All things to all men | 25 February 2016

The ocean that Christopher Oldstone-Moore has set out to chart is as broad as it is shallow: what it has meant to be bearded or shaven in the western world, from before Alexander the Great until the present day. Practicalities — shaving technology and the like — are mentioned from time to time, but only so that their importance can be minimised. His thing is the semiotics of beards.

And the range of signals that a beard could send out, over so many years, is bewildering. To be clean-shaven is to be a god, a priest, Louis XIV, a French conservative of the early 19th century or a 20th-century organisation man. To be bearded is to be a philosopher, a warrior, a Renaissance prince, an extreme French radical of the early 19th century or a respectable Victorian paterfamilias.

These signals can also be contradictory. To shave is to be a philosopher-king, like Alexander, who did away with his beard, Oldstone-Moore argues, in imitation of statues of the gods, to emphasise his uncanny youthfulness and power. To go bearded, by contrast, is to be a philosopher-king, like the emperor Hadrian, who wanted to show off his Stoic lack of vanity.

What beards never are, at least in Oldstone-Moore’s book, is ‘simply a matter of fashion’. He sees not short-term, trivial cycles of taste but ‘beard movements’ lasting decades or centuries, and telling us profound things about the nature of masculinity and authority. This makes more sense as a means of organising material and placing chapter divisions than it does as a way of telling a convincing story: even when the elements of a given ‘beard movement’ seem really to belong together, there’s not much of a chain of causation. And the style that comes with it is a sort of academic mock-epic, with the author in less than complete command of the joke:

As it turned out, of course, the revolution proceeded in fits and starts, proceeding from terror to war, Napoleonic glory and military defeat.