Gale Stokes - Serbian Liberals 19th Century

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Legitimacy through Liberalism: Vladimir Jovanović and the Transformation of SerbianPolitics by Gale StokesReview by: Traian StoianovichThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 387-389Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877453 .

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Book Reviews 387

Legitimacy hroughLiberalism:VladimirJovanovicand the TransformationfSerbian Politics. By Gale Stokes.

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Pp. xvi+279. $11.00

As history -iwie es eigentlich gewvesen,"Gale Stokes's LegitimacythroughLiberalism is a distinguished monograph. The historical method of hischoice, however, does not allow him to develop some of his more importantinsights.

Identifying the Serbian liberals as "the first coherent group in Serbianhistory" to base "its politics on principle more than on personality orfamily," Stokes starts "the modern phase of Serbianpolitical development"with the Saint Andrew's Assembly of 1858 (p. 23). As of then, he affirms,'Every Serbian ntellectualhoped someday to start his own newspaper....

Withouta newspaperno [ideological]movement could live" (p. 172). Stokesfurthermaintains hat the liberals "transformedhe entire mode of discoursein Serbianpolitics. Before the liberals, paternalisticbureaucracy ustified itsexercise of power on the basis of superior education, the authorityof theprince, or other traditionalbases. After the liberals, every politician found itnecessary to justify himself in terms of how well he represented he people"(p. 219). In defense of his interpretation, he authorrefers to the extensivebut fragmented political discourse, in Politieki Ere(nik, of Serbian liberalleader Vladimir Jovanovic. A political encyclopedia projected to comprisethirty volumes-of which four were published (1870-73) and twenty others

completedin manuscript-Jovanovic's Politi(ki re(uiikrepresents"the great

statement of liberal principles in nineteenth-centurySerbia" (p. 184).Readers should note, however, that the liberals were not the first groupin

Serbia to shift from a customary code founded on kinship and blood to awritten code of law. That achievement belongs to Serbia's first two princesand to the constitutionalists. The new code promotedthe developmentof anew mode of political discourse and thereforeof liberalism. But the successof the new mode of political discourse was dependent on the diffusion ofliteracy. Apart from his allusion to the passion of the Serbian intelligentsiafor journalism and his evaluation of adult literacy in the principalityof

Serbia in 1866 at less than 6 percent, however, Stokes does not attempttoanalyze the link between a written code of law and the new politicaldiscourse. It is thereforeimportantto observe that it was the advocates ofwritten law who strove to found their own media with which to weakentradition and mold opinion. The individualsand groups who were attachedto custom, on the other hand, could not but regard all writing not confinedto religion (holy writ) as disruptive and corrupting.Peasants thus were noteager to send their children to school. The process of disruption andcorruption-to view it from the point of view of peasants-was well underway by the 1860s, however, for the literacy level in the principalitywas then

at least five or six times as great as it had been thirty years earlier-a factthat the author omits. The growth of the principality's urban populationfrom 6 percent in 1834to 10 percent in 1874attests to the evolution of amore favorable geosocial foundationfor writtendiscourse, but while Stokesprovides some useful data on Belgrade (Serbia) and Novi Sad (Vojvodina),he avoids a systematic discussion of the links between urban growth andpolitical (Greek polis) development.

Observingthat the need to raise money with which to pay taxes and buy

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388 Book Reviews

goods that formerlyhad been producedat home impelled many peasants toborrowfrom local usurers, he neglects to note that the per capitatax levy inSerbiarose by 500 percent between 1840 and 1870. He insists nevertheless

that Serbianliberalismwas a vehicle ratherthan the outcome of economicchange. This view is untenable. Indeed, the Serbiangovernment pursued adeliberatepolicy of promotingcereal productionand discouraging he olderpastoraleconomy, and the constitutionalistsurgedthe immigrationof skilledartisans and farmersfrom the northin order to compensatefor the immigra-tion of herdsmen rom the southwest. In any event, Serbia'sper capitamaizeproductiongrew fourfold and her per capita wheat productiontwelvefoldbetween the early 1830s and 1889.

The author provides interestingdata on the convict-labormodel state farmTopcider Ekonomija.His most valuableobservationson political economy,

however, concern the sources of inspiration of liberal and especially ofVladimir Jovanovic's thought: Karl Rau's three-volume Lehrbuch derpolitischen Okonomie (1826-32), which modifiedSmithianeconomics by itscameralist concerns; the political economy of Wilhelm Roscher, whichsubordinatedeconomic theory to history; and the economic views of Fr&-deric Bastiat, with their stress on liberty as the naturalorder and as thevehicle of social harmony.

Opposedto inequalitiesthat were the productof prejudiceand privilege-including the inferior position of women-Jovanovic defended those in-equalitiesthat stem from "naturalcapacity" (p. 213). CombiningBastiatand

Roscher, he embraced the view that liberty can exist only in the frameworkof the nation. Liberty may not bear the expected fruit, however, unless apeople knows its own interests. Invoking early medievaltexts, folklore, andepic poetry to prove that Serbians did possess this ability, he providedSerbia with a "Whig theory of history" (p. 59). He hoped that the extendedfamily, which liberal and conservative intellectualsalike called "harmony"(zadruga), would provide Serbians with inspiration, as "harmony" at thehousehold level was dissipated, to turn the nation itself into a zadruga. AsSerbian liberals obtained access to importantpositions of state service in1873, they began to view the state from the perspective of cameralism,

enforcing harmony on individualswho did not know their own interest.Serbian liberals of VladimirJovanovic's persuasion failed to understandthat ideology exists-other than as myth or as utopia-only when there arecompeting ideologies. Through the prism of the Young Serbia (or YoungSerbdom)movement, Professor Stokes has undertakena brief comparativeanalysis of the liberal and other ideologies-national liberalism,progressiveliberalism (more concrete, more earthy in its orientation), populism, andsocialism-that were nurtured in Serbia and the neighboringprovince ofVojvodinabetween 1850,or the late 1850s, and 1880. Seeking to give theirlocal societies the Mazzinianframeworkof "young" national societies, the

Serbian ntelligentsiaorganizedsix congresses of the young in spiritbetween1866and 1871-five in Vojvodinatowns and one (1867) in Belgrade.Profes-sor Stokes concludes that the congresses of the United Serbian Youth(Omladina)served, among the Serbs of the principality,to politicize publicopinionand legitimizethe shift in the locus of sovereigntyfrom God and hisregent the prince to the people (and, in the case of the nationalliberals, toits regent the state). In Vojvodina, to compensate for the lack of politicalautonomy, the liberal intelligentsiaengenderedthe "myth of nationalunity"

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Book Revieivs 389

(p. 219). Attention to the evolution of liberalism n other Europeancountriesmay have allowed the author to show in what ways the Serbianexperienceof liberalismwas like and unlike that of other nations,. But this, in effect,

may be to ask for another book. TRAIAN STOIANOVICH

Rlutgers University

Kropotkin. By Mairtin A. Miller.Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976. Pp. x+342. $15.00.

Martin Miller's study of Peter Kropotkin is best appreciated in light of theauthor's stated intent. Denying his work is a biography "in which thesubject is utilized as a vehicle to analyse the intellectual, social, or political

forces of a period" (p. viii), he rather seeks to understand how Kropotkinperceived the world and how (and to some extent, why) he wanted tochange it. The result may not be a deeper understanding of the Russia or theEurope of Kropotkin's time, but Miller feels his critical review of Kropot-kin's perceived universe over a lifetime of change will give insight intoproblems concerning "the interrelationship between personality and society,the nature of radical commitments, and the personal meaning of ideology"(ibid.).

Here is a formula for biography of decidedly narrow focus, and such isthe merit, or, from another point of view, the limitation of Miller's work.

Surely a critical and scholarly work on the world's leading anarchisttheoretician has been overdue. Kropotkin, the anarchist, as a consistent andpassionate anti-Marxist, has generally been a prophet without honor in hisown country since the revolution and granted only some recognition for hiscontribution to Russian Populism. Anarchists outside of the Soviet Union,in turn, have been too busy pleading a cause to be very critical. And thebook by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince

(London, 1950), which still has value for its lively and more extensivetreatment of some aspects of Kropotin's life and for its interpretation of hisrelation to his times, nonetheless suffers from the authors' inability to use

material which has since become available and their unwillingness to employthe footnote and reference apparatus needed for verification and furtherstudy.

Miller's book thus usefully fills a gap in the scholarship on Kropotkin'slife. It is written after exhaustive research in published and unpublishedmaterials (including for the first time the Kropotkin archives in the SovietUnion), all of which are carefully referenced and described. The authorbrings a sympathetic, but not uncritical, attitude to his subject. and heexpresses himself in a direct and straightforward way. Although he ac-knowledges the genesis of his study in an interest in the application of

Eriksonian psychology to the study of Russian revolutionaries, the work hasclearly evolved into a biography that is primarily descriptive, mercifully freeof psychohistorical jargon, and restricted to conclusions that seem to flowreasonably from evidence in the text.

However, Miller's portrait of Kropotkin is drawn with special emphasison the psychological motivations that helped transform an heir to the highestprivileges of Imperial Russian society into a militant revolutionary seekingtotal social transformation. His personal fear of chaos and alienation was