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Minahasa Civilization: A Tradition of Change

sensibly tentative. He modestly traces the emergence of Vietnamese nationhood to the "early medieval period, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries." Readers would not know from this—and probably do not need to know—that there have been two great periods of debate about this subject in Hanoi: in 1955 to 1957 (when Stalinist definitions of a "national people," as something whose appearance coincided with that of capitalism, were dominant, and the origins of Vietnamese nationhood were located variously in the tenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries) and since 1965 (with earlier Marxist perspectives about the coincidental development of nationhood and of independent political states now being used, and with Vietnamese nationhood again being variously traced to the time of the Hung kings, to the tenth century, etc.). But occasionally the results are more bothersome. Hodgkin gives us the tactfully irresolute Hanoi textbook view of the successes and failures of the Tay-sons. The brothers exercised a "revolutionary leadership," and had a "radical egalitarian program," yet somehow they could not change Vietnamese feudalism. Here the reader ought to know that this textbook view is merely a sort of compromise pastiche, designed to please as many as possible of the Hanoi historians who have been battling for decades over whether Tay-son land policy was progressive and a "correct response to the objective requirements of its time" (Phan Huy Le 1961), or whether the Tay-sons' preservation of landlordism was instead both a "natural historical limitation" and the personal "shortcoming" of Quang Trung himself (Nguyen Phan Quang, among others). It is as if the British Academy were to try to compile an official history of the English Revolution equally acceptable to Christopher Hill and to Hugh • Trevor-Roper. As for the August Revolution itself, "perhaps the most important event" in world history since 1917, Hodgkin gives us a stirring and close-textured description of the various decisions and events. He identifies eight "continuing themes" (including the village, the nation, the tradition of peasant revolt, the poor rural scholar-gentry, and the patriotic national minorities), which he hopes will make it intelligible. But he does not engage in a comparative examination of revolutionary theory, nor does he discuss the specific ways in which the conceptualization (and practice) of a revolution in Vietnam differed from that of revolutions in China and Russia. One senses that he is more fond of the particular group of Marxist-Leninists who triumphed in Vietnam than of more general discussions of Marxist-Leninist theory. Thus, the "Third World Radicals" whom he wishes to address should be captivated by his excellent narrative political history of the Vietnamese Communists and the ancient country they now rule. But such radicals may not at the same time easily gain the harvest of general theoretical lessons that Hanoi leaders would undoubtedly like to give them.