Philosophy of history aside, just the process of doing historical research is the cat’s meow, especially outside one’s comfort zone. Learning a language(s), spending time in archives, trying to make sense of a world understood only through the mediation of documents, chasing down vague leads, getting to know librarians and archivists, putting it all in your own words, maybe living in a foreign country. No doubt the internet has drilled a hole in the pure *adventure* of historical research.
A tiny melodrama that cracked me up: 1985, I’m in the spectacularly beautiful public library in Bologna doing some research. If you want to copy any documents, there’s one guy standing behind a photocopy machine who is the only one authorized to do it. That’s his job, all day long. People line up at the machine with their stuff, when it’s your turn, you hand it to him and tell him which pages you want copied.
One day he’s standing there but there’s a hand-written sign on a piece of cardboard on his machine that says, “sciopero per forza maggiore” (“on strike due to force majeure”). I ask him what’s going on and he says, “Just a dispute with the boss. Come back tomorrow.”
No lesson in the “laws” of history here and I don’t think my politics would have been any different if I’d followed my brother into construction, but there’s something about just doing history and trying to make sense of it in a serious way that is intrinsically worthwhile and maybe offers some protection against facile, lazy and simplistic bromides. Not enlightenment, for sure, but more than just a pot to piss in.
Historiography should be a much more prevalent field of study than it currently is. I think E.H. Carr encapsulates it best in his work “What Is History?” but of course I’m likely bias as someone who closely relates to 20th century modernist thought.
The act of history (yes, it’s a verb) requires sources, interpretation, and selection. Carr proposes that none of these has specific primacy over the other, so history becomes not only a view into the past, but an expression of the present as well. The historian, through interpretation, makes clear their framework; and through selection, makes clear their objective. Often times both of these work in tandem to reveal a nagging question so important to the present situation.
Carr is Hegelian in a sense. Not that he thinks progress is some objective science, but in that the study and interpretation of history seeks a path toward a kind of progress.
“The absolute in history is not something in the past from which we start; it is not something in the present, since all present thinking is neces- sarily relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of becoming - something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape our interpretation of the past.”
The Noah Smith tweets displayed complete ignorance of what it is that historians do and what they hope to accomplish. No working historian today thinks his or her findings will represent that last word on a subject. The satisfaction is in presenting evidence in a new light or even considering evidence that others have not previously drawn on. Theories and methodologies proliferate, and exist in kind of dance: one never approaches a subject without some theoretical perspective, and that perspective contributes to methodology, including the selection of evidence; yet one's theory almost invariably changes, at least a little, in the process. In short, there is no "innocent" or "objective" approach to doing history. That said, if your evidence is weak or your methods suspect, the work will not survive. And in that sense, historians do have to answer for the work. But it has nothing to do with replicating outcomes in the way science are supposed to do. And it has nothing to do with plugging the evidence of history into some provable or disprovable take on the present.
I would add one point vis-à-vis the "fascism debate." It seems to me that too many people approach such questions in the manner of analytic philosophers. This sort of positivism infects the way Americans think about nearly everything, including social sciences and psychology. This is as true of the left as it is of the right. Any hint of an even remotely dialectical or psychoanalytic point of view is seen as disqualifying. So in terms of fascism, the argument becomes "fascism is identified by a specific set of characteristics and we can judge whether or not something meets these predetermined criteria." This completely ignores the fact that European fascism of the early 20th century varied from country to country and over time from its earliest formations in the teens to its exercise of power in the following decades.
This is an excellent post. Agree 100% that history is "useful" because of its particularity, because it provides examples (exemplars), because it provides illumination, because it informs one's judgment--an important faculty, arguably the most important. One need not quote Santayana to see its value. But, at the same time, it has that place on Mount Parnassas--even if it isn't "useful," in the bean-counter's sense, it's a worthy human endeavor. But like any worthy human endeavor that becomes institutionalized, most of its students end up as "time servers for truth" dedicated to some narrowly conceived vision of the endeavor. How do I know that? History.
No brilliant thought. But all science is history, because you have to say what happened before you can imagine why. But of course “what happened?” is never an objective question.
You open this fine essay with a discussion of the Noah Smith tweets, which for me touched a nerve. Smith's view of history as the falsification of hypotheses mirrors a naive but widely-held view of the so-called "hard" sciences, and yes, unfortunately, this perspective has become once more hegemonic in my home discipline of Political Science. Things weren't always this way: the early 2000s saw the emergence of the "Perestroika" movement in Poli Sci, which tried to pluralize things. The years right before Perestroika were very dark indeed: the leading journal was full of number-crunching normal science, all of the plum TT jobs at R1 universities were going to people emulating the kind of "science" Smith seems to have in mind. After a brief interval, the pendulum has swung back in this positivist direction.
Thanks for sharing this reflection on history. Your thoughtful post leads me to some further reflections based on what you've written.
1. Like you, early on I was a fan of what I now refer to as "patterns of history;' the stuff of Vico and Ibn Khaldun; Spengler, Toynbee, & Sorokin, but to contemporaries like Joseph Tainter and Peter Turchin, and so on. But I've come to reject the ideas that there are "laws" of history, only patterns, which often repeat, but not certainly. Humans, like other animals, establish patterns of behavior. Those patterns may alter, either through sheer force of circumstance (we simply can't physically continue a pattern of behavior), or we may discontinue a pattern of behavior via thought, through choosing a goal to pursue in pursuit of some advantage that the new behavior or action seems likely to provide. To paraphrase, past performance is no guaranty of continued performance; i.e., not "law" compels the future.
2. As an undergraduate (full disclosure: starting a half-century ago now) I took a course entitled "Philosophy of History" from the Philosophy Dept. And while I was more interested in the broad sweep of history (its patterns), I tended to ignore the philosophy of what history is and who to understand it as a human enterprise. My bad. In doing so, I overlooked one of the readings in the assigned anthology (actually way more than one), but one that in the last decade I've realized to have been a major miss on my part: that of R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood's thinking about history is unparalleled (sorry E.H. Carr, proponent, he's good but not the best. :)). Collingwood states that "all history is the history of human thought." Not, mind you, that all history is the history of ideas--not at all. But the human enterprise, human action, arises from thought. That thought may be fleeting and entirely situational (e.g., "where's the best place to build this fort?") or entirely philosophical and everything in-between. Also, I should note, the thought is not only what is conveyed through language & symbols, but through actions ("res gestae" in Collingwood's words) as well, which reveal thought that may not be stated (or stated but not truthfully).
3. Finally, Collingwood sees history as self-understanding. Indeed, he describes the melding of history and philosophy. History manifests changes in consciousness (yes, shades of Hegel & even Marx here). Thus, "what is history good for?" might be answered by saying it's the type of knowledge that allows for individual and collective self-understanding. All we know comes to us from the past; we must live forward but we can know from the past. Let me close this extended comment (and thanks for the patience if you're read this far!) with some quotes from the historian John Lukacs:
"The past in our minds is memory. Human beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that is entirely new. (The Greek work for "truth, aletheia, also means "not forgetting")"There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us," C.S. Lewis once wrote. No one can even imagine an entirely new color; or an entirely new animal; or even a third sex. At best (or worst) one can imagine a new combination of already existing—that is, known to us—colors, or monsters, or sexes.
At the End of an Age (52).
William James wrote: "You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught by reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to whom these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature means grammar, art a catalog, history as list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures"
At the End of an Age (53), quoting James, Memories and Studies (1911) (312-313).
In sum, the history of anything amounts to that thing itself. History is not a social science but an unavoidable form of thought. That "we live forward but we can only think backward" is true not only of the present (which is always a fleeting illusion) but of our entire view of the future: for even when we think of the future we do this by remembering. But history cannot tell us anything about the future with certainty. Intelligent research, together with a stab of psychological understanding, may enable us to reconstruct something from the past; still, it cannot help us predict the future. There are many reasons for this unpredictability (for believing Christians let me say that Providence is one); but another (God-ordained) element is that no two human beings have ever been the same. History is real; but it cannot be made to "work", because of its unpredictability.
I agree with you about the particular here, for sure. Was just reading Wedgwood's incredible (and incredibly readable) histories of the Thirty Years War, the Dutch War of Independence, and the English Civil War, and what makes those compelling is the sketch of a time and political landscape that was just totally different from the one that exists now, and so thinking about the long genesis of concepts like "sovereignty", or the army and the state. This kind of stuff can furnish interesting and relevant "genealogies" of concepts, Hobsbawm's stuff on nationalism comes to mind here, but it doesn't have to. History is also just full of interesting characters and personalities and time periods that don't require contemporary equivalents to reward consideration--Wallenstein, Phillip II, William of Orange.
On the other hand, I do think that once you get into the "twilight" period of history, i.e, historical events that your grandparents could have heard described to them by their grandparents , then it really does seem that the events of the past are unfolding into the present and so require not just interpretation but also, in the case of atrocities, crimes, and outrageous injustices, some kind of redemption, since we live in the world our forefathers created, and continue to pay off their moral debts, so to speak. Probably not an accident, for that reason, that the history of the last 150 years is a lot more hotly contested than the history of the last 1000.
Philosophy of history aside, just the process of doing historical research is the cat’s meow, especially outside one’s comfort zone. Learning a language(s), spending time in archives, trying to make sense of a world understood only through the mediation of documents, chasing down vague leads, getting to know librarians and archivists, putting it all in your own words, maybe living in a foreign country. No doubt the internet has drilled a hole in the pure *adventure* of historical research.
A tiny melodrama that cracked me up: 1985, I’m in the spectacularly beautiful public library in Bologna doing some research. If you want to copy any documents, there’s one guy standing behind a photocopy machine who is the only one authorized to do it. That’s his job, all day long. People line up at the machine with their stuff, when it’s your turn, you hand it to him and tell him which pages you want copied.
One day he’s standing there but there’s a hand-written sign on a piece of cardboard on his machine that says, “sciopero per forza maggiore” (“on strike due to force majeure”). I ask him what’s going on and he says, “Just a dispute with the boss. Come back tomorrow.”
No lesson in the “laws” of history here and I don’t think my politics would have been any different if I’d followed my brother into construction, but there’s something about just doing history and trying to make sense of it in a serious way that is intrinsically worthwhile and maybe offers some protection against facile, lazy and simplistic bromides. Not enlightenment, for sure, but more than just a pot to piss in.
Historiography should be a much more prevalent field of study than it currently is. I think E.H. Carr encapsulates it best in his work “What Is History?” but of course I’m likely bias as someone who closely relates to 20th century modernist thought.
The act of history (yes, it’s a verb) requires sources, interpretation, and selection. Carr proposes that none of these has specific primacy over the other, so history becomes not only a view into the past, but an expression of the present as well. The historian, through interpretation, makes clear their framework; and through selection, makes clear their objective. Often times both of these work in tandem to reveal a nagging question so important to the present situation.
Carr is Hegelian in a sense. Not that he thinks progress is some objective science, but in that the study and interpretation of history seeks a path toward a kind of progress.
“The absolute in history is not something in the past from which we start; it is not something in the present, since all present thinking is neces- sarily relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of becoming - something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape our interpretation of the past.”
- E.H. Carr
The Noah Smith tweets displayed complete ignorance of what it is that historians do and what they hope to accomplish. No working historian today thinks his or her findings will represent that last word on a subject. The satisfaction is in presenting evidence in a new light or even considering evidence that others have not previously drawn on. Theories and methodologies proliferate, and exist in kind of dance: one never approaches a subject without some theoretical perspective, and that perspective contributes to methodology, including the selection of evidence; yet one's theory almost invariably changes, at least a little, in the process. In short, there is no "innocent" or "objective" approach to doing history. That said, if your evidence is weak or your methods suspect, the work will not survive. And in that sense, historians do have to answer for the work. But it has nothing to do with replicating outcomes in the way science are supposed to do. And it has nothing to do with plugging the evidence of history into some provable or disprovable take on the present.
I would add one point vis-à-vis the "fascism debate." It seems to me that too many people approach such questions in the manner of analytic philosophers. This sort of positivism infects the way Americans think about nearly everything, including social sciences and psychology. This is as true of the left as it is of the right. Any hint of an even remotely dialectical or psychoanalytic point of view is seen as disqualifying. So in terms of fascism, the argument becomes "fascism is identified by a specific set of characteristics and we can judge whether or not something meets these predetermined criteria." This completely ignores the fact that European fascism of the early 20th century varied from country to country and over time from its earliest formations in the teens to its exercise of power in the following decades.
This is an excellent post. Agree 100% that history is "useful" because of its particularity, because it provides examples (exemplars), because it provides illumination, because it informs one's judgment--an important faculty, arguably the most important. One need not quote Santayana to see its value. But, at the same time, it has that place on Mount Parnassas--even if it isn't "useful," in the bean-counter's sense, it's a worthy human endeavor. But like any worthy human endeavor that becomes institutionalized, most of its students end up as "time servers for truth" dedicated to some narrowly conceived vision of the endeavor. How do I know that? History.
"...knowledge is about learning about as many things as possible and then thinking about how they are related..." Great stuff, thanks!
No brilliant thought. But all science is history, because you have to say what happened before you can imagine why. But of course “what happened?” is never an objective question.
You open this fine essay with a discussion of the Noah Smith tweets, which for me touched a nerve. Smith's view of history as the falsification of hypotheses mirrors a naive but widely-held view of the so-called "hard" sciences, and yes, unfortunately, this perspective has become once more hegemonic in my home discipline of Political Science. Things weren't always this way: the early 2000s saw the emergence of the "Perestroika" movement in Poli Sci, which tried to pluralize things. The years right before Perestroika were very dark indeed: the leading journal was full of number-crunching normal science, all of the plum TT jobs at R1 universities were going to people emulating the kind of "science" Smith seems to have in mind. After a brief interval, the pendulum has swung back in this positivist direction.
Last year, I wrote about this recent history: https://trysterotapes.substack.com/p/psr-and-perestroika
Thanks for sharing this reflection on history. Your thoughtful post leads me to some further reflections based on what you've written.
1. Like you, early on I was a fan of what I now refer to as "patterns of history;' the stuff of Vico and Ibn Khaldun; Spengler, Toynbee, & Sorokin, but to contemporaries like Joseph Tainter and Peter Turchin, and so on. But I've come to reject the ideas that there are "laws" of history, only patterns, which often repeat, but not certainly. Humans, like other animals, establish patterns of behavior. Those patterns may alter, either through sheer force of circumstance (we simply can't physically continue a pattern of behavior), or we may discontinue a pattern of behavior via thought, through choosing a goal to pursue in pursuit of some advantage that the new behavior or action seems likely to provide. To paraphrase, past performance is no guaranty of continued performance; i.e., not "law" compels the future.
2. As an undergraduate (full disclosure: starting a half-century ago now) I took a course entitled "Philosophy of History" from the Philosophy Dept. And while I was more interested in the broad sweep of history (its patterns), I tended to ignore the philosophy of what history is and who to understand it as a human enterprise. My bad. In doing so, I overlooked one of the readings in the assigned anthology (actually way more than one), but one that in the last decade I've realized to have been a major miss on my part: that of R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood's thinking about history is unparalleled (sorry E.H. Carr, proponent, he's good but not the best. :)). Collingwood states that "all history is the history of human thought." Not, mind you, that all history is the history of ideas--not at all. But the human enterprise, human action, arises from thought. That thought may be fleeting and entirely situational (e.g., "where's the best place to build this fort?") or entirely philosophical and everything in-between. Also, I should note, the thought is not only what is conveyed through language & symbols, but through actions ("res gestae" in Collingwood's words) as well, which reveal thought that may not be stated (or stated but not truthfully).
3. Finally, Collingwood sees history as self-understanding. Indeed, he describes the melding of history and philosophy. History manifests changes in consciousness (yes, shades of Hegel & even Marx here). Thus, "what is history good for?" might be answered by saying it's the type of knowledge that allows for individual and collective self-understanding. All we know comes to us from the past; we must live forward but we can know from the past. Let me close this extended comment (and thanks for the patience if you're read this far!) with some quotes from the historian John Lukacs:
"The past in our minds is memory. Human beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that is entirely new. (The Greek work for "truth, aletheia, also means "not forgetting")"There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us," C.S. Lewis once wrote. No one can even imagine an entirely new color; or an entirely new animal; or even a third sex. At best (or worst) one can imagine a new combination of already existing—that is, known to us—colors, or monsters, or sexes.
At the End of an Age (52).
William James wrote: "You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught by reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to whom these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature means grammar, art a catalog, history as list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures"
At the End of an Age (53), quoting James, Memories and Studies (1911) (312-313).
In sum, the history of anything amounts to that thing itself. History is not a social science but an unavoidable form of thought. That "we live forward but we can only think backward" is true not only of the present (which is always a fleeting illusion) but of our entire view of the future: for even when we think of the future we do this by remembering. But history cannot tell us anything about the future with certainty. Intelligent research, together with a stab of psychological understanding, may enable us to reconstruct something from the past; still, it cannot help us predict the future. There are many reasons for this unpredictability (for believing Christians let me say that Providence is one); but another (God-ordained) element is that no two human beings have ever been the same. History is real; but it cannot be made to "work", because of its unpredictability.
At the End of an Age ((53-54).
Thanks again for sharing.
sng
I agree with you about the particular here, for sure. Was just reading Wedgwood's incredible (and incredibly readable) histories of the Thirty Years War, the Dutch War of Independence, and the English Civil War, and what makes those compelling is the sketch of a time and political landscape that was just totally different from the one that exists now, and so thinking about the long genesis of concepts like "sovereignty", or the army and the state. This kind of stuff can furnish interesting and relevant "genealogies" of concepts, Hobsbawm's stuff on nationalism comes to mind here, but it doesn't have to. History is also just full of interesting characters and personalities and time periods that don't require contemporary equivalents to reward consideration--Wallenstein, Phillip II, William of Orange.
On the other hand, I do think that once you get into the "twilight" period of history, i.e, historical events that your grandparents could have heard described to them by their grandparents , then it really does seem that the events of the past are unfolding into the present and so require not just interpretation but also, in the case of atrocities, crimes, and outrageous injustices, some kind of redemption, since we live in the world our forefathers created, and continue to pay off their moral debts, so to speak. Probably not an accident, for that reason, that the history of the last 150 years is a lot more hotly contested than the history of the last 1000.
Your link to Jay Caspian Kang goes to the wrong place :)