Despite the historical importance of the Vietnam War, we know very little about what the Vietnamese people thought and felt prior to the conflict. Americans have tended to treat Vietnam as an extension of their own hopes and fears, successes and failures, rather than addressing the Vietnamese record. In this volume, David Marr offers the first serious intellectual history of Vietnam, focusing on the period just prior to full-scale revolutionary upheaval and protracted military conflict. He argues that changes in political and social consciousness between 1920 and 1945 were a necessary precondition to the mass mobilization and people's war strategies employed subsequently against the French and the Americans. Thus he rejects the prevailing notion that Vietnamese success was primarily due to communist techniques of organization.

However, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial goes beyond simply accounting for anyone's victory or defeat to an informed description of intellectual currents in general. Replying for his information on a previously ignored corpus of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and leaflets, the author isolates eight issues of central concern to twentieth-century Vietnamese. The new intelligentsia—indubitably the product of a peculiar French colonial milieu, yet never divorced from the Vietnamese past and always looking to a brilliant Vietnamese future—spearheaded every debate beginning ini 1925.

After 1945, Vietnamese intellectuals either placed themselves under ruthless battlefield discipline or withdrew to private meditation. David Marr suggests that the new problems facing Vietnamese today make both of these approaches anachronistic. Whether the Vietnam Communist Party will allow citizens to subject received wisdom to critical debate, to formulate new explanations of reality, to test those explanations in practice, is the essential question lingering at the end of this study.

List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction

1. The Colonial Setting
2. Morality Instruction
3. Ethics and Politics
4. Language and Literacy
5. The Question of Women
6. Perceptions of the Past
7. Harmony and Struggle
8. Knowledge Power
9. Learning from Experience
10. Conclusion

Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Index

David G. Marr is a Fellow of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University.

"This book sets a new and higher standard for Western scholarship on Vietnam's modern political history. In addition to drawing on recently available French archival material and pertinent Chinese and Japanese sources, Professor Marr makes effective use of a substantial body of Vietnamese sources that have been largely untapped by other Western writers."—American Political Science Review

"There is no doubt that this book breaks new ground in its wealth of data on the leaders of Vietnamese resistance to the colonial regime, their writings, ideas, plans and actions in the period before 1925. What has been sketchily treated or ignored in earlier publications based on western sources is here given the attention it deserves."—Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

"A unique and, in the true sense of the word, pioneering achievement."—Political Science Quarterly

"The Marr study is not a dry historical account of the early national movement, but rather a vibrant and alive story which transmits to Americans the cultural content, the ways of thinking, the spirit, and the debates of that period. It is a noteworthy achievement."—Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars