the analogy as the headline on a sheet of paper; then draw a straight line down the middle of the page and write “similar” at the top of one column and “different” at the top of the other.
During the same period, German military planners watched with alarm as Russia rushed to complete railways that could allow it to move forces rapidly to the borders of Germany and its faltering Austro-Hungarian ally.
The Good Tsar Bias
I propose to call it “the good Tsar bias,” for the proverbial attitude of ordinary Russians to the Tsar in contrast to his ministers before the revolution. (Whether ordinary Russians actually held this attitude is a different question — looking around lazily, I can only find one good reference, in W. Bruce Lincoln’s Sunlight at Midnight, p. 188 — but the belief that they did was already proverbial in the 1930s. Even the Security Service of the SS made reference to the “good tsar” idea to account for the widespread finding of their public opinion researchers that people hated the Nazi party, but did not blame Hitler for their everyday woes; Kershaw quotes a report from them that claims that before WWI in Russia people used to explain their dissatisfaction with the government by saying that “Father Tsar knows nothing of it, he would not wish or tolerate it” before going on to warn that “Russia’s fate proves this principle is dangerous”
.. Though the “good Tsar bias” seems to be related to what psychologists call the just world bias, insofar as it appears to serve as a compensatory form of system justification, it does not seem to be quite the same thing. The “good Tsar” bias does not incline people to say that the world is just, or to rationalize injustice as somehow deserved, only to deny that those leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the nation (the Tsar, the Führer, the King, etc.) bear responsibility for bad outcomes in everyday life; that responsibility, instead, is assigned to subordinates. In this respect, the bias appears to be more closely related to what Dan Kahan and others have called “identity-protective cognition“: the closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people’s identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one’s identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure.
No Accounting Skills? No Moral Reckoning
One of the less sexy and thus forgotten facts about the Italian Renaissance is that it depended highly on a population fluent in accounting. At any given time in the 1400s, 4,000 to 5,000 of Florence’s 120,000 inhabitants attended accounting schools, and there is ample archival evidence of even lowly workers keeping accounts.
.. Every level of Dutch society practiced double-entry accounting — from prostitutes to scholars, merchants and even the Stadholder, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. Painters regularly depicted merchants keeping their books
.. A cultural ideal was set. For the next century, it became common practice for public administrators to have portraits of themselves painted with their account books — sometimes with real calculations in them — open, for all to see.
.. The explosion of data-driven journalism should also include a subset of reporters with training in accounting so that they can do a better job of explaining its central role in our economy and financial crises.The explosion of data-driven journalism should also include a subset of reporters with training in accounting so that they can do a better job of explaining its central role in our economy and financial crises.