Background

Clarence Crane Brinton was born on February 2, 1898 in Winsted, Connecticut, the son of Clarence Hawthorne Brinton, a dry-goods clerk, and Eva Josephine Crane. Brinton disliked his first name and never used it.

Education

Educated in the public schools of Pittsfield and Springfield, Massachussets, Clarence Brinton entered Harvard University in 1915. There he came under what he called the "fantastically contradictory influences" of the conservative Irving Babbitt and the radical Harold J. Laski, as well as two specialists in French history, Charles Homer Haskins and Robert M. Johnston.

He graduated summa cum laude in 1919, receiving a prize for an essay on Lord Acton's philosophy of history and winning a Rhodes Scholarship. Brinton spent a year traveling in Europe before he began his studies at New College, Oxford University, where he received a Ph. D. His thesis, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists, was published in 1926.

Career

Brinton returned to Harvard in 1923 to begin a teaching career. Rising from instructor to full professor by 1942, he was named McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History in 1946, a position he held until 1968.

Brinton was also drawn to the "new history" of James Harvey Robinson, which substituted the analysis of social and cultural development for the narrative of politics and war.

During the 1930's Brinton published a succession of books that established him as an authority on modern European history. The Jacobins: A Study in the New History (1930), based on extensive research in French archives, applied statistical methods to the membership of the radical clubs of the French Revolution. Inspired by Laski, Brinton's English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1933) presented critical portraits of major theorists of government.

A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799 (1934), a general study written for the Rise of Modern Europe series, emphasized social and cultural change but did not neglect political, military, and religious affairs. In French Revolutionary Legislation on Illegitimacy, 1789-1804 (1936) Brinton examined the laws passed to deal with bastardy, and in The Lives of Talleyrand (1936), he attempted to rescue the French ecclesiastic and diplomat from accusations of betrayal and immorality.

After America's declaration of war, he left academic life to work for the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He spent the years 1942-1944 in London carefully sifting through the information available on occupied France. Two months after D day he undertook a 1, 600-mile journey through liberated France to investigate local conditions and sample public opinion.

Brinton left the OSS in 1945 to resume his teaching at Harvard, where he helped to develop its new general education program.

His wide-ranging survey Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought (1950) traced the development of major cosmological and ethical questions from ancient Greece through the twentieth century. In The Portable Age of Reason Reader (1956) he focused on the Enlightenment and the growth of rationalism.

He died on September 7, 1968 in Cambridge, Massachussets.

Achievements

• Clarence Crane Brinton's numerous publications in the field gained him wide readership because of their lucid style and cosmopolitan outlook. Rational and tolerant, Brinton felt a strong affinity for the refined world of the Enlightenment. In 1963 Brinton was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was also president of the Society for French Historical Studies. Other honors included designation as a chevalier of the Legion of Honor and membership in the American Philosophical Society, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and Royal Historical Society.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Decade of Revolution 1789-1799

    (CONTENTS: I - The Setting; II - The Monarchical Experimen...)

  • A History of Civilization: Volume Two: 1715 to the Present

    (Extensively illustrated and exceptionally appealing in it...)

  • History of Western Morals

    (Hailed by The New York Times as "tantalizing" and "learne...)

  • The Anatomy of Revolution

    (The definitive, hugely influential comparative history of...)

  • Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought

    (A survey of Western philosophy, art and literature as the...)

  • A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present (Combined) (9th Edition)

    (New edition of a time-tested text, and one of a two-volum...)

  • English political thought in the 19th century (Harper torchbooks)

    (The book has three main parts with 5 - 8 essays in each: ...)

  • Civilization in the West

    (This edition is a single volume based on the two-volume w...)

  • The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History

    ( The Jacobins were the most famous of the political club...)

  • A History of the Middle Ages

    (A History of the Middle Ages is the amazing story of Euro...)

  • A History of Civilization Volume One: Prehistory to 1715

    (This history of Civilization, volume 1, goes from Ancient...)

  • Ideas & Men, the Story of Western Thought,

    (A scholarly history of ideas written by a leading America...)

  • A History (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A History I introduction. II causes OF the ...)

  • European Intellectual History
  • The anatomy of revolution
  • History of Civilization, A: Prehistory to 1715 (Vol. I)
  • The Portable Age of Reason Reader
  • The lives of Talleyrand
  • The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton (1965-08-12)

Politics

In a farewell lecture at Harvard Brinton reaffirmed his faith in human reason and praised the diversity of modern democratic society. A Wilsonian liberal in his youth, he remained a moderate in his politics, favoring peaceful social change and condemning all forms of extremism, whether Jacobinism, Nazism, or Communism, as sources of conflict and terror.

Views

Applying sociological theory to history on a grand scale, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) compared upheavals in seventeenth-century Britain, eighteenth-century America and France, and twentieth-century Russia. Brinton used the analogy of an intense fever to demonstrate that all four revolutions passed through a similar sequence: from the breakdown of a weak and ineffective old regime through a moderate first stage and then a more radical second phase, or crisis, to the inevitable Thermidor, or return to normal but permanently altered conditions.

The rise of Adolf Hitler and the outbreak of World War II led Brinton to write Nietzsche (1941), a biography of the German philosopher whose ideas he believed contributed to Nazi ideology. Brinton despised Nazism and, after the Germans invaded Russia, predicted that Hitler would follow Napoleon into defeat.

He studied changes in social behavior in A History of Western Morals (1959) and concluded that if the ethics of the twentieth century were little better than those of ancient times, they were at least no worse. Examining the fundamental beliefs of Western civilization and seeking to offer guidance for the future, he collected important philosophical texts in The Fate of Man (1961). It called for a "multanimity" of ideas, or cultural pluralism, that allowed for diversity of opinion. Brinton's experiences overseas stimulated his interest in contemporary affairs. He drew upon his wartime stay in London for The United States and Britain (1945), which described how conditions in England and relations with America had been transformed by the conflict. Two series of lectures on world conditions were published as books: From Many One (1948) discussed the possibilities of international political unity, and The Temper of Western Europe (1953) analyzed Europe's recovery from World War II and praised its renewed vitality. His last work, The Americans and the French (1968), a general survey of the Fifth Republic, reflected on the reasons for Charles de Gaulle's hostility toward the United States. Brinton did much to develop "intellectual history, " a term he was among the first to employ, as a recognized discipline.

Brinton was a confirmed optimist about the fate of humanity and derided the "prophets of doom" who doubted its survival.

Quotations: Brinton subsequently became a recognized expert on intellectual history, which he defined as the "relations between the ideas of the philosophers, the intellectuals, the thinkers, and the actual way of living of the millions who carry the tasks of civilization. "

"I have kept to the basic belief of my youth in the rightness of human reason, " he declared. "You may write me down as born in the eighteenth century and yet not too uncomfortable in the mid-twentieth. "

He held that intellectuals had the obligation "if not to change the world, at least to diagnose it clearly and realistically. "

Membership

Brinton served as president of the American Historical Association and the Society for French Historical Studies. Other honors included designation as a chevalier of the Legion of Honor and membership in the American Philosophical Society, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and Royal Historical Society.

Personality

Brinton retained a youthful physique and appearance that belied his white hair. While most comfortable in the company of intellectuals, he preferred the quiet of his summer home in Peacham, Vermont, where he could garden and write.

Interests

• Brinton was a restless traveler who enjoyed motoring and hiking.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  He was strongly influenced in his thinking by the physiologist Lawrence J. Henderson, who directed his attention to the work of the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto.

Connections

On December 18, 1946, Clarence Crane Brinton married Cecilia Washburn Roberts, widow of his longtime friend Penfield Roberts, and later adopted her three children.

Father:

Clarence Hawthorne Brinton

Mother:

Eva Josephine Crane

Wife:

Cecilia Washburn Roberts

associate:

Elizabeth Eisenstein

historian He served as an advisor for historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

associate:

Will Johnston

historian In the early 1960s Brinton was the dissertation supervisor at Harvard of the young historian Will Johnston.

References

• Memory and History: Recollections of a Historian of Nazism, 1967-1982