Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History (Ep. 128)

On pessimism across different cultures

论不同文化中的悲观主义

I think this is fundamentally the difference between Calvinists and Anglicans or Episcopalians.

我认为这就是加尔文主义者与英国圣公会或圣公会主义者之间的根本区别。

I grew up in the Calvinist West of Scotland, Glasgow and its environs.

我在加尔文主义的苏格兰西部、格拉斯哥及其周边地区长大。

I think I had drummed into me a kind of pessimism that’s only alleviated by gallows humor.

我想我已经向自己灌输了一种悲观主义，只有绞刑架式的幽默才能缓解这种悲观主义。

Scotland has the weather to go with the pessimism.

苏格兰的天气与悲观情绪相适应。

It does rain a lot.

雨确实很多。

I remember when I first heard the song “The Sunny Side of the Street,” wondering where that was and realizing that Americans really do see things differently, partly because it’s sunnier.

我记得当我第一次听到“街道的阳光面”这首歌时，我想知道那是在哪里，并意识到美国人确实以不同的方式看待事物，部分原因是它更阳光。

When I went to Oxford, and I must have been 17, I was struck by the very different sensibility of the English who became my friends, that they’re definitely much less steeped in doom and gloom than I was.

当我去牛津时，我当时大概 17 岁，我对那些成为我朋友的英国人截然不同的感受感到震惊，他们肯定比我不那么沉浸在厄运和忧郁之中。

We’re all fundamentally very alike and really should just be united under a new name, Not England.

我们从根本上来说非常相似，真的应该以一个新的名字团结在一起，而不是英格兰。

I don’t mind which Not England I’m in — it’s essentially the same.

我不介意我身处哪个非英格兰——本质上是一样的。

South Wales is like the West of Scotland.

南威尔士就像苏格兰西部。

It was a center of the Industrial Revolution: coal mines, dilapidated steelworks.

它是工业革命的中心：煤矿、破旧的钢铁厂。

The pubs feel the same.

酒吧的感觉都一样。

The conversations are similar, and there isn’t this preoccupation with embarrassment and class, which are the things that make England slightly unbearable after a while.

谈话很相似，也没有那种对尴尬和阶级的关注，这些让英格兰在一段时间后变得有点难以忍受。

I like coming to Wales, but Wales is Scotland lite.

我喜欢来威尔士，但威尔士是苏格兰的精简版。

They are undoubtedly less morose, although they certainly like to drown their sorrows.

毫无疑问，他们不那么忧郁，尽管他们确实喜欢借酒浇愁。

I think of Wales — although this will annoy any Welsh people listening — as Scotland lite.

我认为威尔士——尽管这会惹恼任何威尔士人——就像苏格兰精简版一样。

It’s the diet version.

这是节食版本。

It’s the same, but it’s just not so strong.

是一样的，只是没那么强。

That’s perhaps why I enjoy being here.

也许这就是我喜欢呆在这里的原因。

There are times when I go back to Scotland and a kind of claustrophobic feeling seizes me.

有时当我回到苏格兰时，一种幽闭恐惧症的感觉抓住了我。

The other good thing about the Welsh is that they don’t take their nationalism too seriously.

威尔士人的另一个优点是他们不太重视民族主义。

Nobody really thinks they’ll ever be an independent Wales.

没有人真正认为他们会成为一个独立的威尔士。

Not really.

并不真地。

Not seriously.

不是认真的。

Whereas, unfortunately, a significant proportion of my countrymen in Scotland seem to believe that there could be a People’s Republic of Scotland, a terrible idea in my view.

然而不幸的是，我的苏格兰同胞中有很大一部分人似乎相信可能会有一个苏格兰人民共和国，在我看来，这是一个糟糕的想法。

I think if one reads Kapital, it is a prophetic work about England and about any country that follows England down the route of Industrial Revolution and class society.

我认为，如果有人读《资本论》，它就是一本关于英国以及任何追随英国走上工业革命和阶级社会道路的国家的预言书。

I can’t think of any more — you could say Blake— but I can’t think of any more influential pessimistic view of history than Marx’s and it was hatched in England.

我想不出更多的了——你可以说布莱克——但我想不出比马克思的悲观历史观更有影响力的了，而且它是在英国酝酿出来的。

I think we, in the English-speaking world, imported an idea of bureaucracy from the Germans in the same way that we imported the PhD and all the bad things about academic life from the Germans.

我认为，在英语世界，我们从德国人那里引进了官僚主义的观念，就像我们从德国人那里引进了博士学位以及学术生活中所有不好的事情一样。

When bureaucracy came to Britain — which it did, I think, rather later than it came to Germany — it almost immediately became an object of mockery.

当官僚主义来到英国时——我认为它确实比它来到德国更晚——它几乎立即成为嘲笑的对象。

The funniest thing ever written about bureaucracy is the sitcom Yes, Minister.

关于官僚主义的最有趣的事情是情景喜剧《是的，部长》。

I don’t see that as the distinctively English or British pathology, though it’s become a general pathology of the Western democratic world, certainly in the last 50 years.

我不认为这是英国特有的病态，尽管它已经成为西方民主世界的普遍病态，尤其是在过去 50 年里。

On James Bond

关于詹姆斯·邦德

I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience of being introduced to a famous person.

不知道你是否有过被介绍给名人的经历。

It’s very uncomfortable.

这很不舒服。

At least I felt embarrassed because I was on the doorstep of his house in Lyford Cay.

至少我感到尴尬，因为我站在他位于莱福德岛的家门口。

I had been taken to this house without any warning that it was Sean Connery’s house — it was quite a modest bungalow by a golf course — by a well-meaning friend who thought I should meet the most famous of all Scotsmen.

我被一位好心的朋友带到了这所房子，没有任何警告，说这是肖恩·康纳利的房子——“这是一座高尔夫球场旁相当简陋的平房”——他认为我应该见到这位苏格兰人中最著名的人。

We knocked on the door, and the door was opened by Sean Connery, obviously in the middle of his lunch, wearing only a sarong.

我们敲了敲门，开门的是肖恩·康纳利（Sean Connery），他显然正在吃午饭，只穿着纱笼。

I couldn’t think what to say to him.

我想不出该对他说什么。

After the earth refused to swallow me up, I mumbled, “It’s a great honor to meet you, Mr. Connery.

当大地拒绝吞噬我之后，我咕哝道：“很荣幸见到你，康纳利先生。

I think I learned everything about how to be a man from watching you in the cinema in Glasgow in the 1970s.”

我想我在 20 世纪 70 年代在格拉斯哥的电影院里看《你》，学到了关于如何做一个男人的一切。”

Connery looks at me and raises his eyebrow and said, “Oh, that’s strange.

康纳利看着我，扬起眉毛说：“哦，这很奇怪。

Don’t you know I’m a homosexual?” That was such a great comeback line that it broke the ice.

你不知道我是同性恋吗？”这是一个非常棒的回归台词，打破了僵局。

I replied, “Is that why you’re wearing a skirt?” We went from there.

我回答：“这就是你穿裙子的原因吗？”我们从那里出发。

Connery’s Bond had a big influence on me.

康纳利的邦德对我影响很大。

I make all my children watch those movies.

我让我所有的孩子都看那些电影。

But what’s the point of the story line?

但故事情节的重点是什么？

The story line is, it’s like World War II.

故事情节是，就像第二次世界大战一样。

Britain’s clearly second fiddle to the United States — as much as it was in the Second World War — in the Cold War.

英国显然是美国的第二把手——就像在第二次世界大战中一样——在冷战中。

But we’ve got something the Americans aren’t so good at, which is intelligence.

但我们有美国人不擅长的东西，那就是情报。

It’s spies, and that’s really the plot line.

这是间谍，这就是情节主线。

I realized that all the heroes that I grew up with were heroes born of that British sense that we definitely didn’t have the brawn, but we might still have the brains.

我意识到，和我一起长大的所有英雄都是英国人的观念所诞生的英雄，即我们肯定没有体力，但我们可能仍然有大脑。

Doctor Who was my favorite science fictional character when I was a boy.

当我还是个孩子的时候，神秘博士是我最喜欢的科幻角色。

Doctor Who’s the only superhero who uses his brain, not his muscles.

神秘博士是唯一一个使用大脑而不是肌肉的超级英雄。

All American superheroes are bodybuilders.

所有美国超级英雄都是健美运动员。

Doctor Who doesn’t have a muscle in his body.

神秘博士的身体里没有肌肉。

I think that’s the point of both of those characters — that you’re trying to compensate for your dwindling economic muscle with superior brains.

我认为这就是这两个角色的要点——你试图用卓越的大脑来弥补你日渐萎缩的经济实力。

It was unfortunate that it turned out that, in fact, our intelligence network could be much more successfully penetrated by the KGB than the US network, but we blame that on Cambridge where I come from.

不幸的是，事实证明，我们的情报网络实际上比美国的网络更容易被克格勃渗透，但我们将此归咎于我来自剑桥的情况。

But the plot twists — if you think back to the early Fleming novels and the early movies — the plot twists that matter are rather relevant to our own time because the people who are the villains are not clearly direct employees of the Soviet Union, of the Russians.

但情节的曲折——如果你回想一下弗莱明早期的小说和早期的电影——重要的情节曲折与我们这个时代息息相关，因为反派的人显然不是苏联、俄罗斯人的直接雇员。

They’re semi-freelancing organized criminals, whether it’s Dr. No or Goldfinger.

他们是半自由职业的有组织犯罪分子，无论是诺博士还是金手指。

That’s actually quite appropriate in our time because that’s how cyber warfare is waged.

这在我们这个时代实际上是非常合适的，因为这就是网络战的发动方式。

Criminal gangs who are semi-officially working with the Kremlin are already quite a major threat to our political and economic stability.

与克里姆林宫半官方合作的犯罪团伙已经对我们的政治和经济稳定构成了相当大的威胁。

I hope that somewhere out there, there is a 007-like figure who bumps off the ringleaders of the Moldovan hacking or malware organization that’s behind the Colonial Pipeline attack.

我希望在某个地方，有一个像 007 一样的人物，能够击倒殖民管道攻击背后的摩尔多瓦黑客或恶意软件组织的头目。

Actually, this makes Bond feel quite relevant, and the plot twists are absurd, of course.

事实上，这让邦德觉得很有意义，当然，情节的曲折是荒谬的。

Fleming was a bit like John Buchan.

弗莱明有点像约翰·巴肯。

These books are the direct lineal descendants, as you probably know, Tyler, of the great Richard Hannay books that John Buchan wrote, beginning with The Thirty-Nine Steps.

泰勒，你可能知道，这些书是约翰·巴肯 (John Buchan) 所写的伟大理查德·汉内 (Richard Hannay) 著作的直系后代，从《三十九级台阶》开始。

It’s a tradition, I think, that can be traced all the way back to the period before the First World War.

我认为这是一个传统，可以追溯到第一次世界大战之前的时期。

You read these books, I think, with a certain suspension of disbelief because the authors are signaling to you that there’s something slightly camp going on here, that it’s not to be taken too seriously.

我想，你阅读这些书时，会带着一定程度的怀疑，因为作者向你发出信号，表明这里发生了一些轻微的营地事件，不要太认真地对待它。

Buchan regarded the Hannay novels as ripping yarns.

巴肯认为汉内的小说是胡言乱语。

I think he called them shockers.

我认为他称他们为震惊者。

He would refer to them as shockers.

他将他们称为令人震惊的人。

Fleming was equally disdainful, really, of the Bond novels, but they capture a truth about the Cold War, the Bond novels.

事实上，弗莱明同样鄙视邦德小说，但邦德小说抓住了冷战的真相。

That is the Cold War isn’t actually cold.

也就是说，冷战实际上并​​不冷。

It involves quite a lot of violence, just small-scale, precision violence rather than the large-scale violence of world war.

它涉及相当多的暴力，只是小规模、精确的暴力，而不是世界大战那样的大规模暴力。

We also have the nasty suspicion — this is there in Nick Bostrom’s work — that we’ve created a whole bunch of technologies that have actually increased the probability rather than reduced the probability of an extinction-level event.

我们还有一个令人讨厌的怀疑——“这在尼克·博斯特罗姆的作品中就有——”我们创造了一大堆技术，这些技术实际上增加了而不是降低了灭绝级事件发生的概率。

On the other hand, we’re told that there’s a singularity in prospect when all the technologies will come together to produce superhuman beings with massively extended lifespans and the added advantage of artificial general intelligence.

另一方面，我们被告知，当所有技术结合在一起产生超人类时，其前景将会出现奇点，这些超人的寿命将大大延长，并且具有通用人工智能的额外优势。

The epistemic problem, as I see it is — Ian Morris wrote this in one of his recent books— which is the scenario?

在我看来，认知问题是——伊恩·莫里斯在他最近的一本书中写到了这一点——场景是什么？

Extinction-level events or the singularity?

灭绝级事件还是奇点？

That seems a tremendously widely divergent set of scenarios to choose from.

这似乎是一组截然不同的场景可供选择。

I sense that — perhaps this is just the historian’s instinct — that each of these scenarios is, in fact, a very low probability indeed, and that we should spend more time thinking about the more likely scenarios that lie between them.

我感觉到——“也许这只是历史学家的本能”——事实上，这些情景中的每一种的可能性都非常低，我们应该花更多的时间思考它们之间更有可能出现的情景。

Your essay, which I was prompted to read before our conversation, about the epistemic problem and consequentialism set me thinking about work I’d done on counterfactual history, for which I would have benefited from reading that essay sooner.

在我们谈话之前，我被提示阅读你的关于认知问题和结果主义的文章，让我思考我在反事实历史方面所做的工作，如果早点阅读那篇文章，我会受益匪浅。

I think that if you ask what are the counterfactuals of the future, we spend too much time thinking about the quite unlikely scenarios of the end of the world through climate change or some other calamity of the sort that Bostrom talks about, or some extraordinary leap forward.

我认为，如果你问未来的反事实是什么，我们会花太多时间思考通过气候变化或博斯特罗姆谈到的其他灾难或某种非凡的飞跃而导致世界末日的不太可能的情景。

I can’t help feeling that these are — not that we can attach probabilities; they lie in the realm of uncertainty — but they don’t seem likely scenarios to me.

我不禁觉得这些不是我们可以附加概率的；它们处于不确定的领域——但对我来说，它们似乎不太可能发生。

I think we’ll end up with something that’s rather more mundane, and perhaps a relief if we’re really serious about the end of the world, or perhaps a disappointment if we’re serious about the singularity.

我认为我们最终会得到一些更平凡的东西，如果我们真的认真对待世界末日，也许会松一口气，或者如果我们认真对待奇点，也许会感到失望。

If you want to understand all this, by the way, you have to read Walter Scott, which I hadn’t done for years and years.

顺便说一句，如果你想理解这一切，你就必须读沃尔特·斯科特的书，我已经很多年没有读过这本书了。

I’d never really read Scott because I was told he was boring.

我从来没有真正读过斯科特的作品，因为有人告诉我他很无聊。

Then during the pandemic, I started reading the Waverley novels, and it’s all there: all the fundamental dilemmas that were raised, not just by the Glorious Revolution, but prior to that by the Civil War of the 17th century, and that were raised again in the 1745 Jacobite rising.

然后在大流行期间，我开始阅读韦弗利的小说，一切都在那里：所有的基本困境不仅是由光荣革命提出的，而且是在此之前的 17 世纪内战中提出的，并且在 1745 年詹姆斯党起义中再次提出。

Scott’s brilliant at explaining something that I don’t think is properly understood, and that is that Scotland had the most extraordinary historical trajectory.

斯科特出色地解释了一些我认为没有被正确理解的事情，那就是苏格兰拥有最非凡的历史轨迹。

It went from being Afghanistan in the 17th century — it was basically Afghanistan.

它从 17 世纪的阿富汗变成了现在的阿富汗。

You had violent warring clans in the north, in the mountainous parts of the country, and a theocracy of extreme Calvinist zealots in the Lowlands.

在北部山区，有暴力冲突的部落，在低地则有极端加尔文主义狂热分子的神权政治。

This was a deeply dysfunctional, very violent place with much higher levels of homicide than England.

这是一个功能严重失调、暴力非常的地方，凶杀案的发生率比英国高得多。

Really, it was a barbaric place.

确实，那是一个野蛮的地方。

And something very strange happened.

发生了一些非常奇怪的事情。

That was that in the course of — beginning really from the late 17th century — in the course of the 18th century, Scotland became the most dynamic tiger economy in the world.

也就是说，在“——”实际上从 17 世纪末开始”——“在 18 世纪的过程中，苏格兰成为世界上最有活力的老虎经济体。

Also, it became the cradle of the Enlightenment, had really all the best ideas of Western civilization, all at once in a really short space of time with a really small number of people, all sitting around in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

而且，它成为启蒙运动的摇篮，真正拥有西方文明的所有最好的思想，在很短的时间内，只有很少的人，全部集中在格拉斯哥和爱丁堡。

I still don’t think a book has been written that properly explains that.

我仍然认为还没有一本书能够正确解释这一点。

You certainly wouldn’t have put a bet on Scotland behaving that way by the late 18th century, if all you knew about it was Scotland in the mid-17th century.

如果你只知道 17 世纪中叶的苏格兰，你当然不会打赌苏格兰到 18 世纪末就会有这样的表现。

If you look at it that way, then you kind of have to be a Whig.

如果你这样看，那么你一定是辉格党人。

You have to recognize that the institutions that came from England, including the Dutch institutions that were imported in the Glorious Revolution, really helped Scotland get out of its Afghan predicament.

你必须认识到，来自英国的制度，包括光荣革命中引进的荷兰制度，确实帮助苏格兰摆脱了阿富汗的困境。

That ambivalence, I think, is absolutely central to the culture that I come from.

我认为，这种矛盾心理绝对是我所来自的文化的核心。

If you ask the question, where does Jekyll and Hyde come from?

如果你问这个问题，杰基尔和海德从哪里来？

Why does Stevenson — who’s really the heir of Scott — why does Stevenson constantly explore split personalities or fraternal feuds?

为什么史蒂文森——“他实际上是斯科特的继承人”——为什么史蒂文森不断探索人格分裂或兄弟不和？

Read The Master of Ballantrae.

阅读《巴兰特雷大师》。

Because it gets at this fundamental tension between the romantic, the Tory, the Catholic on the one side and the rationalist, Whig Protestant on the other side.

因为它触及了浪漫主义者、保守党、天主教徒与理性主义者、辉格党新教徒之间的根本紧张关系。

You know that there’s something unattractive about the hard-nosed Protestant types.

你知道，顽固的新教徒有些缺乏吸引力。

On the other hand, if you entrust your country to romanticism, it’s probably going to revert to Afghanistan.

另一方面，如果你把你的国家托付给浪漫主义，它可能会回到阿富汗。

I don’t think a Stuart restoration should have gone very well.

我认为斯图亚特王朝的复辟应该不会进展顺利。

I think there’s good reason to be skeptical about that.

我认为有充分的理由对此表示怀疑。

Jonathan Clark wrote a fantastic essay — almost my favorite essay in the book, Virtual History — imagining lots of different counterfactuals and contingencies of British history.

乔纳森·克拉克（Jonathan Clark）写了一篇精彩的文章——“虚拟历史”书中几乎是我最喜欢的文章——想象了英国历史上许多不同的反事实和偶然事件。

It’s one of the best reflections on the various counterfactuals of the 17th and 18th century, including the counterfactual that you somehow avoid the American Revolution.

这是对 17 世纪和 18 世纪各种反事实的最好反思之一，包括你以某种方式避免美国革命的反事实。

It’s a great piece of writing.

这是一篇很棒的文章。

He’s a great historian.

他是一位伟大的历史学家。

He’s one of the great historians of our generation, who — because he was a conservative — was essentially driven into a kind of academic exile.

他是我们这一代最伟大的历史学家之一，但他——因为他是保守派——基本上被迫陷入了学术流放。

The historicists ultimately produced in Meinecke somebody who transcends great men.

历史决定论最终在迈内克身上培养出了一位超越伟人的人物。

I think one has to look at it partly from the vantage points of 19th-century publishing.

我认为人们必须部分地从 19 世纪出版的角度来看待它。

If you think about how history evolves as a discipline, it’s partly propelled by the publishers in the 19th century, and they did like biographies.

如果你想一想历史学作为一门学科是如何演变的，你会发现它在一定程度上是由 19 世纪的出版商推动的，他们确实喜欢传记。

They knew what we know now — biographies sell, so there was an incentive to write biographies.

他们知道我们现在所知道的——传记很畅销，所以有动力写传记。

When Meinecke sought to break free of that — and I think Meinecke is, in many ways, one of the most important and profound historical thinkers — it’s probably not that commercially successful.

当迈内克试图摆脱这种束缚时——“我认为，在很多方面，迈内克是最重要、最深刻的历史思想家之一”——但它在商业上可能并不那么成功。

But you’re asking questions now about the philosophy of history, a subject that is largely lost these days.

但你现在问的是关于历史哲学的问题，这个话题如今已经基本上失传了。

Most historians are remarkably indifferent to the philosophy of history.

大多数历史学家对历史哲学非常漠不关心。

I think it’s a great loss that we no longer really ask these questions.

我认为我们不再真正问这些问题是一个巨大的损失。

We no longer read Meinecke.

我们不再读梅内克的书了。

“Causality and Values” is one of Meinecke’s great essays.

《因果关系与价值》是迈内克最伟大的论文之一。

It should be required reading for history undergraduates, but I bet you it isn’t assigned anywhere in the United States today.

这应该是历史系本科生的必读读物，但我敢打赌，今天美国任何地方都没有分配这本书。

On philosophy of history

论历史哲学

Collingwood says that the historical — and here I’ll paraphrase rather than try to quote from memory — the historical act is essentially one of reconstitution of past thought, that you are reconstituting past thought from such relics of thought survive.

科林伍德说，历史行为——在这里我将进行解释，而不是试图从记忆中引用——历史行为本质上是对过去思想的重构，你正在从这些幸存的思想遗迹中重构过去的思想。

Then you’re juxtaposing that past thought with your own thought, the thought of your own time — in order to be informed by it, you’re not studying it for its own sake; you’re interested in its implications, in the light that it sheds on your own predicament.

然后，你将过去的想法与你自己的想法、你自己时代的想法并列在一起——为了从中获得信息，你不是为了它本身而研究它；而是为了从中获得信息。你对它的含义感兴趣，因为它对你自己的困境有所启发。

This is put best in his autobiography, another thing that should be required reading, which he published in 1939.

这一点在他的自传中得到了最好的体现，这是他于 1939 年出版的另一本值得一读的书。

When I discovered it — which was only after I’d crossed the Atlantic and started teaching at Harvard — it was a kind of sudden illumination.

当我发现这一点时——那是在我跨越大西洋并开始在哈佛任教之后——那是一种突然的启发。

That’s exactly the kind of approach to history that I favor because, as Collingwood says, we’re doing this for a purpose, which is to understand our own predicament better by that juxtaposition of past and present thought.

这正是我所喜欢的历史方法，因为正如科林伍德所说，我们这样做是有目的的，那就是通过过去和现在思想的并置来更好地理解我们自己的困境。

I read Taylor as a schoolboy, beginning with the Illustrated History of the First World War, which is a potboiler, really, but it’s just full of fantastic writing.

我还是个小学生的时候就读过泰勒的书，从《第一次世界大战历史图解》开始，这本书确实很烂，但里面充满了精彩的文字。

Taylor was as good a prose stylist as George Orwell.

泰勒是一位与乔治·奥威尔一样优秀的散文作家。

We should really put them in the same league when it comes to improving the way we write English.

在改善我们的英语写作方式方面，我们确实应该将它们放在同一水平上。

Taylor loved the paradox.

泰勒喜欢这个悖论。

He loved to be the contrarian.

他喜欢做逆向者。

His Origins of the Second World War is still a masterpiece of polemical writing.

他的《第二次世界大战的起源》仍然是一部论战性著作的杰作。

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe is just a tour de force that transformed my thinking about 19th-century history, but it’s just brilliant writing.

《欧洲的统治之争》只是一部杰作，它改变了我对 19 世纪历史的看法，但它只是一部精彩的作品。

I also remember a great Taylor line about historical sensibility being a little bit like a musical sensibility.

我还记得泰勒的一句伟大的话：历史敏感性有点像音乐敏感性。

Taylor understood that one was really engaged in something closer to music than science, and I think that’s right.

泰勒明白，一个人真正从事的是比科学更接近音乐的事情，我认为这是对的。

He was a very scrupulous diplomatic historian of the old school.

他是一位非常严谨的老派外交历史学家。

Taylor really did believe in the Rankean principle that you plowed through the documents and tried to construct the sequence of events that way.

泰勒确实相信兰克原则，即你仔细阅读文件并尝试以这种方式构建事件的顺序。

He’s fantastically scathing in his review of Kissinger’s first book, a review that I only found by chance — this is A World Restored, a book that has many merits, but Taylor despised it because of its flourishes and the fact that they’re not really anchored in the documents.

他在对基辛格第一本书的评论中极其严厉，这是我偶然发现的评论——这是《恢复的世界》，一本有很多优点的书，但泰勒鄙视它，因为它的华丽以及它们并没有真正扎根于文件中。

At the same time, I think Taylor’s method — because it strictly adhered to the diplomatic documents — led him to the very appealing conclusion that Hitler was just a traditional German statesman, and the war was a kind of accident, mainly due to misunderstandings.

同时，我认为泰勒的方法——“因为它严格遵守外交文件”——使他得出了一个非常有吸引力的结论，即希特勒只是一个传统的德国政治家，战争是一种意外，主要是由于误解。

I think that’s really as much about the nature of the source material as it is about Taylor’s love of paradox and contrarian thinking.

我认为这实际上与原始材料的性质有关，也与泰勒对悖论和逆向思维的热爱有关。

Actually, Taylor’s account of the events of 1938–’39 is quite good.

事实上，泰勒对 1938-39 年事件的描述相当不错。

There’s much in it that’s right, but what’s missing is that which you would only find from looking at what Hitler was saying in other contexts.

其中有很多内容是正确的，但缺少的是你只能通过查看希特勒在其他背景下所说的话才能找到的内容。

I think Taylor knowingly underplayed Hitler’s ideological motivations because he was pursuing that contrarian argument and had the material to pull it off.

我认为泰勒故意淡化了希特勒的意识形态动机，因为他正在追求这种逆向论证，并且拥有实现这一目标的材料。

But you have to ignore the diabolical and ultimately catastrophic impulses that were Hitler’s primary motivations.

但你必须忽视希特勒的主要动机，即恶魔般的、最终导致灾难性的冲动。

I think the antidote to a book like Taylor’s is Michael Burleigh’s excellent book of, gosh, more than a decade ago, The Third Reich: A New History, which emphasizes Hitler’s messianic political-religious side.

我认为像泰勒这样的书的解药是迈克尔·伯利十多年前的优秀著作《第三帝国：一部新历史》，这本书强调了希特勒弥赛亚式的政治宗教方面。

You can’t really explain why Hitler is able to overcome the anxieties of Germans in 1938 and initiate a war in 1939 — after all, Germans had as terrible memories of World War I as anybody did — you can’t understand how he’s able to deliver the mobilization of ’39 unless you recognize that there’s something more than just traditional realpolitik going on here.

你无法真正解释为什么希特勒能够在 1938 年克服德国人的焦虑并在 1939 年发动战争 ——毕竟，德国人和其他人一样对第一次世界大战有着可怕的记忆 ——你无法理解他如何能够实现 39 年的动员，除非你认识到这里发生的不仅仅是传统的现实政治。

I think Burleigh, better than most English-speaking historians, captures the political-religious quality of national socialism, the sense that some national redemption is taking place, that Hitler is the redeemer.

我认为伯利比大多数英语历史学家更好地抓住了国家社会主义的政治宗教品质，以及某种民族救赎正在发生的感觉，希特勒是救赎者。

Most of the English-language biographies that people read — like Ian Kershaw’s or Alan Bullock’s or Richard Evans’s very boring books — fail to capture the diabolical appeal that Hitler had and make him sound almost, in Ian Kershaw’s account, like a negligent colleague at a provincial university.

人们读到的大多数英文传记——比如伊恩·克肖（Ian Kershaw）、艾伦·布洛克（Alan Bullock）或理查德·埃文斯（Richard Evans）的非常无聊的书——都未能捕捉到希特勒的恶魔般的吸引力，在伊恩·克肖的描述中，他听起来几乎就像一所省立大学的粗心同事。

Only Michael Burleigh really gets that Hitler has this terrifying star quality that leads Germans into the abyss again.

只有迈克尔·伯利真正明白希特勒具有这种可怕的明星品质，它再次将德国人带入深渊。

It’s the second time they’re going into that abyss.

这是他们第二次进入那个深渊。

That’s what’s missing from Taylor.

这正是泰勒所缺少的。

But Quinton’s a brilliant man, and I think he had a huge, an ultimately admirable influence on the way that Cambridge did political thought because he insisted on contextualizing the documents and insisted that we don’t read texts as if they are handed to us on stone tablets, that one has to understand Italian ideas of republicanism by delving deeply into the contexts in which someone like Machiavelli worked.

但昆顿是一位才华横溢的人，我认为他对剑桥政治思想的方式产生了巨大的、最终令人钦佩的影响，因为他坚持将文件置于语境中，并坚持认为我们阅读文本时不要像它们是写在石碑上一样，人们必须通过深入研究像马基雅维利这样的人工作的背景来理解意大利的共和主义思想。

So I admire Quentin as a scholar, even if he was crushing when I was a young hopeful.

所以我钦佩昆汀作为一个学者，即使当我还是个充满希望的年轻人时，他正在压垮我。

I’ve always been a bit allergic to kings and queens as a subject of study because that’s what historians in England are supposed to do.

我一直对国王和王后作为研究对象有点过敏，因为那是英国历史学家应该做的。

If it’s not got Henry VIII in it, you’re going to struggle for an audience.

如果里面没有亨利八世，你就会为争取观众而苦苦挣扎。

I’ve studiously avoided writing about monarchs.

我刻意避免写关于君主的文章。

I once tried to write a book about the royal families, plural, after I’d done the Rothschild book, which is probably my best book.

在完成罗斯柴尔德家族的书之后，我曾经尝试写一本关于王室家族的书，这本书可能是我最好的书。

I wanted to do a similar book about the dynasty, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty.

我想写一本关于萨克森-科堡-哥达王朝的类似书。

This was the German family who somehow became the rulers of most European countries by the later 19th century.

这个德国家族在 19 世纪后期以某种方式成为了大多数欧洲国家的统治者。

They were all related.

他们都是相关的。

I went to considerable lengths to prepare that book, which, of course, Queen Victoria was a big part of because she was the matriarch of the Saxe-Coburgs.

我花了相当多的精力来准备这本书，当然，维多利亚女王在这本书中扮演了重要角色，因为她是萨克森-科堡家族的女族长。

The problem with the project was that their letters were so much more boring than the Rothschild letters.

该项目的问题在于他们的信件比罗斯柴尔德的信件无聊得多。

I would just fall asleep in the royal archives at Windsor.

我会在温莎皇家档案馆里睡着。

I gathered an enormous amount of material.

我收集了大量的材料。

I drew a wonderful family tree, which I still have, a genealogy of European royalty, which I have outside my office at Hoover, showing that it’s really one family.

我画了一个很棒的家谱，我现在还保留着它，这是欧洲皇室的家谱，它放在我胡佛办公室外面，表明这确实是一个家庭。

They just happened to have nearly all the thrones of Europe by 1900.

到了 1900 年，他们恰好拥有了欧洲几乎所有的王位。

But the letters — they were just full of gossip and hunting stories.

但这些信————充满了八卦和狩猎故事。

I just got on so much better with the Rothschild correspondence.

我与罗斯柴尔德的信件相处得好多了。

I realized that I didn’t have a great affinity with royal history and steered clear of it for most of my career.

我意识到我对皇室历史并没有太大的兴趣，因此在我职业生涯的大部分时间里都避开了它。

It’s probably why I ended up in the United States because American readers are more interested or ready to read about bankers than British readers, who do like kings and queens.

这可能就是我最终来到美国的原因，因为美国读者比英国读者更感兴趣或愿意阅读有关银行家的文章，而英国读者确实喜欢国王和王后。

On Northern Ireland

在北爱尔兰

You had to kind of agree not to do that.

你必须同意不这样做。

That implied, of course, that you’d have your customs border in the Irish Sea and that Northern Ireland would functionally be treated in the same way as the rest of Ireland, as the Republic of Ireland, in trade at least.

当然，这意味着你的海关边界位于爱尔兰海，并且北爱尔兰在功能上将受到与爱尔兰其他地区（至少在贸易方面）与爱尔兰共和国相同的待遇。

This, of course, when you think about it for a split second, is a terrible blow to Unionism in Ulster, Northern Ireland, and a great win for the proponents of Irish reunification.

当然，如果你仔细想一想，这对北爱尔兰阿尔斯特的统一主义来说是一个可怕的打击，但对爱尔兰统一的支持者来说却是一个巨大的胜利。

But Boris doesn’t care about that.

但鲍里斯并不关心这些。

Like most people who’ve grown up in English politics, he has only the haziest notions about Northern Ireland.

和大多数在英国政治中长大的人一样，他对北爱尔兰只有最模糊的概念。

From his point of view, the goal was to get to the top of the greasy pole.

在他看来，目标就是登上油杆的顶端。

If that meant agreeing to something unworkable, then so be it.

如果这意味着同意一些不可行的事情，那就这样吧。

That worked out well for him, and it continues to work well because Brexit is not an end state.

这对他来说效果很好，而且它会继续发挥作用，因为英国脱欧并不是最终状态。

It’s an ongoing, probably interminable, process, which helps the conservatives in England, particularly with the working class.

这是一个持续的、可能是无休止的过程，对英国的保守派，特别是工人阶级有帮助。

What happens in Northern Ireland?

北爱尔兰会发生什么？

Well, I was told just the other day that the Troubles would return because of these issues.

好吧，就在前几天我被告知，由于这些问题，麻烦将会再次出现。

I think that’s bluff.

我认为那是虚张声势。

I don’t think there really are that many people north or south of the Irish border who want to go back to the bad old days.

我认为爱尔兰边境以北或以南确实没有多少人想回到过去的糟糕日子。

I think there’s a lot of bluff there, and the media like to hype it up, but I don’t think we’ll go back to the Troubles over this issue.

我认为这里面有很多虚张声势，媒体喜欢炒作，但我不认为我们会再回到这个问题上的麻烦。

I think the key thing to remember is, what you get from doing history over long time scales is that there’s a shape-shifting quality to this thing we call the United Kingdom.

我认为要记住的关键一点是，从长期研究历史中你会得到的是，我们称之为英国的这个东西具有变形的品质。

It’s only been the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for about a hundred years.

大不列颠及北爱尔兰联合王国成立仅一百年左右。

Before that, Ireland was united, but united as part of the United Kingdom.

在此之前，爱尔兰是统一的，但作为英国的一部分统一。

You don’t have to go too far back — only go back to the early 19th century.

你不必回溯太久——只要回溯到 19 世纪初即可。

You encounter a pre-Union arrangement in which Ireland is notionally a separate entity.

您会遇到一种联盟前的安排，其中爱尔兰名义上是一个独立的实体。

Go back to 1707 — that’s when Scotland’s parliament’s united with England.

回到 1707 年，苏格兰议会与英格兰合并。

It seems to me perfectly possible that it could shift again, perhaps after my lifetime but in my children’s lifetime.

在我看来，它完全有可能再次发生变化，也许是在我有生之年，但在我孩子们的有生之年。

Previously, you asked me how I feel about this.

之前，你问我对此有何感想。

I was a Scottish nationalist at the age of 15, prepared to punch people on the nose over the issue.

15 岁时，我是一名苏格兰民族主义者，准备在这个问题上打别人的鼻子。

I think once you grow out of that kind of thing — by the time I’d got to Oxford, I’d become a young Thatcherite, a kind of punk Tory.

我想一旦你摆脱了这种事情——当我到达牛津时，我就会成为一个年轻的撒切尔主义者，一种朋克保守党。

The more I reflected on it as a historian, the more I could see that Scotland had a great deal out of the Union.

作为一名历史学家，我对它的思考越多，我就越能看到苏格兰在联邦之外有很多东西。

It was entirely to the advantage of people like me that Scotland was a part of a greater political unit.

苏格兰成为一个更大的政治单位的一部分，这完全有利于像我这样的人。

Johnson was right about the finest sight a Scotsman sees: the high road to London.

约翰逊关于苏格兰人看到的最美景色的说法是正确的：通往伦敦的公路。

All that persuaded me, and I’ve been a proponent of the Union ever since.

所有这些都说服了我，从那时起我就一直是联邦的支持者。

But having fought the battle over 2014 when the referendum on independence occurred last, I’m a little bit despondent at the thought of having to make all those arguments again.

但在经历了 2014 年独立公投最后一次的战斗之后，一想到必须再次提出所有这些论点，我就有点沮丧。

Maybe in the end, you just have to treat it like the Quebec issue and try to call the nationalists’ bluff because I don’t really think there’s that profound a sentiment in favor of nationalism.

也许最终，你只需要像对待魁北克问题一样对待它，并试图揭穿民族主义者的虚张声势，因为我真的不认为有那么深刻的支持民族主义的情绪。

The SNP keeps this going with a mixture of anti-English sentiment and trying to distract attention from its own failures because they basically do run Scotland.

苏格兰民族党带着反英国情绪继续维持这一局面，并试图转移人们对其自身失败的注意力，因为苏格兰基本上是由他们管理的。

Devolution has given them all the power that matters.

权力下放赋予了他们所有重要的权力。

These issues are so parochial that it’s hard for me to get excited about them anymore.

这些问题是如此狭隘，以至于我很难再对它们感到兴奋。

I would now say, “Well, okay, try independence and see how you like it.

我现在会说：“好吧，尝试一下独立，看看你是否喜欢它。

You think you’re going to be a Scandinavian country, but you’ll turn out to be a Balkan country, and serve you right.”

你以为你会成为一个斯堪的纳维亚国家，但结果你会成为一个巴尔干国家，这是对的。”

On this or that

关于这个或那个

I’d hated all that progressive stuff that people listened to.

我讨厌人们听到的所有进步的东西。

Pink Floyd sent me into a coma.

平克·弗洛伊德让我陷入昏迷。

Punk rock was great, but then I was able to rediscover the roots of British popular music, and that included the Beatles.

朋克摇滚很棒，但后来我能够重新发现英国流行音乐的根源，其中包括披头士乐队。

But with all due respect to Macca , who’s a lovely man, and whose birthday I believe it is or has just been .

但恕我直言，麦卡是一个可爱的人，我相信今天是或刚刚是他的生日。

.

。

.

。

After the Sex Pistols, I was a Jam fan, a Clash fan, a Damned fan, Buzzcocks.

继 Sex Pistols 之后，我是 Jam 粉丝、Clash 粉丝、Damned 粉丝、Buzzcocks 粉丝。

Those were the bands that really moved me.

这些是真正让我感动的乐队。

I recovered my memory of the Adverts the other day because I was thinking how terrible COVID has been for teenagers.

前几天我恢复了对广告的记忆，因为我在想新冠病毒对青少年来说是多么可怕。

I suddenly remembered the Adverts, “Bored Teenagers,” a really good song that I hadn’t heard for years.

我突然想起广告里的《无聊的少年》，一首我好几年没听过的非常好的歌曲。

Punk was a wonderful eruption of a distinctly British popular culture.

朋克是一种独特的英国流行文化的精彩爆发。

That’s why no American bands could ever quite get it right.

这就是为什么没有一个美国乐队能够完全做到这一点。

That was when the challenge of history suddenly gripped me, that there was this vast, almost unmanageable body of literature to read on any topic.

就在那时，历史的挑战突然抓住了我，关于任何主题都有如此巨大的、几乎难以管理的文献可供阅读。

So, libraries, yes.

所以，图书馆，是的。

Libraries are better than Google.

图书馆比谷歌更好。

Very important because libraries sort the material in a way that is honest, and Google sorts it in a way that’s designed to sell ads to you.

非常重要，因为图书馆以诚实的方式对材料进行排序，而谷歌以旨在向您出售广告的方式对其进行排序。

I think libraries — they are sacred places.

我认为图书馆 ——它们是神圣的地方。

Isn’t it funny?

这不是很有趣吗？

Think back: The way that print evolved as a technology produced an enormous amount of content that was not selling ads, and libraries ended up as the organizing institutions of information with a system of cataloging that wasn’t designed to do anything other than get you to associate the book you were reading with the other books that were related to it.

回想一下：印刷作为一种技术的发展方式产生了大量的内容，但这些内容并不是在销售广告，而图书馆最终成为信息的组织机构，其编目系统的目的只是让你将你正在阅读的书与其他与之相关的书联系起来。

I think library cataloging systems are a much-underrated contribution to our civilization.

我认为图书馆编目系统对我们文明的贡献被严重低估了。

The realization that Tocqueville’s idea of liberty is something that has to be protected by nonobvious means, by things that you might not, as a liberal, even approve of — that’s a fascinating insight.

认识到托克维尔的自由观念必须通过非显而易见的手段来保护，通过你作为一个自由主义者可能不赞成的东西来保护——这是一个令人着迷的见解。

Then, when we read Democracy in America, it became even clearer what Tocqueville’s project was, which was to show why France had failed to be or could not be the United States, and why American liberty had a very distinctive set of institutional supports.

然后，当我们读到《美国的民主》时，托克维尔的计划是什么就变得更加清楚了，它是为了表明为什么法国未能或不可能成为美国，以及为什么美国的自由有一套非常独特的制度支持。

I think what I like about Tocqueville is that it’s a historical method that he uses.

我认为我喜欢托克维尔的地方在于他使用了一种历史方法。

I’m a philosophical ignoramus.

我是一个哲学无知者。

I can’t get past first base with abstract arguments.

我无法用抽象的论点来超越一垒。

I need to be told a story, and Tocqueville’s story of what had gone wrong in 18th-century France, which makes a lot more sense when you read his account of what’s gone right in 19th-century America — that just clicked with me.

我需要听一个故事，托克维尔关于 18 世纪法国所发生问题的故事，当你读到他对 19 世纪美国所发生的事情的描述时，这个故事就更有意义了——这让我很感兴趣。

While everybody else was reading Aristotle and Locke, I was reading Adam Smith and then The General Theory, and The General Theory was the hardest thing I’d ever read, and I read it from cover to cover, taking notes three times in an attempt to understand it.

当其他人都在读亚里士多德和洛克时，我在读亚当·斯密，然后是《通论》，《通论》是我读过的最难的书，我从头到尾读了一遍，记了三遍笔记，试图理解它。

Probably strikes you as a crazy way to learn economics, but it was Oxford, and that was how it worked.

也许你会觉得学习经济学是一种疯狂的方式，但那是牛津，这就是它的运作方式。

The reason I’m in some ways out of sympathy with Keynes is that his Bloomsbury background, his Bloomsbury network made him so iconoclastic, so determined to tear down all that the Victorians had built that, ultimately, he ended up clearing a path for a failed socialist experiment.

我在某种程度上对凯恩斯表示同情，因为他的布卢姆斯伯里背景、他的布卢姆斯伯里网络使他如此反传统，如此坚定地要推倒维多利亚时代人所建立的一切，最终，他最终为失败的社会主义实验扫清了道路。

Not that Keynes himself was a socialist, but his tearing down of the Victorian verities — of the gold standard, of free trade, of the importance of posterity, all of those things — did not create a viable basis for liberalism, but just opened the path to Labour dominance and a period of stagnation in the period after Keynes’s death.

并不是说凯恩斯本人是社会主义者，而是他对维多利亚时代的真理——“金本位制、自由贸易、子孙后代的重要性，所有这些”的推翻——并没有为自由主义创造可行的基础，而只是为工党的统治和凯恩斯去世后的一段时期的停滞开辟了道路。

But you can’t read Keynes without admiring the intellect and the man.

但如果你不钦佩凯恩斯的才智和为人，你就无法阅读凯恩斯。

Skidelsky’s brilliant three-volume biography— which is a model of how to write a biography of an economist — is a wonderful work, not least because of the conclusion that by the end, Keynes was not a Keynesian, or at least regarded the people who called themselves Keynesians with great skepticism.

斯基德尔斯基精彩的三卷本传记——堪称如何撰写经济学家传记的典范——是一部精彩的著作，尤其是因为他最终得出的结论是，凯恩斯并不是凯恩斯主义者，或者至少对那些自称凯恩斯主义者的人抱有极大的怀疑。

I got into an argument with the early Keynes in my very earliest book, the book Paper and Iron, because I encountered Keynes in a new role, which wasn’t well known, and that was his role as an adviser to the Weimar government during the reparations negotiations.

在我最早的书《纸与铁》中，我与早期的凯恩斯发生了争论，因为我遇到了凯恩斯的一个新角色，这个角色并不为人所知，那就是他在赔款谈判期间担任魏玛政府顾问的角色。

That informal role that Keynes played from the Versailles peace negotiations right through to the complete collapse of the currency is a fascinating chapter in his life.

从凡尔赛和平谈判一直到货币彻底崩溃，凯恩斯所扮演的非正式角色是他一生中令人着迷的一章。

It doesn’t, I think, look so good as some of Keynes’s more famous contributions because I don’t think he gave the Germans great advice.

我认为，它看起来不像凯恩斯的一些更著名的贡献那么好，因为我不认为他给了德国人很好的建议。

When the whole thing ended in catastrophe in 1923, Keynes distanced himself from it and certainly didn’t acknowledge his curious part in that episode.

1923 年，当整件事以灾难告终时，凯恩斯与此事保持了距离，当然也没有承认自己在那一事件中扮演了令人好奇的角色。

My parting of the ways with Keynes is, as I said, that the impulse of Bloomsbury was to despise the Victorians.

正如我所说，我与凯恩斯的分道扬镳是布卢姆斯伯里的冲动是鄙视维多利亚时代的人。

Strachey was more open about this because Eminent Victorians is just a hatchet job on all the icons of the 19th century, but Keynes more subtly dismantles the Victorian achievement, and I’m more sympathetic to that achievement.

斯特雷奇对此持更开放的态度，因为《杰出维多利亚时代》只是对 19 世纪所有偶像的攻击，但凯恩斯更巧妙地拆解了维多利亚时代的成就，而我更同情这一成就。

The redeeming feature of Keynes’s life I think is the heroic effort he made to keep Britain from going under in World War II.

我认为凯恩斯一生的救赎之处在于他为防止英国在第二次世界大战中崩溃而做出的英勇努力。

Skidelsky’s third volume is a terrific account of that very difficult fight that Keynes had to fight to prevent Roosevelt and his advisers dismantling the British Empire there and then, which they were in a strong enough position to do.

斯基德尔斯基的第三卷精彩地描述了凯恩斯为阻止罗斯福及其顾问当场解体大英帝国而进行的一场非常艰难的斗争，而他们当时的地位足够强大。

It took a lot of intellectual effort to keep Britain in the game in 1945.

1945 年，英国付出了巨大的智力努力才得以留在这场游戏中。

And the counterfactual is crucial here because those people on the left who make a living out of comparing the empire to the Third Reich are just not being rigorous.

反事实在这里至关重要，因为那些以将帝国与第三帝国进行比较为生的左翼人士并不严谨。

They’re committing category errors, and more importantly, they’re not positing realistic counterfactuals.

他们犯了类别错误，更重要的是，他们没有提出现实的反事实。

Empire is a book that you couldn’t write today.

《帝国》是一本你今天写不出来的书。

I don’t think you could publish that book today.

我认为你今天不能出版那本书。

Certainly, if you tried to, you’d encounter all kinds of pushback.

当然，如果你尝试这样做，你会遇到各种各样的阻力。

Bruce Gilley’s article that got unpublished basically makes the argument of that book.

布鲁斯·吉利（Bruce Gilley）未发表的文章基本上阐述了该书的论点。

My only regret when I read Gilley’s article was that he didn’t cite it.

当我读到吉利的文章时，我唯一的遗憾是他没有引用它。

The basic argument of Empire is an economic one.

帝国的基本论点是经济论点。

It is that if you think about what the empire became in the 19th century, it became an empire of liberalism, an empire of free trade, an empire of free migration, of free capital movement.

就是如果你想想这个帝国在19世纪变成了什么，它变成了一个自由主义的帝国，一个自由贸易的帝国，一个自由移民的帝国，一个自由资本流动的帝国。

It was also an empire that turned away from slavery before others did.

它也是一个比其他国家更早摆脱奴隶制的帝国。

So the argument of the book was that, compared with the available alternatives, including indigenous empires — because that was the alternative — the British Empire was a very positive force in the 19th and even more positive force in the 20th century.

因此，该书的论点是，与现有的替代方案相比，包括本土帝国——“因为那是替代方案”——“大英帝国在 19 世纪是一支非常积极的力量，在 20 世纪甚至是更积极的力量。

This is a deeply unfashionable view.

这是一种非常不流行的观点。

It has made me a hate figure for the academic left because, in the last 20 years, it has become mandatory to regard imperialism as an unmitigated evil, to dismiss economic cost-benefit arguments, to ignore counterfactual rigor, and just to engage in a massive act of condescension to the past, and this is the opposite of what Collingwood had in mind.

这让我成为了学术界左派的痛恨人物，因为在过去的20年里，人们不得不将帝国主义视为彻头彻尾的罪恶，忽视经济成本效益论点，忽视反事实的严格性，并且只是对过去进行大规模的居高临下的行为，而这与科林伍德的初衷相反。

Collingwood’s idea was that we should reconstruct past thought faithfully and juxtapose it.

科林伍德的想法是，我们应该忠实地重建过去的思想并将其并置。

The modern historical ethos is to go back with our value system and condescend to the past and regard it as a blinding insight of scholarship that people in the past were racists or, for that matter, sexists.

现代历史精神是回归我们的价值体系，居高临下地看待过去，并将过去的人们是种族主义者或性别歧视者视为一种令人眼花缭乱的学术见解。

The question is what was going on in comparable geographies in the 1890s.

问题是 1890 年代类似地区发生了什么。

Roy’s book is very interesting because the great defects of British investment was that they invested nothing really in primary education.

罗伊的书很有趣，因为英国投资的最大缺陷是他们对初等教育没有任何真正的投资。

They invested in the elites’ education because they wanted to train a native Indian elite that would help them run the empire, but there was a really serious shortfall in investment in basic education.

他们投资精英教育，是因为他们想培养本土的印度精英，帮助他们管理帝国，但基础教育的投资确实严重不足。

That’s clearly one of the reasons that India remains so poor, but remember, India’s relative per capita GDP doesn’t begin to close the gap with Britain until quite recently.

这显然是印度仍然如此贫穷的原因之一，但请记住，印度的相对人均国内生产总值直到最近才开始缩小与英国的差距。

The first decades of independence were not characterized by very rapid growth.

独立的头几十年并没有出现非常快速的增长。

I want to write the Kissinger book because I think there’s a lot to be learned from the 1970s, and I’ve gathered some amazing material that nobody’s looked at before because most books about the 1970s just use American sources or a few foreign sources, but I’ve been looking at the Central Committee transcripts, and they’re great.

我想写基辛格的书，因为我认为 20 世纪 70 年代有很多东西值得学习，而且我收集了一些以前没有人看过的令人惊奇的材料，因为大多数关于 1970 年代的书籍只使用美国资料或一些外国资料，但我一直在看中央委员会的笔录，它们很棒。

That’s a book worth writing, and it will illuminate the US-China relationship in a fresh way.

这是一本值得写的书，它将以全新的方式阐明美中关系。

After that, I think it’s time to move on.

在那之后，我想是时候继续前进了。

The most important thing to do — I’m now 57; if you can count on maybe a couple more decades, let’s assume I live as long as my dad — the most important thing you can do in that remaining part of your life must be intellectual succession and planning.

最重要的事情 —— 我现在57岁了；如果你还能指望再过几十年，让我们假设我和我父亲一样长寿——你在余生中能做的最重要的事情一定是智力继承和规划。

I don’t see a whole lot of intellectual succession.

我没有看到太多的智力传承。

Academic life, in my view, has gone off the rails in ways that I never would have imagined in the 1980s when I was starting out.

在我看来，学术生活已经脱轨，这是我在 20 世纪 80 年代刚开始时从未想象过的。

We need new institutions, urgently need new institutions, and I want to spend more time on institution building and less time on book writing in whatever time is left to me, and that should strike terror in my enemies’ hearts.

我们需要新的机构，迫切需要新的机构，我想在剩下的时间里花更多的时间在机构建设上，而不是在写书上，这应该会让我的敌人感到恐惧。

Thumbnail photo credit: Zoe Law

缩略图图片来源：Zoe Law