Introduction
Clarence Crane Brinton (Winsted, Connecticut, 1898 - Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 7, 1968) was an American historian of France, as well as an historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever. He was McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History from 1946 to 1968.
For many years he taught a popular course at Harvard known informally to his students as "Brunch with Brinton."
Brinton was known for his witty, convivial, and urbane writing and commentary, and was fluent in French. During World War II he was for a time Chief of Research and Analysis in London in the Office of Strategic Services. He was also Fire Marshal for St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which withstood the Blitz with minor damages. After the war, he was commended by the United States Army for "Conspicuous Contribution to the Liberation of France" and was chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows in the late 1940s, whose membership during that period included McGeorge Bundy and Ray Cline, who became quite influential in national security and intelligence.
In the early 1960s Brinton was the dissertation supervisor at Harvard of the young historian Will Johnston. He also served as an advisor for historian, Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
In 1963 Brinton was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was also president of the Society for French Historical Studies.
On February 19, 1968 Brinton testified at the Fulbright Hearings on the Vietnam war as to the nature of the Vietnamese opposition, saying that Americans are sympathetic to a revolution but not a Communist one, and that if Ho Chi Minh had not been a Communist, "The whole story would have been different.".
He died on September 7, 1968.
Brinton wrote a review of Carroll Quigley's book Tragedy and Hope.
Among those his scholarship inspired were Samuel P. Huntington, who cited Brinton many times in his book Political Order in Changing Societies, and Robert Struble, Jr., in his Treatise on Twelve Lights.
Works
- The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1926, 1966)
- The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History (1930), a detailed account of the political radicals of the French Revolution
- English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1933)
- A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799 (1934), a study of the French Revolution
- "The History of Paper Money to the War," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 6, No. 3, September 1934
- The Lives of Talleyrand (1936), a biography of Talleyrand with a uniquely favorable perspective
- The Anatomy of Revolution (1938, revised 1965)
- Ideas and Men: the Story of Western Thought (1950, 1963), an account of Western thought from ancient Greece to the present
- A History of Western Morals (1959), an account of ethical questions
- The Shaping of the Modern Mind (1963), an abridged version of his Ideas and Men
- "Ideas in History," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 37, No. 4, December 1965
- The Americans and the French (1968), an attempt to explain the often difficult relations between two longtime allies