FREE TO THE FINLAND STATION: A STUDY IN THE ACTING AND WRITING OF HISTORY PDF Edmund Wilson,Geoff; Wilson | 608 pages | 24 Apr 2012 | Farrar Straus Giroux | 9780374533458 | English | United States To the Finland Station - Wikipedia Pete organizes an annual seminar on U. He invites one outside scholar to spend two days at To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History University talking books and ideas with him and his engaging colleagues from the history, English, and philosophy departments. To the Finland Station is beautifully written, imaginatively constructed, sweeping in scope, and smart in many of its judgments—though it gets some important things wildly wrong. Like the Du Bois and James books, To the Finland Station did not achieve a large readership immediately upon publication. To the Finland Station is a sympathetic history of revolutionary socialist thought from the French Revolution to the moment in when Lenin arrived at the Finlyandsky Rail Terminal in St. Lenin is depicted as a harsh but necessary advancer of human freedom and the grand arc of socialism is the equivalent of modern human freedom. Had it been published in or evenTo the Finland Station might have generated a more robust To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History even favorable reception, at the very least among those in the Popular Front circles that Wilson inhabited. But proved poor timing. Lenin was persona non grata. Communism no longer had the same purchase, but neither did anti communism. To the Finland Station was a much different read without the weight of all that baggage. Certifying yet again that we are to consider To the Finland Station To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History classic work of intellectual history, The New York Review To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History Books published a new edition of the book in with an introduction by Louis Menand. Echoing Berman, and rendering a beautiful explanation of the historical imagination required to write good history, Menand writes:. The test for a successful history is the same as the test for a successful novel: integrity in motion. Novelists sometimes explain their work by saying that To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History invent a character, put the character in a situation, and then wait to see what the character will do. History is not different. This gives the description of the conditions a plausibility, too: the person fits the time. The figures and the landscape come to life together, and the chart of their movements makes a continuous motion, a narrative. The past reveals itself to have a plot. The plot of To the Finland Station is as follows. In the wake of the French Revolution a growing number of intrepid historians and intellectuals began articulating a vision of the world in which the parts added up to a whole, the parts being human actors and the whole being capitalism as a system. Marx is for Wilson a tragic and flawed man but ultimately the hero of the book. We see this tension between tragedy and triumph in the way in which Wilson treats the Marx and Engels friendship. Marx is the cold, calculating, abstract, brilliant rhetorician who endows the world with metaphors that capture the sweep of history. Engels is Robin; Marx is Batman. One of the things that I love about To the Finland Station is the To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History with which Wilson renders historical judgment. Such ease is a throwback to intellectual history of another era, when writers were less specialized and had read more widely on a larger range of topics. Broad knowledge led to writerly confidence. Of course, writing with authority was also a product of the hyper-masculine milieu of the New York Intellectual world that Wilson inhabited. Wilson argues that such polemics, which included tracts that took Marx months to write and that spanned hundreds of pages, however nasty they were, and however pointless or inane they seem to us in retrospect, were necessary. Marx was doing something new—creating new and revolutionary knowledge—and as such he had to figure out his ideas in the heat of battle. Creation born of negation. This seems exactly so. But then Wilson proceeds to criticize Marx for his use of the dialect on similarly faulty grounds. How could Marx square his materialist conception of history with a theory of human agency? That is, how did people living in a system of capitalist social relations become communist revolutionaries? How did Marx rationalize his own thought—his having seemingly discovered the path to communist revolution—with his materialist conception that humans were constrained by the force of history? Marx leavened with Emerson. This is an interesting notion and not uncommonly made especially after the horrors of Stalinism became more widely known. But it misunderstands the dialectic as understood first by Hegel and then by Marx. Thought—and human agency as such—does not stand above this unfolding, as a sort of superstructure. Rather, human thought—which is intersubjective and, at its philosophical best, collective— is history unfolding. In the Hegelian dialectic, it is silly to think about structure and agency as separate. And so it was with Marx. Social relations and modes of production were to be understood as history unfolding in purposive ways. Marx theorized that history was unfolding from capitalism to socialism and that his thinking on the matter was part and parcel of such an unfolding. Such a notion of the dialectic is not teleological as Wilson assumed. Nothing is predetermined, at least insofar as humans can know, which means that humans have freedom and responsibility—in a word, agency—because we cannot know how history is unfolding from one moment to the next. Our actions matter—our actions are purposive—because we are the unfolding of history. Karl Marx, with his rigorous morality and his international point of view, had tried to harness the primitive German Will to a movement which should lead all humanity to prosperity, happiness and freedom. But insofar as this movement involves, under the disguise of the Dialectic, a semi-divine principle of History, to which it is possible to shift the human responsibility for thinking, for deciding, for acting—and we are living at the present time in a period of decadence for Marxism—it lends itself to the repressions of the tyrant. The parent stream of the old German Will, which stayed at home and remained patriotic, became canalized as the philosophy of German imperialism and ultimately of the Nazi movement. Writing at the same moment as Wilson wrote To the Finland StationBurnham argued that the dialectic, as a rigid form of thought, led to Stalinism, and that Stalin, Hitler, and even FDR were all branches of the same collectivist tree. By the early Cold War such thought was widespread. Wilson, unlike Burnham, never embraced conservatism. He remained on the left and was a stern critic of U. Cold War policies and even refused to pay taxes as a form of protesting such policies. We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood. Very interesting piece. Yes I agree that Wilson humanizes these landmark figures of socialist history and thought. Nice point. Is it an actual place, a metaphor, or both? Petersburg, Russia, handling transport to northern destinations including Helsinki and Vyborg. The station is most famous for having been the location where Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland on 16 April N. Which they got, with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk March Andrew—I really enjoyed that post. Two things briefly. As I remember, his attitude went from enthusiasm to pretty deep disillusionment with the Marxist tradition, as you mention briefly. Thanks for this, Richard. And yes to the critique of dialectical materialism in the s—especially late. James Burnham combined his rejection of Trotsky with a rejection of dialectical materialism because Trotsky, as with the Soviet theorists more generally, refused to give up on the idea that the dialectic was pointed towards socialist revolution. Andrew: Enjoyed the post. To the Finland Station has been staring at me from its place on my shelf for too long. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History to read it. A colleague, who recently retired, gave me his copy of Letters on Literature and Politics, Great read. Cook Entries run from Spoiler… Kazin loathed Jacques Barzun. Maybe, somehow, the market was a bit saturated. But these works do testify to the pertinence of Marx circaand To the Finland Station which Robert Alter claimed was an even greater book than Patriotic Gore fortified that interest of readers in that era to the necessity and urgency of reckoning with the Marxist heritage. Intellectual History Blog. Andrew Hartman May 18, Edmund Wilson. Related Posts Andrew Hartman January 11, Andrew Hartman April 27, Andrew Hartman August 30, To the Finland Station | Society for US Intellectual History Skip to search form Skip to main content You are currently offline.