Arts and Letters

Crane Brinton used to say that he practiced the "method of men" rather than the "method of ideas." By this he meant that in writing intellectual history he believed in organizing his work around individual human beings rather than around formal propositions. This was not a mere tactical preference. It embodied a strong philosophical and temperamental conviction (like William James, he regarded philosophy as an expression of temperament) about the character of historical reality. He could not accept the notion that essence was more 'real' than existence, that great abstractions have "a 'reality' independent of the twistings and turnings, the depths and mysteries, of the individual consciousness and conscience of those who hold them." The "method of men" traced ideas to "their natural source, in the living human being." Throughout his life, he reflected with incurable fascination and good humor on what he called the "varieties of human experience, equivocal and inexhaustible."

By nature he was a man of the Enlightenment, urbane, witty, skeptical, speculative, a tolerator of disagreement, a believer in the power of reason. But he lived through the darkness of the 20th century, and he did not flinch from the necessary conclusions. Beginning as a student of Harold Laski in Laski's more rationalist and pluralist phase, Crane Brinton in his middle years was impressed by the anti-rationalist arguments of his friend L. J. Henderson and, through Henderson, of Vilfredo Pareto. The doctrine that cerebration probably played a smaller role in human behavior than irrationality reinforced his preference for the "method of men" and gave his historical accounts of ideas an agreeable and sparkling casualness, as if he felt there were limits beyond which the dissection of abstract propositions could be profitably pursued. Yet his sympathies remained with the Enlightenment. The 18th and 20th centuries were in amiable tension within him and shaped his musings on the strange mixture of reason and unreason in man.

In another area, the Enlightenment and contemporary anti-rationalism flowed together—that is, in encouraging Crane Brinton's interest in the possibilities of history as science. "The doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history," he wrote, "seems nonsense"; and in a number of works, most notably in The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), he tried to point out what he called, with characteristic diffidence, "certain first approximations of uniformities" in the historical process. If history were a science, however, it was, he insisted, a "clinical" science, working through the case method, depending on observation rather than experiment. Yet, if he sought, on occasion, to conceive history as a science, he always wrote it as an art. His style, lucid, supple, playful, allusive, was a subtle and elegant instrument of historical analysis.

He was a generous and stimulating teacher, a splendid chairman of Harvard's Society of Fellows, an inveterate hiker along the trails of Vermont (he always hoped to do a New England equivalent of Cobbett's Rural Rides), a quiet and steadfast liberal in politics, and a great gentleman. He was never interested in founding a school or establishing an orthodoxy. Through the charm of his personality and the relevance of his ideas he acquired influence without seeking it. He was an imperturbably civilized man in a not very civilized age; and his work and his life helped strengthen in all who knew or read him the hope for reason which always underlay his candid recognition of the strength of irrationality.