book review

The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy
Peter H. Wilson
Belknap, 2009, 997 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

In this one, Peter H. Wilson takes a people-oriented approach. There's little information here on the ideas, many of which trace back to Martin Luther, that created the religious divisions. For the history of ideas in the Reformation, a better book is The Age of Reform 1250–1550 by Steven Ozment.

Wilson's emphasis on people leads him to conclude that the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) was not a war over religion, but the culmination of endless conniving and jockeying for power among the European royalty. He writes [p.270]: “Politics polarized along confessional lines, since religion was the only ground on which to attack royal policy.” About the Uskok War (1615–1617), he says: “The main threat to peace was not confessional tension in the Empire, but the continued uncertainty surrounding the Habsburg succession.” [p.255]

The emphasis on politics may strike many readers as not seeing the forest for the trees, since the Thirty Years War had, after all, the Protestants on one side and the Catholics on the other. It also creates the impression that the war started, as many wars do, from a series of individual blunders rather than civilizational currents, and that no one wanted it and few saw it coming. But describing the war as people scheming and betraying each other makes sense because allegiance in those days was to individuals more than to impersonal nations, though it also creates an impression of Byzantine complexity.

And it was complex, not least because many of the people have the same name, many being referred to by place names, as with Francisco Goméz de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma, thereafter known as ‘Lerma’. There are seven Fredericks, two Francis IIs, a freightload of Friedrichs, four Phillips, and a phalanx of Pfalz-Neuburgs, Pfalz-Birkenfelds, and Pfalz-Zweibrückens. In those days, it seems, if your name didn't start with an ‘F’, you were nobody.

The war was complex politically as well as militarily. Wilson portrays Ferdinand, the Catholic emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (one of eight Ferdinands in the book), as a leader who unintentionally radicalized the Protestants by heavy-handed actions. It might have been called the Twelve Years War if not for the ill-fated invasion of Germany by the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, another guy with an ‘F’-sound in his name, and thus an important person.

The War ended with the famous Peace of Westphalia, which political scientists praise as creating the modern international order based on nation-states, while many historians give it a ‘meh’: European wars continued before and after, and religious hatred continued for centuries afterward. But, Wilson says, its significance was that it signaled a movement away from religion and toward a secular order. Whether that was really much of an improvement remains to be seen. Like the War itself, the Peace was complicated.

sep 09, 2018; edited sep 10, 2018

book review

Requiem for Marx
Yuri N. Maltsev
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993, 301 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

Karl Marx, the prophet of unbelief, might not be the first person to come to mind when we talk about the history of religion. According to Yuri Maltsev, even in the Soviet Union few actually believed in the official ideology—not, he says, the state managers, not the professors, not even the journalists. “It was not necessary that they did so,” he writes, “for Marxism was a means of political rent seeking and of coercive control, not a body of ideas held to by honest men.”

That being the case, you might not be surprised that none of the scholars in this collection of articles, which includes David Gordon, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Gary North, David Osterfeld, Ralph Raico, and Murray N. Rothbard, have much of anything nice to say about Karl Marx. What these followers of the Austrian school say is, however, true.

What makes this book exceptional is not the Marx-bashing, as interesting as it may be, but the 74-page essay by Murray Rothbard titled “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.” Murray Rothbard reveals that he was not just your typical dishwater-dull economist, but a first-rate historian. His thesis is that communism is an atheized version of religious eschatology and that its doctrine of alienation is “an atheistic version of religion's metaphysical grievance at the entire created universe.”

To make this case, Rothbard discusses reabsorption theology, which was a splinter doctrine in 13th to 17th century Christianity that believed that the end point of history would be reunion with God.

The shenanigans of these religious fanatics, such as the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore, the Free Spirit cultists, and the Taborites, who eliminated first private property, then eliminated their enemies, and finally worked up to eliminating many of their followers, demonstrate how the impulse to eradicate sin could lead to eradicating the sinner. The 15th century Adamites, who emulated Adam by going around naked, believed, as did the radical Taborites, that it was their sacred mission to exterminate the unbelievers. They all created tiny totalitarian enclaves reminiscent of the Jim Jones movement of the 1970s.

This, of course, brought them into conflict with each other, and the Adamites were annihilated by the Hussites, a Protestant faction led by Jan Hus. These little-known millennialist religious factional disputes were by no means the last, and Marxists praised them all as forerunners and role models of their own secular brand of totalitarianism.

mar 24, 2018

book review

The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1715, 2nd ed. (Norton History of Modern Europe Series)
Richard S. Dunn
W. W. Norton, 1979, 322 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

Only 44 pages of this book actually cover a religious war, but it's a doozy: the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), in which mercenary armies and religious conflicts managed to reduce the population in what's now modern Germany by 25%. The rest of the book is either not religious (The War of the Spanish Succession, Glorious Revolution) or not a war (the chapter on the scientific revolution, religious art, and philosophy, and the chapter on the rise of capitalism). It's part of a series of books where European history is taken one century at a time and necessarily covered, due to space restrictions, in a scattershot way, and given a title that sort of describes the general tenor. The Thirty Years War is covered in vastly more detail (albeit with 22.6 times as many pages) in the eponymous book by Peter H. Wilson (Belknap, 2009, 997 pages) (reviewed above), who says it was not primarily a religious war as commonly believed.

aug 26, 2018