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 Copyright © 2021 by Perry Merrill LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and
division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin Random House LLC.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Rhodes, Benjamin, author.
Title: After the fall : being American in the world we’ve made / Ben
Rhodes.
Other titles: Being American in the world we’ve made
Description: New York : Random House, [2021] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056623 (print) | LCCN 2020056624 (ebook)
| ISBN 9781984856050 (hardback) | ISBN 9781984856067 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World politics—21st century. | Globalization—
Political aspects—United States. | United States—Politics and
government—2017– | Nationalism—United States—History—21st
century. | Political corruption—Hungary—History—21st century. |
Political corruption—Russia (Federation)—History—21st century. |
Political corruption—China—History—21st century. | Global
Financial Crisis, 2008–2009.
Classification: LCC D863 .R48 2021 (print) | LCC D863 (ebook) |
DDC 909.83/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020056623
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020056624
Ebook ISBN 9781984856067
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Oliver Munday
Cover photograph: Oliver Haynes/SOPA Image/LightRocket/Getty
Images

ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
 Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph

Prologue

Part I: The Authoritarian Playbook

Chapter 1: The Currents of History
Chapter 2: Freedom’s High-Water Mark
Chapter 3: “Take Our Country Back”: From Trianon to the Tea Party
Chapter 4: Identity Politics
Chapter 5: Opposition
Chapter 6: The Liberal Order: An Elongated Reason Cycle?

Part II: The Counterrevolution

Chapter 7: The House of Soviets
Chapter 8: The Song Is the Same
Chapter 9: Putin and Obama: Two Worldviews
Chapter 10: The System Is Rigged
Chapter 11: The Crimean War
Chapter 12: Democratic Nationalism
Chapter 13: A War Without Violence

Part III: The Chinese Dream

Chapter 14: Meet the New Boss
Chapter 15: The Outlier
Chapter 16: The Chinese Dream
Chapter 17: Make China Great Again
Chapter 18: One Country, Two Systems
Chapter 19: “The Narrative of Liberalism and Democracy Collapsed”
Chapter 20: Power Doesn’t Give Up Without a Fight

Part IV: Who We Are: Being American

Chapter 21: Who We Are
Chapter 22: We Do Big Things
Chapter 23: Forever War
Chapter 24: The Ocean Liner
Chapter 25: Fight the Smears
Chapter 26: After the Fall

Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Ben Rhodes
About the Author
The final takeover does not happen with one spectacular
Reichstag conflagration, but is instead an excruciating, years-
long process of many scattered, seemingly insignificant little
fires that smolder without flames.
—ece temelkuran
 Prologue

once there was a nation that ascended to a position of preeminence

unparalleled in history. This nation held within its hands the capacity
to destroy, shape, and enlighten all human life on earth. Its position
of preeminence was reached after what seemed like an inexorable
rise: born in revolution, built in part by the toil of those who suffered
the lash of the whip, preserved through the crucible of Civil War,
populated by immigrants from everywhere, enlarged through the
brutal conquest of a continental frontier, enhanced by great feats of
engineering and ingenuity, validated by the defeat of fascist
ideologies that subjugated people half a world away and the
extension of civil rights at home.
The expansion of this nation’s influence was for a time contained
by the barrier of an alternative form of human organization:
communism. When the wall that symbolized this barrier came down,
it was as if a dam had broken, allowing a great flood to water the
soil on the other side. New markets would create wealth that people
had been denied. Unmatched military strength would maintain peace
among nations. Technological innovation would raise standards of
living and make all human knowledge accessible to people
everywhere. The people themselves would live in the freedom
guaranteed by democracy, the uncorrupted government of, by, and
for the people: the inevitable endpoint of history.
To be born American in the late twentieth century was to take the
fact of a particular kind of American exceptionalism as granted—a
state of nature arrived at after all else had failed.
In the span of just thirty years, this assumption would come
crashing down. Ironically, once they were unbridled, the very forces
that enabled this nation’s rise would accelerate its descent. The
globalized spread of profit-seeking capitalism accelerated inequality,
assaulted people’s sense of traditional identity, and seeded a
corruption that allowed those with power to consolidate control.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, this nation’s sense of
purpose was channeled into a forever war that hemorrhaged
resources, propagated a politics of Us versus Them, and offered a
template and justification for autocratic leaders who represented an
older form of nationalism. This nation’s new technologies proliferated
like an uncontrolled virus before we understood their impact,
transforming the way that human beings consume information; at
first hopeful, the unifying allure of the Internet and social media
segmented people back into lonely tribes where they could be more
easily manipulated by propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy
theory. Somehow, after three decades of unchecked American
capitalism, military power, and technological innovation, the currents
of history had turned against democracy itself, bringing back those
older forms of nationalism and social control in new packaging.
To be American in 2020 was to live in a country diminished in the
world, unwilling to control the spread of disease or face up to our
racism, and looking over the precipice of abandoning the very
democracy that was supposed to be the solid core of our national
identity.
Understanding how that happened is the starting point to figuring
out how to move forward. America itself is a nation that
encompasses the multitudes of humanity, a country populated with
all of humanity’s contradictions, hypocrisies, and opposing impulses.
Having been humbled by our own excesses and salvaged by the
narrow escape of the 2020 election, America has an opportunity to
step back into history as a nation with a new understanding of how
to improve upon the world we made. To do so, we have to re-create
an identity that draws on our better history as a nation of outsiders,
reflexively distrustful of power, joined together to do big things,
united by a set of principles that allows each of us to be whoever we
want to be regardless of tribe. That is what we owe the world, and
ourselves.
After the fall, we must determine what it means to be American
again.

i set out to write this book in the wake of the Obama presidency so
that I could understand what happened to the world, my country,
and myself. After working for eight years at the height of American
political power, I felt like an exile in my own country. It was a newly
disorienting reality, and one that lent itself to questioning every
assumption I had as an American.
Travel was the most comforting and illuminating escape I could
make from the political chaos back home. I took every opportunity I
could to go overseas, and I found myself seeking out the kind of
people I never really had the opportunity to fully know when I was
in government: dissidents, activists, oppositionists—anyone, really,
who looked at power from the perspective of an outsider. What an
opportunity—to learn the stories of individuals who lived the political
trends that I had watched from the exalted distance of the White
House. Unburdened by being American themselves, they
experienced no difficulty of politeness or discomfort that prevented
them from seeing the Trump years for what they were: an American
experiment with fascism, albeit of a particularly incompetent and
corrupt kind. But there was also a similarly obvious reality: The
forces that produced a Trump presidency long predated it and would
still be there after it was over. Indeed, a new model of nationalist
authoritarian politics is a defining reality of our world today.
The more I investigated this phenomenon, trying to work it out
for myself, the more I saw the fingerprints of the era of American
hegemony on what was shaping the lives of people all around me.
How the 2008 financial crisis had collapsed not only the global
economy, but also confidence in the very fact of American-led
globalization, opening the door to deeply familiar nationalist appeals.
How the post-9/11 wars had also discredited American leadership
while opening the door to a hypersecuritized politics of Us versus
Them, one that could easily be repurposed to target an available
Other in country after country. How the spread of social media had
unleashed a flood of disinformation that undermined democracy
while offering autocrats ever more powerful tools of social and
political control.
I saw this most clearly in three countries that were Communist
throughout the Cold War and are at the center of the political forces
remaking the world today. In Hungary, where the anticommunist
liberal turned reactionary nationalist Viktor Orban took advantage of
the 2008 financial crisis to create a model of authoritarian politics
that is strikingly similar to the playbook that the Republican Party
has run in America. In Russia, where Vladimir Putin capitalized upon
the humiliations of the end of the Cold War to build a cabal anchored
in corruption and nationalism and then set out to turn the United
States into a mirror image with American social media as his most
potent offensive weapon. And in China, where Xi Jinping is building
the model for a new world order on the pillars of state-controlled
capitalism, national sovereignty, and totalitarian technology. Remove
any democratic values, and you get the shift from the recent
American model to the emerging Chinese one.
This is a book of stories, based on the instinct that it is best to
see global events through the perspective of individual lives. The
Hungarian opposition searching for a democratic identity capable of
overcoming the blood-and-soil nationalism of the past and the failure
of globalization to deliver on its promise. The Russians who have
been victimized by violence and are still insisting on a politics
cleansed of corruption, anchored in the truth. The Hong Kong
protesters who saw a freedomless capitalist techno-totalitarian
future encroaching upon their city and launched a movement that
should be heard as a cry of warning. Collectively, their stories
allowed me to see more clearly what had happened in their
countries and why, as well as to see the myriad ways that the era of
American hegemony had contributed to it. That, in turn, allowed me
to see America more clearly—through the eyes of outsiders in other
countries, and through my own experience of being an outsider at
home.
Ultimately, this book is my story. My journey from the wake of a
historic presidency to a world that looked at America and saw that
presidency’s opposite. My effort to relearn what it means to be an
American in a world gone wrong. While I was writing this book, a
Russian who is a leading character in it was poisoned and nearly
killed, the Hong Kong protests I immersed myself in were snuffed
out, the world went on lockdown in the face of a pandemic, and an
American autocrat was voted out of office and sought to overturn
the result. Through these dramatic developments, the currents of
history that I was feeling around me remained constant; if anything,
the picture became clearer and clearer, like a landscape from which
fog is lifting.
Because this book represents my own experience of these things,
it is inevitably incomplete. We are all inherently limited in our
perspective, shaped by our own history. But by recognizing ourselves
in others, we can expand our own lens of vision. Perhaps we can
also see our own shortcomings more clearly. For me, the experience
of looking into the eye of where America has gone wrong has only
made me love more fiercely what America is supposed to be.
That is the starting point of my present journey.
 Part I

THE AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK

We can never start a new life. We can only continue the old one.
—imre kertesz
 1

The Currents of History

from the moment I was deposited back into civilian life after the Trump
inauguration, I felt compelled to get away from what was happening
in America. To emerge bleary-eyed from some international flight,
change currency in the baggage claim, and walk into blinding
sunlight and the cacophony of voices speaking another language
along the curbside—men smoking in soccer jerseys, clustered
around a metal pole—was to be reminded that life went on despite
the sense of hostage taking that afflicted my homeland. It was a
form of self-imposed exile. And yet, in each locale, there was the
discovery that the same thing was happening everywhere.
In March 2017, I went to Myanmar to help the government there
prepare for peace negotiations with a patchwork of provincial ethnic
groups who had been waging civil war for decades. Diplomacy, it
turned out, was privatized like everything else. I would be an
independent contractor for a British-based nongovernmental
organization (NGO) led by Jonathan Powell, who had served as chief
of staff for Tony Blair. Powell had led the negotiations to secure the
Good Friday Accords that secured peace in Northern Ireland in the
late nineties. Ever since, he’d become something of a globe-trotting
private peacemaker from Africa to Latin America to Southeast Asia, a
figure out of a Graham Greene novel meeting rebels in jungles and
deserts, seeking to recapture the accomplishment of his career’s
high-water mark. Perhaps because I was newly admitted into the
ranks of former officials, it seemed no surprise to Powell or his staff
that I wanted to get to Burma a little early to unwind. We were
trying to help end wars, but we were also dealing with our own
private ones.
For a couple of days, I walked aimlessly around the sprawling city
of Yangon, a blanket of heavy heat over me, buying knock-off Nikes
for a few bucks to make it easier on my feet. I went to a pagoda and
sat staring at a Buddha, waiting to feel something. I walked into a
U.S.-government-funded library where I’d been a guest of honor a
couple of years before, now anonymous to young Burmese buried in
books and screens. Then I conducted workshops in the capital city
of Naypyidaw to help the Myanmar negotiating team prepare,
sharing lessons I’d learned while negotiating reconciliation between
the United States and Cuba. The civilians took earnest, copious
notes. The stern-faced military men in drab green uniforms wrote
nothing down. Afterward, I joined a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi,
dissident turned state councilor, at her residence. For the first time in
my several meetings with her, we were asked to take off our shoes
inside the Buddhist home, a reminder of the Burmese Buddhist
nationalism that had become more predominant in recent years.
Within a matter of months, the Burmese military that had once
imprisoned Suu Kyi would pursue a campaign of ethnic cleansing
against a Muslim minority, the Rohingya. A million people were
driven into neighboring Bangladesh. Through it all, Suu Kyi would
remain silent. People wondered at her fall from Nobel Peace laureate
of the early nineties to international pariah. But it made a certain
kind of sad sense to me. A survivor from a country on the periphery
of power in the world, she once surfed the wave of democracy that
accompanied the end of the Cold War. She rocketed to international
attention in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down, by
leading a democratic movement protesting the military government.
By 2017, she was doing what she felt she needed to do to survive in
a world where nationalism ran amok. Her own journey—from
democracy icon to tacit collaborator in brutality fueled by Buddhist
nationalism and rampant anti-Rohingya disinformation on Facebook
—didn’t cut against the currents of history, it drifted in the wake of
events in the wider world.
In April 2017, I went to Milan with Barack Obama. He was there
to speak about climate change a few weeks after Donald Trump
pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The rhythm of the trip
felt familiar: a private plane, a block of hotel rooms, Secret Service
agents. But the plane was a fraction the size of Air Force One, there
were only a handful of hotel rooms and agents, and unlike the crush
of responsibilities that used to follow me, I had very little to do. I
accompanied Obama on a private tour of Leonardo da Vinci’s
drawings, peering down at bold lines that improbably anticipated the
machines of the future—helicopters and missiles, the machinery of
war that we’d presided over for eight years. Dusty volumes hundreds
of years old lined the walls of the library. From human creations like
this the Renaissance had emerged, paving the way for the pursuit of
scientific inquiry and cultivation of a more enlightened Western
civilization that now felt under assault. Back at the hotel, throngs of
Italians waited outside Obama’s hotel. I told him that he remained
the most popular politician in the world. “No,” he corrected me, “I’m
one of the biggest celebrities in the world now.” He didn’t mean it as
a good thing—progressive change relegated to cultural celebrity.
In July 2017, I went to Cuba. I stayed at the sprawling Hotel
Nacional in the heart of Havana. Black-and-white photos of the
Castros with visiting dignitaries and celebrities, vestiges of Cold War
history, hung in the lobby. I met a friend from the American embassy
for drinks at the outdoor bar, the kind of place that you assume has
been populated by revolutionaries and spies for the last several
decades. In a hushed voice, my friend told me about a mysterious
illness that had struck employees of the embassy. There were
theories about “sonic attacks,” but the source would never be firmly
established. It felt to us like something the Russians might do—
people who wanted to sow conflict, drive others apart, put America
and Cuba back into the Cold War that I thought we had ended.
A couple of days later, I flew to Santiago, where the Cuban
Revolution had begun. I felt sicker than I could remember ever
having been—a throbbing headache, ringing in the ears, repeatedly
(and not always successfully) suppressing the urge to vomit. Was it
food poisoning, or something else? I was shown around the
revolutionary sites by an eager guide. A museum that documented
the crimes of the prerevolutionary, U.S.-backed Batista government
felt several historical epochs out of date, and so did the Cuban
Revolution. I was driven into the countryside, almost two hours on
roads at times blocked by mangy herds of animals, my stomach
doing flips with every bump. We came to a secluded cemetery in the
mountains, the place where the revolutionaries had become
guerrillas. It was lush and peaceful, the only sounds coming from
the birds and the breeze through the trees. An old man who’d fought
with the Castros showed me around, his tour culminating at the site
where Raúl Castro would be buried. I looked at the tomb with Raul’s
name already etched into it; this was a man who wanted to be
remembered in the place where he had been young, when it was all
still a cause uncorrupted by power and the passage of time.
Back at the Nacional the next day, I lay on my bed staring at the
ceiling and having a conversation in my head. Had we misled all of
these people, from the Cubans who wanted to move beyond the
past, to the Europeans who saw America as a guarantor of
democracy, to the Burmese who wanted democracy for themselves?
People who had trusted us, only to be burned. Or were we always
pushing against inexorable forces, the hard-line Cubans who clung to
power with Russian backers, the nationalists trying to unravel the
European Union, the Burmese military who wanted a nation for
Buddhists? Was the dark turn I sensed everywhere I went a cause of
America’s nationalist, authoritarian turn, or was America merely
following the same turn happening everywhere, caught in the
current of history like a piece of driftwood?
This question continued to roll around in my head, from continent
to continent. In Kenya, an American diplomat told me the Chinese
were methodically supplanting American influence—buying up
businesses and media, courting the students who no longer felt
welcome in the United States. In Singapore, a senior government
official told me casually over drinks that Asia had moved on from
America—speaking as if this gleaming capitalist construction had
almost been seamlessly handed off to the Chinese. In Amsterdam,
Obama and I toured the empty Anne Frank house at night, peering
into the small rooms where she’d penned her diary, the absence of
tourists lending the place a feeling of having been forgotten.
In country after country, people asked me searching questions
about how Trump could have happened. In Europe, Trump was often
tied to the British vote for Brexit and the refugee crisis of 2015, the
fears of Muslim hordes invading our open societies. But this theory, I
felt certain, was wrong. It diminished the more structural,
consequential forces at work everywhere I went, forces that had
been building for a long time. No, this wasn’t some black swan
event, easily explained by a couple of years’ worth of scary
headlines. It ignored the lived reality of the eight years that I worked
in the White House, the feeling that a cancer was metastasizing
everywhere despite our efforts to treat it. It conveniently elided the
ways in which decades of American capitalism, technology, and the
politicized pursuit of national security had ripened so many people in
the United States and around the world for crude nationalist
appeals.
Then, on an early 2018 trip to Berlin for an Obama town hall with
European youth, I met a young Hungarian named Sandor Lederer.
We talked in an empty room of what was once the headquarters of
the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a Soviet-backed nation that
doesn’t exist anymore. The building was built in the drab style of
1960s Communist architecture. The exterior was gray and imposing,
the interior filled with mosaics depicting idealized scenes of Germans
in factories, farms, and mines contrasted with images of book
burning and the persecution of workers under the Nazis. For more
than three decades, the men who ruled the GDR with access to the
Stasi’s files on the private lives of other East German citizens came
to work in this building. It has since become one of Germany’s
leading business schools, the European School of Management and
Technology (ESMT), a name that encapsulates the technocratic
ethos of globalization that shaped the beginning of the twenty-first
century. A monument to Communist power turned into a place to
train capitalists. A reminder that history never ends.
Not yet forty, Sandor had knowing, sunken eyes and a mop of
black hair flecked with gray, as if he carried around his country’s
post–Cold War journey like a weight. I asked him to walk me
through how his country’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, had
transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely
authoritarian system in the span of a decade. It took him only a few
minutes. Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into
people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by
unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund
your politics. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw
parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power. Pack the
courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the
rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and
favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through
social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George
Soros. Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national
security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message
that taps into the longing for a great past. Offer a sense of
belonging for the disaffected masses. Relentlessly attack the Other:
immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.
 It struck me that Sandor could have been describing America
instead of Hungary.
I saw more clearly what had been stirring in me since Trump’s
inauguration: America wasn’t at risk of being transformed into a
semiauthoritarian nation by Trump; we were already well along that
spectrum, and the damage could not be undone by any single
election. And sitting in the old headquarters of the GDR, this
monument to the world that America transformed with the end of
the Cold War, I began to see the outlines of how America’s own
actions over the last thirty years made this transformation possible—
in our own country and in others.
This is the world we made.
 2

Freedom’s High-Water Mark

sandor lederer was six years old when the Berlin Wall was torn down
in 1989. His father was a foreign correspondent based in East Berlin,
and Sandor remembers the energy of the people in the streets, the
excited conversations at the dinner table, the sense that something
important was happening all around him even if he was too young to
fully grasp it. After experiencing the euphoria of Berlin’s
reunification, his family returned to Budapest to find it transforming.
“As a child,” he told me, “you see the visuals. Visuals in terms of
statues that you see on the streets, street names, cars on the street,
billboard advertising, and also what you see on TV—several political
parties discussing things.” Gone were the traces of Soviet-sponsored
totalitarianism, with its stale sameness, Communist iconography, and
anointed heroes. In its place, suddenly, was the promise of an open
society—the freedom to choose what news you watched, what
products you aspired to buy, which political parties you joined. The
freedom to choose who you were.
Viktor Orban was just twenty-five years old when he made his
first impression on Hungarians at a rally in Budapest five months
before the Wall came down. The purpose of the rally was to rebury
the corpse of the martyred Imre Nagy, the man who led Hungary
during its 1956 uprising against Soviet rule. Nagy, the Communist
prime minister, had embraced the uprising, called for multiparty
democracy, declared Hungary’s neutrality in the Cold War, and
demanded an end to Soviet military occupation. In a scene
analogous to that in Tiananmen Square a few decades later, Soviet
tanks rolled into Budapest, crushing the uprising, killing thousands
and displacing hundreds of thousands more. Nagy was hanged, his
body discarded in a prisoner’s grave.
At the time of the 1989 rally, Orban was a young beneficiary of
the wealthy Hungarian-American émigré George Soros. As the leader
of the Federation of Young Democrats, Orban represented the
demands of Hungarian youth. Tieless, his dark hair in the style of a
1980s lead singer, he stood in front of four microphones and a crowd
of a hundred thousand people. Orban paid tribute to the fact that
Nagy “identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to
put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian
Empire, and the dictatorship of a single party.” Orban himself was
strident and uncompromising in his own defiance.
“Orban was a very popular liberal politician back then,” Sandor
told me. Listening to him recall those days, I remembered my
wonder at the images I watched on television as a twelve-year-old in
New York City, of the crowds of Europeans filling the streets of fallen
imperial capitals. I believed that what they wanted was simple: They
wanted freedom, and that meant that America—in my young boy’s
mind—was winning. The winds of change.
This was freedom’s high-water mark. In a dizzying few years, the
Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed, followed by the
Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela strode out of a South African prison.
Right-wing dictatorships tumbled from South America to Southeast
Asia, no longer a useful extension of American anticommunism. The
organizing principle of American politics disappeared as well: the
Cold War, which had driven everything from our ascent to the moon,
to the structure of our government, to the pop culture that shaped
my worldview through osmosis. Bill Clinton was elected, the first
American president born after World War II, who melded together
center-left policies with accommodation to the unregulated, wealth-
creating markets unleashed by the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
When the Cold War ended, Orban was in some ways an American
creation—an underdog and vessel for the same arguments American
presidents had been making for decades, a beneficiary of the
American policy of containment that compressed the Communist
bloc into a pressure cooker overheated by its own corruption and
hypocrisy. Today, the anticorruption organization that Sandor leads,
along with many other civil society organizations, has been deemed
an “enemy of the state” by the government of Prime Minister Viktor
Orban. Meanwhile, Orban has become what he once railed against:
obedient to Russia, the corrupt beneficiary of the dark money that
courses through the veins of global markets, leader of what
increasingly resembles a dictatorship by a single party. The story of
how that happened is the story of how the period after that high-
water mark of freedom failed to reconcile the wounds of the past or
offer people a sense of purpose for the future. It’s a story that
shaped the lives of Hungarians like Viktor Orban and Sandor Lederer
in very different ways.

at the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to end the historical
epoch that had begun with the rise of fascism and Communism. The
carnage of World War II had morphed into the competition between
capitalist democracy and Communist autocracy, and now that battle
was over. As an American, I believed we had all emerged into a new
consensus, the benevolent cocoon of American-led globalization. But
within Europe, the early-twentieth-century clashes over identity cast
long shadows; after the Iron Curtain was lifted, the shadows were
still there within nations, communities, and individual lives.
Sandor is a half-Jewish Hungarian whose family circle
encompasses the various conflicts and contradictions of the
twentieth century. He was born in a country that suffered under the
rule of Nazi-backed Hungarian fascists during World War II and
Russian-backed Communists during the Cold War. His Jewish
grandparents on his father’s side met in exile, in Turkey, during
World War II. During the war, Sandor’s grandmother—who was born
in the Ukrainian city of Odessa—worked for Soviet intelligence.
Sandor’s grandfather—horrified by what was happening in Europe—
worked for the British secret services. After the war, Sandor’s
grandparents moved to Budapest, where they were generally loyal to
the new Soviet-backed system. “For them,” Sandor said, “I think the
Communist rule was a safeguard that Nazism could not come back.
Politics was a question of red or brown”—Communist or Nazi.
As a child, Sandor was preoccupied with the Holocaust. He wasn’t
religious, but he was acutely aware that he would have been marked
for the death camps. “It’s still a lesson from history that shapes my
thinking,” he said. “How such a tragedy can happen in a civilized
world as Europe was in the first half of the twentieth century.”
During his time in Germany as a child, Sandor used to take a
particular interest in the older buildings, whose timelessness seemed
to represent something sturdy and lasting from the past. He’d look
around and wonder how it was that a country that was in many
ways the center of Western civilization could produce such evil,
supported explicitly or implicitly by the people who’d lived in those
old buildings. As I am half-Jewish and secular myself, it’s not
surprising that this question used to gnaw at my American mind as a
child as well, even though I was insulated by the distance of an
ocean.
Sandor grew up wary of the dark places that charismatic political
leaders can take nations, so his heroes were not politicians, but
ordinary people—Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleinman, the two
Dutch men who helped hide Anne Frank and her family in that small
annex to an apartment during the Nazi occupation of Holland. “I
never really liked authority and celebrities and stars and these kinds
of heroes,” Sandor told me. “And for me these two guys were
powerful examples of risking their own lives, risking their own well-
being, to protect a family that was in danger because they were
Jewish.” It made no difference that none of the people in this drama
were Hungarian. “What we need in society are such people,” he said.
Yet as Sandor moved through school in 1990s Budapest, he
noticed how Hungarians avoided the minefields of the twentieth
century. Some Hungarians had supported the Nazi-collaborating
government that sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death.
Others, like Sandor’s family, had supported the Communists who
kept a tight lid on Hungary for more than four decades. “We did not
really deal with it,” he said. “Teachers were afraid to touch these
topics, or speak out on this, because immediately students brought
up their family stories. Because every family could look back on this
—we were victims of the Nazis, we were benefiting from the
Communists, we were benefiting from the Nazis taking flats from the
Jews. So instead of having these debates, the teachers I think
always wanted to share the minimum—the dates and people
involved, and just to have a timeline of history but not really the
interesting stuff.”
In this way, instead of forging a renewed sense of national
identity after the experience of the Cold War, one that exorcised its
ghosts and replaced them with something different, the newly free
Hungary avoided the matter of identity, what it meant to be
Hungarian in the political sense. That was something private, tied to
the painful past. Globalization was the new identity on offer from the
American victors of the Cold War: expanding markets, opening
societies, and liberal democracy washing over Eastern Europe like
the rushing water of a breaking wave before it recedes.

—
as sandor moved through school, Viktor Orban began his
transformation from liberal firebrand to reactionary. There was a
crowded slate of parties on the left, and Orban’s own party—Fidesz
—performed poorly in elections. So he pulled his party to the right,
embracing—at first—a conventional form of center-right politics:
smaller government, market-friendly, socially conservative. He
served an unremarkable term as prime minister from 1998 to 2002
and was then voted out.
Over the next eight years, Orban turned his political party into a
social movement, organizing “civic circles” across the country. The
civic circles were small gatherings of people, often centered in
churches, that cemented a longing for a traditional set of values
rooted in a lost Hungarian identity: a Hungary that was Christian, a
Hungary with an ancient past, a brotherhood rooted in patriotism
and shared grievances. Orban reached back to the time before the
Cold War and even before World War II. He highlighted the historic
humiliation of the Treaty of Trianon, which dismembered Hungary at
the end of World War I, costing it two thirds of its territory and
stranding millions of ethnic Hungarians beyond newly drawn
borders. Here was a history that many Hungarians could agree
upon. But it was also the same blood-and-soil form of European
nationalism that had ravaged the continent during World War II and
killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Balkan wars of the
1990s, a nationalism that implicitly excused the ideology of fascism
while rebuking the more recent evil of Communism.
Orban’s politics didn’t always fit neatly on the West’s left-right
spectrum. Many of his supporters from the civic circles joined the
global protests against the Iraq War in 2003, embracing antiwar
rhetoric that rightly cast the American occupation of an Arab country
as a form of imperialism that discredited the entire American-led
international order. As the decade marched on toward the financial
crisis of 2008, Orban attacked amoral multinational corporations and
the neoliberalism that fueled their profits, along with widening
inequality between individuals and nations. In this way, Orban’s
identity-based nationalism drew upon resentment of two
fundamental pillars of the post–Cold War American order: the
unequal wealth creation of open markets, and the unchecked
excesses of American military power. At the same time, Orban began
to expropriate themes from the Republican Party’s culture wars
within American society: fidelity to Christian values, opposition to
abortion and LGBT rights, antipathy to crass popular culture, and
resentment of the political correctness of elites.
To many Hungarians, the first two decades after the fall of the
Berlin Wall had been disorienting and disappointing. The nation was
wealthier, but that wealth was still far behind that of its Western
European neighbors, and it was concentrated more in the hands of
faceless corporations and a small elite than in those of individual
Hungarians. The nation was a member of clubs like NATO and the
European Union, but it lacked the clout to have a voice on foolish
American projects like the invasion of Iraq. The nation was free, but
to many, the liberated culture seemed designed to offend more
traditional Christian sensibilities. In response, Orban wasn’t just
leading a political party, he was building a movement rooted in a
deeper sense of national identity, offering a seawall of protection
against the encroaching tides of globalization. To do that, he planted
a foot on one side of that unresolved divide between red and brown
—Communism and fascism—in Hungarian history. He was a
nationalist, and he was poised to make Hungary great again.

around the same time, in the mid-2000s, Sandor had a very different
kind of political awakening. He was finishing university with plans to
be a diplomat when he noticed that one of his favorite parts of
Budapest was being systematically destroyed—the 7th District, a
neighborhood of pleasantly worn-in nineteenth-century buildings
with balconies and long courtyards, housing a teeming mix of people
from different classes, backgrounds, and ethnicities. It was also
Hungary’s old Jewish quarter, the neighborhood where Jews had
been pushed into ghettos toward the end of Nazi dominance. That
distinctive charm and resonant history, he noticed, was being
replaced by new buildings without any character—the stale
sameness not of Communism but of utilitarian capitalism. “Ugly,
irrelevant buildings,” Sandor told me, “that could be anywhere in the
world.”
It was not hard for me to understand why Sandor might have a
visceral reaction to this cultural erasure. Like Sandor’s, my Jewish
roots are in the Eastern European countries where pogroms drove
people deep into the Jewish quarters of the grand cities. A good
chunk of my family came to America early, decades before German
nationalism lit the fires that fueled the Holocaust, while some stayed
behind, destined to be surrounded by walls. Growing up in New York
City, I did not feel my Jewishness as a religious identity; history was
something we had escaped from. Our rabbis were writers—Roth,
Bellow, Singer—who told stories from the residue of nation-states,
the assertion of the individual. Our temples were the apartment
buildings, courtyards, and fire escapes of Manhattan, where every
life contained multitudes. As unbridled capitalism washed across
New York at the same time that it remade Budapest, I had felt
Sandor’s sense of loss as I watched characterless glass towers erase
those old apartment buildings and with them the stories they held.
While Orban was starting his civic circles, Sandor decided to
investigate what was remaking this neighborhood he cared about. It
wasn’t hard to find a paper trail around the real estate transactions,
or to figure out the larger context. The people kicked out of their old
apartments received little compensation. The developers made a lot
of money putting up these larger, uglier buildings. The politicians
funded their campaigns—and probably made something on the side
—from the developers. “It was not simply ignorance or a lack of
culture,” he told me, “it was mainly corruption. Very typical. I think
you have these stories all around the world.”
When Sandor graduated from university, he decided to do
something about it. Together with two friends, he started K-Monitor,
an organization dedicated to combating corruption and promoting
transparency and accountability in politics. They had no money. They
worked, Sandor said, like a garage band out of a worn-down house
that one of his friends’ parents owned on the outskirts of Budapest.
They collected data and created a database mapping corruption
across the country. The Internet was essential to their work.
Ultimately, their database grew to include more than fifty thousand
articles. They began to raise funds and receive grants. In keeping
with the grassroots, egalitarian ethos of the organization, Sandor
insisted on paying each employee the same amount, himself
included.
In their different ways, Orban and Sandor were both reacting to a
sense in the broader society that the economy and politics were
increasingly corrupted. And there was ample evidence to justify that
feeling. At the same time that K-Monitor was formed in 2006,
confidence in the center-left government collapsed when the
recently reelected prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, was secretly
recorded giving a speech to party elites in which he acknowledged,
“obviously we lied throughout the last year and a half, two years…
we lied morning, noon and night.” He was referring, in part, to a
refusal to tell the truth in the last campaign about austerity
measures that would be needed because of the excess government
spending that seemed to have benefited mostly those at the top. “If
there is a scandal in the society,” he lamented, “it’s the fact that the
upper ten thousand are building themselves up again using public
money.” As if anticipating the coming direction of events, he
implored the left “that it doesn’t have to hang its head in this fucking
country. That we shouldn’t shit ourselves in fear of Viktor Orban and
the right.”
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 CHAPTER XVI.
THE UNIVERSITY DURING THE REIGNS OF GEORGE III.

AND GEORGE IV.

We may pass lightly over the history of the

Stagnation of University during the latter part of the eighteenth
University century, when its external and internal life were
legislation in the equally barren of memorable events. Only eight
eighteenth
statutes had been enacted by Convocation
century
between 1636 and 1759; nor was the succeeding
period more prolific of reforms. The legislative energy of the
University was confined for the most part to amendments of mere
administrative details, and it was even suggested that such trifling
measures were beyond its powers. In the year 1759, the right of the
University to abrogate any of the Laudian statutes without the
consent of the Crown was challenged by the proctors. The objection,
however, was overruled, and the principle was established that,
whereas it was not competent for the University to make any statutes
as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, it could not
delegate any such power to the King himself, so that any statute
made under royal sanction was subject to repeal, like ordinary bye-
laws. In 1770, a new statute was passed for the regulation of
academical habits, which provoked a long controversy, and
incidentally established the principle, applicable to more important
subjects, that no individual Head of a college, nor even all the Heads
of colleges together, could dispense with statutable rules,
independently of Convocation.
Meanwhile, a considerable number of Acts were
Statutes passed by Parliament confirming or enlarging the
affecting the privileges of the University. For instance, in 1774,
University the Universities of England and Scotland were
empowered by special enactment to hold in
perpetuity their exclusive right of printing books, the copyright of
which should have been vested in them by the authors. Other Acts
granted colleges special exemptions from the land tax in respect of
their buildings, and from legacy duty in respect of collections and
other specific articles bequeathed to them. Resident members of the
University were further exempted from service in the Militia, and the
stringent Act of 1799, ‘for better preventing treasonable and
seditious practices,’ was expressly limited so as not to curtail the
freedom of University lectures or the University press.
In 1793, the installation of the Duke of Portland
Political as successor to Lord North in the chancellorship
sympathies of was signalised by festivities on an unprecedented
the University scale, and a tumultuous struggle for admission to
after the
the Sheldonian Theatre led to a fray which
outbreak of the
French reflected little credit on academical manners. The
Revolution hero of the day, and favourite of the gownsmen,
was Edmund Burke, whose son received an
honorary D.C.L. degree, but who is said to have declined it for
himself on the ground that, in 1790, the Heads of Houses had
negatived a requisition from forty-nine Masters of Arts proposing that
a D.C.L. degree should be conferred on him ‘by diploma.’ The
political sympathies of the University were, in fact, strongly called
forth on behalf of the Royalist cause in France, and a large
subscription was raised in 1792 for the relief of the French refugees,
especially Catholic priests, three of whom settled at Oxford. Tn 1794
nearly 2,500l. was contributed for purposes of national defence by
the resident body of graduates, including a grant of 200l. from the
University chest. In 1798, a further contribution of 4,000l. ‘in aid of
the revenue of the country’ was sent to the government from the
University and colleges of Oxford, while an University volunteer
corps, mustering about five hundred men, was formed and drilled, as
in the days of the Civil War. This martial ardour, and the drain of
students into the army, doubtless contributed to increase the
depression of academical studies which preceded and rendered
necessary the ‘new examination statutes’ of 1800. But academical
studies must also have suffered from the prevailing distress which
marked the winter of 1799, when bread-riots took place in Oxford,
and large subscriptions were raised in the University for the relief of
the poor townspeople.
Notwithstanding the decline of academical
Accessions to vigour during the eighteenth century, both the
professoriate in professorial staff and the public buildings of the
the eighteenth University received a considerable extension. In
century
1708 the Professorship of Poetry was founded out
of funds bequeathed for the purpose by Henry
Birkhead. In 1724 the Regius Professorship of Modern History was
established by George I. In 1728 the Professorship of Botany, then in
a state of suspended animation, was re-endowed out of the
munificent bequest of William Sherard. In 1749 the first Professor of
Experimental Philosophy was appointed, with a salary of 30l., out of
the Crewe benefaction. In 1758 the bequest of Charles Viner took
effect by the election of William Blackstone to the new Vinerian
Professorship of Common Law. In 1780 the Clinical Professorship
was founded in connection with the Radcliffe Infirmary. In 1795 the
Professorship of Anglo-Saxon was constituted, forty years after the
death of its founder, Dr. Rawlinson, the famous antiquary, and in
1798 George Aldrich, formerly of Merton College, bequeathed
property for the endowment of Professorships in Anatomy, Medicine,
and Chemistry.
Meanwhile the mediæval aspect of Oxford was
Architectural modified by many new architectural features. Early
improvements in the century additional buildings sprang up in
Magdalen, Corpus, Queen’s, and Oriel. To the
same age belong the Codrington Library at All Souls’, with the new
Library and Peckwater Quadrangle at Christchurch, and other
college buildings. In 1713 the Clarendon Building was opened to
receive the University Press. Books had been printed in Oxford since
1468, when Caxton’s invention was still on its trial, but Delegates of
the Press were not appointed until 1586, and the University privilege
of printing dates from the patent granted in 1633, at the instance of
Archbishop Laud. After 1669 the University Press was set up and
worked in the Sheldonian Theatre, but the copyright of Clarendon’s
‘History of the Rebellion’ having been presented to the University,
the profits were applied towards the cost of erecting the fine edifice
known as the ‘Clarendon Press’ for 118 years. A still more important
benefaction was that of the celebrated Dr. Radcliffe, who died in
1714, leaving a large sum of money to be accumulated for the
foundation of a Medical Library, an Infirmary, and an Observatory.
The first stone of the library was laid in 1737, all the houses in ‘Cat
Street,’ north of St. Mary’s Church, having been demolished to make
room for it. It was opened for the use of students on April 13, 1749,
after a ‘two days’ solemnity,’ including a Public Act, and a concert
managed by Handel, whose oratorios had been received with great
applause at Oxford six years earlier, and whose ‘Sampson’ was
performed in the Sheldonian Theatre on the following day. The
Infirmary and Observatory were completed in 1770 and 1795
respectively, but are not under University control, though closely
associated with University studies. In 1788 Sir Robert Taylor, an
architect of some eminence, bequeathed a large sum to found a
building for the cultivation of ‘the European languages,’ but this
bequest did not take full effect until 1848, when the present ‘Taylor
Institution’ was opened. Meanwhile, in 1771, an Act of Parliament
had been passed enabling the City to rebuild Magdalen Bridge, and
take down the east and north gates, the south and west gates having
been already demolished. By these alterations the conversion of
Oxford into an University town was finally consummated, and few of
its inhabitants now realise that it was once a fortified city sheltering a
cluster of poor schools and halls not yet aspiring to the dignity of
colleges.
The general history of the University in the
Effects of the present century may be divided into two periods:
French war the first terminated by the Reform Act of 1832, and
upon the the great ecclesiastical reaction which followed
University.
upon it; the second embracing the last two or three
Opposition to
reforms years of William IV.’s reign, and the whole reign of
Queen Victoria. The new Examination Statute of
1800, and the subsequent introduction of the class system,[16] were
the only events of any academical importance in the earlier of these
periods, and nothing occurred to disturb the repose of the University
during the last twenty years of George III.’s reign, or the ten years’
reign of George IV. The domestic records of this interval are meagre
and trivial in the extreme. When the Peace of Amiens was
proclaimed in 1802, there seems to have been a short-lived revival
of educational vigour at Oxford; when the war broke out afresh in
1803 volunteers were again enrolled from the University, and Oxford
studies again began to languish. In 1805 these were vigorously
attacked by Sydney Smith in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ and vigorously
defended by Mr. Copleston, afterwards Provost of Oriel, himself
among the foremost of University reformers. While the country was
engaged in its desperate struggle with Napoleon, the ‘class system’
was being quietly introduced, and supplying a new incentive to
industry. The political animosities which had agitated the University
in the last century had completely died out, but it is certain that
Oxford was profoundly affected by the anti-Jacobin panic which set
in after the French Revolution and lasted for a whole generation. It
is, however, some proof of a latent inclination to moderate Liberalism
among Oxford graduates that in 1809 Lord Grenville was elected
Chancellor after a contest with Lord Eldon. On the other hand, the
sympathies of the University on all ‘Church and State’ questions
were identical with those of George III. So far back as 1810 a petition
was presented against Catholic Emancipation, and when Robert
Peel was elected member for the University in 1817, it was fully
understood that he was to oppose the Catholic Claims. In 1829, the
University Convocation reaffirmed its reprobation of these claims by
a solemn vote. Peel resigned his seat, and upon a new election was
defeated by Sir Robert Inglis. In a like spirit the University petitioned
in 1831 against Parliamentary Reform, in 1833 against the Irish
Church Temporalities Bill, and in 1834, with only one dissentient,
against the grant of a charter to the new London University. No
doubt, in this last case the instinctive hostility of Churchmen to a
non-religious academical body was quickened by a less honourable
jealousy of a rival institution to be invested with the power of granting
degrees. In spite of the Oxford protest, the charter was granted at
the close of 1836, and in the following year a similar privilege was
conferred upon Durham University.
 Two other incidents in University life during this
Reception of the somewhat obscure period deserve a passing
Allied notice. In 1814 Oxford was enlivened by the
Sovereigns. famous visit of the Allied Sovereigns, when
Abolition of the
Blucher was received with enthusiastic plaudits in
Mayor’s Oath
the Sheldonian Theatre. Had the loyalty of the
University been doubtful, the Prince Regent must have been
reassured by the fervent display of it on this occasion; but these
royal visits had lost their significance when the adhesion of Oxford
ceased to be a factor in Imperial politics, and the subsequent
receptions of Queen Adelaide and Queen Victoria, though almost as
hearty as that of Queen Elizabeth, were tributes of respectful
homage and not of political devotion. In 1825 the mayor and bailiffs
of Oxford were released by a document under the University seal
from the penance laid upon them after the great riot on Scholastica’s
Day in 1354, when they were required, as we have seen, to attend
St. Mary’s Church yearly with sixty leading citizens, to celebrate a
mass for the souls of the murdered scholars, and to offer one penny
each at the altar. No sooner was the Sacrifice of the Mass forbidden
in the reign of Elizabeth than the citizens hastened to give up this
annual appearance, but were compelled to resume it by an Order of
Council, a litany being substituted for the mass. The whole ceremony
was now abolished; but another grievance of earlier origin still
remained, and was not finally removed until the year 1859. By the
letters patent of Henry III., already mentioned, dated 1248, the
mayor and bailiffs, on taking office, were directed to swear that they
would keep ‘the liberties and customs of the University,’ the
Chancellor having been previously informed, in order that he might
witness the oath personally or by a deputy. This obligation, though it
may have been sometimes evaded, does not seem to have been
disputed for more than six centuries. In 1855, however, the mayor
and corporation requested the University to dispense with the oath.
The University at first demurred, but after friendly conferences gave
its sanction to a Bill for abolishing the oath, upon condition, however,
of its being once more taken by the mayor and sheriff for the last
time. In 1859 this Bill, introduced at the instance of the City, but with
the concurrence of the University, was passed into law, and the
standing feud so long maintained between these ancient
corporations was thus brought to an amicable conclusion. The
harmony which has since prevailed between the authorities of the
University and the City may have been partly due to other causes,
but it has certainly been promoted by the disuse of a humiliating
formality, well calculated to revive the memory of barbarous violence
on one side and invidious pretensions on the other.

FOOTNOTES:
[16] See Chapter XVII.
 CHAPTER XVII.
OXFORD STUDIES AND EXAMINATIONS IN THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY.

‘The studies of the University were first raised from

Examination their abject state by a statute passed in 1800.’
Statute of 1800 Such is the testimony of the Oxford University
and later Commissioners appointed in 1850, and it is amply
amendments
confirmed by University records. The Laudian
system was doomed to failure from the first,
inasmuch as it provided no security for the capacity of examiners or
against their collusion with the candidates, while these were
animated by little fear of rejection and no hope whatever of
distinction. The statute of 1800, for which the credit is mainly due to
Dr. Eveleigh, then Provost of Oriel, was directed to cure these
defects. That it was regarded as a vigorous attempt to raise the
standard of degree examinations is proved by the fact that in 1801,
the last year of the ‘old system,’ the number of B.A. degrees
suddenly rose to 250, largely exceeding the average of degrees and
even of matriculations in several preceding years. The new statute
was deliberately based on the Laudian system, in so far as it
presupposed an inherent supremacy in the faculty of Arts, and it was
unconsciously based on the old mediæval curriculum of Trivials and
Quadrivials, in so far as it specified grammar, rhetoric, logic, moral
philosophy, and the elements of mathematics—with the important
addition of Latin and Greek literature—as the essential subjects of
examination. But it effected a grand reform in the method of
examination. Candidates were to offer themselves either for what
has since been known as a ‘pass,’ or for Honours, and the Honour-
list was to be divided into two classes, in which the names were to
be arranged in order of merit. There was also to be a further
examination for the M.A. degree, comprising higher mathematical
subjects, history, and Hebrew; while candidates for the B.C.L.
degree were to be examined in history and jurisprudence, besides
the subjects required for the B.A. degree. Moreover, the examiners
were thenceforth to be paid by salary, and chosen by responsible
officers to serve for considerable periods. They were solemnly
charged to deliberate maturely and secretly on the merits of the
candidates, sepositis omnino amicitiâ et odio, timore ac spe. Material
changes were introduced into this system by statutes of 1807,
modified again in 1809, 1825, 1826, and 1830. The general effect of
these changes was to substitute, in the main, written papers for oral
questions, to establish two stated times in the year for examination,
to subdivide the list of honours into three classes, to relegate
mathematics to a ‘School’ by itself, to abrogate the examination for
the M.A. degree, and to make the Greek and Latin languages,
philosophy, and history, the staple of examination in what now came
to be called the Literæ Humaniores School, though permission was
given to illustrate the ancient by modern authors. Meanwhile, the old
scholastic exercise of Responsions in Parviso was replaced by an
elementary examination, bearing the same name, to be passed in
the second year.
Such was the Oxford examination-system when
Examination it was transformed afresh in 1850, by a statute
Statute of 1850 which has been amended and extended by many
and later supplementary measures. A ‘First Public
amendments
Examination,’ popularly known as ‘Moderations,’
was interposed between Responsions and the final examination for
the B.A. degree, thenceforth officially designated the ‘Second Public
Examination.’ This intermediate examination, in which honours are
awarded, was specially designed to encourage and test a scholarlike
knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, ancient history,
philosophy, and logic being mainly reserved for the Final Classical,
or Literæ Humaniores, School. The Honour School of Mathematics
was retained, and two new Schools were established, the one for
Natural Science, the other for Law and Modern History. This last
School was afterwards divided into two schools, of Jurisprudence
and of Modern History, respectively, while a sixth Honour School was
added for Theology. Until the year 1883, two examinations were held
annually in each of the six Honour Schools, but in and since that
year one only has been held, and that in Trinity Term. Two
examinations, however, continued to be held annually for candidates
seeking an ordinary degree, and these ‘pass examinations’ were
subdivided into several branches, for the purpose of securing a
tolerable degree of proficiency in more than one subject of study.
The important examination statutes of 1850
University were in contemplation, but not yet in operation,
Commission of when a Royal Commission was issued, on August
1850 31, in that year, ‘for the purpose of inquiring into
the state, discipline, studies, and revenues’ of the
University and colleges. The report of this Commission is the most
comprehensive review of the whole University system which has
ever been published. It recommended various important reforms, of
which some were effected by an Act of Parliament enacted in 1854,
and others through Ordinances framed by executive commissioners,
therein appointed, for the several colleges. In 1850, the sole initiative
power in University legislation, and by far the largest share of
University administration, was still vested in the ‘Hebdomadal Board,’
consisting solely of heads of colleges with the two proctors, and
described by no unfriendly critic of Oxford institutions as ‘an
organised torpor.’ The assembly of resident and ‘regent’ Masters of
Arts, known as the ‘House of Congregation,’ still existed for the
purpose of granting degrees, but its other business had dwindled to
mere formalities. The University Convocation included, as ever, all
Masters of Arts, resident or non-resident, and had the right of
debating, but this right was virtually annulled by the necessity of
speaking in Latin—all but a lost art—and Convocation could only
accept or reject without amendment measures proposed by the
Hebdomadal Board. No student could be a member of the University
without belonging to a college or hall, while every member of a
college or hall was compelled to sleep within its walls, until after his
third year of residence. Persons unable to sign the Thirty-nine
Articles were absolutely excluded, not merely from degrees, but from
all access to the University, inasmuch as the test of subscription was
enforced at matriculation. Nevertheless, college fellowships were
further protected against the intrusion of dissenters by the
declaration of conformity to the liturgy required to be made under the
Act of Uniformity. If professorial lectures were not at so low an ebb
as in the days of Gibbon, they were lamentably scarce and
ineffective. The educational function of the University had, in fact,
been almost wholly merged in college tuition, but the scholarships,
as well as the fellowships, of the colleges were fettered by all
manner of restrictions, which marred their value as incentives to
industry. The great majority of fellows were bound to take Holy
Orders, and the whole University was dominated by a clerical spirit,
which directly tended to make it, as it had so long been, a focus of
theological controversy.
Though several of the wise and liberal measures
Act of 1854 and recommended by the Commission of 1850 were
new College postponed to a more convenient season, a
Ordinances profound and most beneficial reform was wrought
in the whole spirit and working of the University
system by the Act of 1854, and the College Ordinances framed
under its provisions. The Hebdomadal Board was replaced by an
elective Council, on which Heads of colleges, professors, and
resident Masters of Arts were equally represented. A new
‘Congregation’ was created, embracing all resident members of
Convocation, and soon became a vigorous deliberative assembly,
with the right of speaking in English. The monopoly of colleges was
broken down, and an opening made for ulterior extension by the
revival of private halls. The professoriate was considerably
increased, reorganised, and re-endowed, by means of contributions
from colleges. The colleges were emancipated from their mediæval
statutes, were invested with new constitutions, and acquired new
legislative powers. The fellowships were almost universally thrown
open to merit, and the effect of this was not merely to provide ample
rewards for the highest academical attainments, but to place the
governing power within colleges in the hands of able men, likely to
promote further improvements. The number and value of
scholarships was largely augmented, and many, though not all, of
the restrictions upon them were abolished. The great mass of
vexatious and obsolete oaths was swept away, and though
candidates for the M.A. degree and persons elected to fellowships
were still required to make the old subscriptions and declarations, it
was enacted that no religious test should be imposed at
matriculation, or on taking a bachelor’s degree. The University itself
had supplemented the extension of its curriculum and examination
system by the foundation of a new museum specially consecrated to
natural science. The permanence of this extension was, however,
additionally secured by a clause introduced into the College
Ordinances, whereby it was directed that fellowships should be
appropriated, from time to time, for the encouragement of all the
studies recognised by the University.
Other salutary changes naturally grew out of this
Effect of these comprehensive reform, and far greater progress
reforms was made by the University during the thirty years
immediately following it than in any previous
century of its history. The impulse given to education reacted upon
learning and research; Oxford science began once more to
command the respect of Europe; the professoriate received an
accession of illustrious names; and college tuition, instead of being
the mere temporary vocation of fellows waiting for livings, gradually
placed itself on the footing of a regular profession. Instead of drying
up the bounty of founders, as had been confidently predicted, the
reforms of 1854 apparently caused the stream of benefactions to
flow with renewed abundance. Nearly all the older colleges have
extended their buildings, mostly by the aid of private munificence, a
new college has been erected, bearing the name of the Rev. John
Keble, and Magdalen Hall has been refounded, under its original
name of Hertford College, with a large new endowment, provided by
Mr. C. Baring. Meanwhile, a new class of ‘unattached’ or ‘non-
collegiate’ students has been created, the number of which rose to
284 in the year 1880, though it has since manifested a tendency to
fall. The aggregate strength of the University has been doubled
within the same period of thirty-two years, and the net total of
undergraduates in residence has been swelled from about 1,300 to
upwards of 2,500, and the annual matriculations have increased in a
like proportion.
The relaxation of the ‘classical monopoly’ and the opening of
scholarships was supplemented, in 1871, by a still more important
 reform—the complete abolition of University Tests,
Abolition of already reduced by the Act of 1854. This great
University Tests concession to religious liberty was brought about
by a persistent movement chiefly emanating from
the Universities themselves. In the year 1862 a petition was
presented from 74 resident fellows of colleges at Cambridge, praying
for a repeal of the clause applicable to fellowships in the Act of
Uniformity. In the year 1863, a petition was presented from 106
Heads, professors, fellows, ex-fellows, and college tutors at Oxford,
praying for the removal of all theological restrictions on degrees. In
the year 1868, a petition against all religious tests, except for
degrees in theology, was signed by 80 Heads, professors, lecturers,
and resident fellows at Oxford, while a similar petition was signed by
123 non-resident fellows and ex-fellows. In the same year a petition
to the same effect was signed by 227 heads and present or former
office-holders and fellows of Cambridge. Separate petitions,
specially directed against the declaration of conformity, were
presented by Trinity and Christ’s Colleges at Cambridge. Supported
by the whole Nonconformist body and by the Liberal party in
Parliament, these efforts were ultimately successful. The contest in
Parliament lasted no less than nine years, and one Bill after another
was defeated or withdrawn, but in 1871 the abolition of University
Tests was adopted as a government measure and accepted by the
House of Lords. Experience has not justified the fears of its
opponents, and neither the religious character nor the social peace
of the University has been in the slightest degree impaired by the
admission of Nonconformists to its degrees and endowments.
But the impulse given to academical education
Local by the legislation of 1854 is not to be measured
examinations, solely by the internal growth of the University, now
and board for accessible to every class in the nation. Since that
examination of
period it has initiated and carried out two
public schools
educational movements of national importance, the
one in concert, the other in friendly rivalry, with the University of
Cambridge. The first of these was the scheme of local examinations
for pupils of middle-class schools, established by a statute passed at
Oxford in 1857, afterwards adopted by Cambridge, and now
exercising a regulative influence on middle-class education
throughout England. The examination of public schools by a joint-
board representing the two Universities was originated in 1873, and
was doubtless facilitated by the fear, then prevalent, of State-
inspection being applied to endowed schools. At these examinations
certificates are granted, which, under certain limitations, carry with
them an exemption from Responsions at Oxford, as well as from a
part of the ‘previous examinations’ at Cambridge, and of the military
examinations. Such certificates may be regarded as supplying the
rudiments of a missing link not only between secondary and
University education, but also between secondary and professional
education.
In the meantime, a new wave of democratic
Commission of sentiment in Parliament impelled Mr. Gladstone to
inquiry (1872) issue, in January 1872, a commission to inquire
and Act of 1876 into academical property and revenues, as a
preliminary step to further legislation. The functions
of this commission were strictly limited to investigation and to
matters of finance, no power being entrusted to it either of passing
judgment on the actual application of University and college funds, or
of suggesting a better application of them—much less of entering on
general questions of University reform. These questions were
destined to be reopened, and a fresh appropriation of academical
endowments to be made, by the Conservative Government which
came into office in the spring of 1874. At this period the system
established by the Oxford Reform Act of 1854, and the executive
commission thereby appointed, had barely taken root, but a vigorous
agitation was already in progress against it, mainly on the ground
that it had done too much for educational competition and too little
for learning or research. The principle upon which a fresh
commission was now demanded was not so much the expediency of
redistributing college revenues for the benefit of the colleges
themselves, as the expediency of diverting them from the colleges to
the University, especially in the interests of Natural Science. The
Marquis of Salisbury, as Chancellor of the University and an
important member of the government, heartily espoused these
claims, and introduced a Bill expressly designed to enrich the
University at the expense of the colleges.
This Bill was passed, with some amendments, in
Commission of 1877. Its preamble recited the expediency of
1877 making larger provision out of college revenues for
University purposes. It proceeded to institute an
executive commission, armed with sweeping powers of revision and
legislation; but, as a safeguard for the interests of colleges, it gave
each college, not indeed a veto upon the statutes to be framed, but a
share in framing them, by means of elected representatives,
associated pro tempore with the commissioners. It further enjoined
that in assessing contributions on colleges, regard should first be
had to the educational wants of the college itself. Accordingly, the
commissioners sat for several years, and elaborated an entirely new
code both for the University and for the colleges, repealing all
previous college statutes or ordinances, but leaving the legislative
constitution of the University untouched. They charged the colleges
with an aggregate subsidy of 20,000l. and upwards for the
endowment of professorships and readerships or lectureships, the
contributions of wealthy colleges being fixed on a higher scale than
those of poorer colleges. By the same process they set free a certain
amount of University income for such objects as the maintenance of
buildings and libraries. They regulated the payment, duties, and
appointment of professors and readers, as well as the nomination of
University examiners, which had been subjected to much criticism.
They made some approach towards an organisation of University
teaching, by grouping studies roughly under Faculties, and giving
‘Boards of Faculties’ a certain limited control over the distribution of
lectures. They formulated extremely minute rules for the publication
of University and college accounts. They remodelled the whole
system of college fellowships, attaching the greater number of them
to University or college offices, but retaining about one hundred
sinecure fellowships, terminable in seven years, with an uniform
stipend of 200l. a year, and subject to no obligations of residence or
celibacy. With certain exceptions, they abolished all clerical
restrictions on fellowships or headships, but regulated various details
of college management and tuition which the former commissioners
had left in the discretion of each governing body. They established
an uniform standard of age and value for college scholarships,
requiring, as a rule, that no candidate should have exceeded
nineteen, and that no scholarship should be worth more than 80l.
annually. They also provided for the appropriation of any surplus
revenues which should accrue, to college or University purposes.
It is too soon to pronounce a judgment on the
Character of effect of these reforms, some of which have not yet
last reforms come into full operation, and which have been
supplemented by incessant changes in the
examination statutes, made by the University itself. Indeed,
notwithstanding the bold amendments which it has undergone, the
constitution and educational system of the University must be
regarded as still in a state of transition. It has ceased to be a mere
aggregate of colleges, but it has not ceased to be essentially
collegiate in many parts of its organisation, and the dualism of the
professorial and tutorial systems has been perpetuated.
Professorships have been freely created, but attendance on their
lectures has not been made obligatory, and it has been found easier
to provide them with salaries out of college revenues than to provide
them with audiences at the expense of college lecturers. The
number of necessary examinations has been increased, and many
obstacles have been thrown in the way of persistent idleness; but the
door of the University has not been closed against complete
ignorance by an effective entrance examination, and a dunce
ignorant of his letters may still matriculate and reside, if he can find a
college to admit him. The student is free to choose his Final School,
and, unless he chooses the Classical School, he may abandon Latin
and Greek, in any case, after Moderations. But a minimum
proficiency in these languages is still necessary for Responsions as
well as for Moderations, several alternatives for which have been
offered with an utter disregard of symmetry or equality between
studies. Women have been admitted to certain University
examinations, but not to all, nor on the same terms as men; and the
names of those who obtain honours are published in a class-list, but
not the ordinary class-list. Religious equality has been established
for most purposes, but not for all, and the Faculty of Theology
maintains its exclusive connection not only with the Anglican Church
but with the Anglican clergy. Such are some of the anomalies which
have been left to adjust themselves by successive commissions and
successive groups of University legislators. They have not proved
inconsistent with a vigorous internal life, but while they exist and
continue to be multiplied, the University cannot be said to have
attained a state of stable equilibrium, nor can a poetical unity be
imparted to an historical narrative of recent University reforms.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
THE NEO-CATHOLIC REVIVAL, KNOWN AS THE ‘OXFORD

MOVEMENT.’

The great Neo-Catholic Revival of the nineteenth

Character of the century is so intimately identified with Oxford that it
‘Oxford came to be widely known as the ‘Oxford
Movement’ Movement.’ It was less important than Methodism
in its purely moral aspect, since it was far less
popular and practical, leaving no such profound impression upon the
religious life of the nation. On the other hand, it exercised a more
powerful influence on Anglican theology, since it wore a more
scholarlike garb, was more attractive to cultivated and imaginative
minds, allied itself with the speculative and historical spirit of the age,
and purported to be essentially constructive or reconstructive. It had
from the first a centre, and solid base of operations, in the University,
with branches stretching far and wide, wherever zealous Churchmen
were found. The assaults of Methodism upon religious apathy in high
places had been more in the nature of guerilla warfare; those of
‘Tractarianism,’ as it came to be called, assumed the character of a
well-organised campaign.
Whatever may have been the aims of its
A reaction leaders, the Oxford Movement was in truth a
against the reaction, and its real origin must be sought in
rising tide of political rather than in ecclesiastical causes. The
Liberalism
question of Catholic Emancipation, which had
been stifled at the Union, was revived in 1812 and fiercely debated
for the next seventeen years. The measure was equally opposed by
the High and Low Church parties in the Church, but carried in 1829
by a Tory Government in deference to political exigencies. It was
followed by the Reform Act, and in 1832 the reformed Parliament
assembled, with a large majority, not merely Erastian, but hostile to
the National Church. The vote of the bishops on the Reform Bill had
exposed them to popular obloquy; Lord Grey himself had openly
threatened them, and the press was full of attacks on Episcopacy
and the Establishment. Lord Grey’s Act for suppressing ten Irish
bishoprics was regarded as the first outburst of the gathering storm;
timid Churchmen trembled for the very existence of their Church,
and the Oxford Movement was set on foot with the deliberate
purpose of defending the Church and the Christianity of England
against the anti-Catholic aggressions of the dominant Liberalism.
The University of Oxford was the natural centre
Oriel the centre for such a reaction. The constitution of the
of the University and colleges was semi-ecclesiastical;
Movement the Heads were clerical dignitaries; nearly all the
fellows were bound to be in Holy Orders. Among
the colleges, Oriel then held the first rank, both as a place of
education, and as the home of a speculative and learned society
among the fellows. Copleston, its last Provost, had been a man of
remarkable capacity, and he was ably seconded by such colleagues
as Davison and Whately. The system of tuition at Oriel was the best
in Oxford, and as it was the first college to throw open its fellowships,
it was able to attract the ablest of the young graduates. It was known
that Oriel fellows were selected not merely on the evidence of the
class-list, or by the results of competitive examination, but also by a
discriminating, though arbitrary, estimate of their social qualities and
probable intellectual development. They were, therefore, a select
body, somewhat inclined to mutual admiration, producing little, but
freely criticising everything. The result was an Oriel school of
thought, commonly known as the Noetics, who applied an unsparing
logic to received opinions, especially those concerning religious faith,
but whose strength lay rather in drawing inferences and refuting
fallacies than in examining and settling the premisses from which
their syllogisms were deduced. Still, Oriel fostered a bright and
independent intellectual life of its own; the Oriel school was a
standing protest against the prevailing orthodoxy of mere conformity,
and it became the congenial head-quarters of the Oxford Movement.
 Pusey and Keble were among the fellows of
John Henry Oriel, when John Henry Newman was elected to a
Newman fellowship in 1823, and later, in 1826, became tutor
in succession to Jelf. Newman’s early life at Oxford
was a solitary one. He did not seek friends, and in the Oriel
common-room his shy and retiring nature sometimes concealed his
real power. As Wesley’s sympathies were originally with High Church
doctrines, so Newman’s were originally with Evangelical doctrines;
he was connected with the Evangelical set at St. Edmund Hall; he
was for a time secretary to the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, and he actually helped to start the ‘Record’ newspaper.
In the early development of his ideas he owed much to the robust
intellect of Whately and the accurate criticism of Hawkins, who
succeeded Copleston as Provost in 1827. But his reverence was
reserved for Keble, whose ‘Christian Year’ appeared in the same
year and gave the first secret impulse to the Movement, of which
Newman became the head. In the following year, Pusey, then little
known to Newman, returned to Oxford as Professor of Hebrew and
Canon of Christchurch, unconsciously destined to give his own name
to Newman’s followers.
At this period Newman had no intention of
Origin of ‘Tracts heading the Oxford Movement, still less of
for the Times’ founding a new party in the Church. His
Evangelical principles were gradually falling away
from him, and he was girding himself up for a great struggle with
Secularism as represented by a Liberal Government, but the first
steps in the Tractarian agitation were not taken by him. In 1832 he
travelled in Italy with his friend and pupil, Richard Hurrell Froude;
and it was from him that Newman imbibed his veneration for the
Virgin and the Saints, his antipathy to the Reformation, and his
respectful toleration of the Roman Catholic Church. They went so far
as to inquire upon what conditions they would be allowed to
communicate in that Church, but were repelled on hearing that a
subscription to the decisions of the Council of Trent would be
required. It was during Newman’s absence abroad, in July 1833, that
Keble preached his Assize Sermon on ‘National Apostasy,’ which
may be said to have struck the first note of the Movement, and in the