Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War

‘A book unlike any other on the 1914 debate … a wealth of sharp and compelling reflections on how and why historians argue as they do, why they rethink, abandon or double down on their positions, and how politics and emotion flow into the writing of history and back out of it into the world’

Christopher Clark, London Review of Books

In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson picks from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the conflagration: Fritz Fischer, celebrated champion of German war guilt; Pierre Renouvin, a dis­abled serviceman and preeminent authority on the conflict in France; Luigi Albertini, the Italian newspaper tycoon who, unique among scholars of the Great War, played a part in pitching his country into it; Paul W. Schroeder, the American expert on the system of European interstate relations and its breakdown in 1914; Keith Wilson, the one radical deviant from a patriotic consensus about Britain’s role in the outbreak of the fighting; and, from Australia (summoned into the war as a dominion), Christopher Clark, acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers.

Disputing Disaster offers a compelling analysis of the major compet­ing versions of the genesis of the Great War; fresh light on the politi­cal background of its leading historians; and a novel synthesis of the determining pressures that brought the conflict to pass.