HISTORICAL REALITY

A MANIFESTO

F. R. Ankersmit

History and Theory 65, no. 1 (2026)

From the times of Herodotus and Thucydides until deep into the eighteenth century, the eyewitness account (or “autopsy”) was the model for historical knowledge. The eighteenth-century Historical Revolution replaced this emphasis on autopsy by introducing the notion of the point of view, as explicated in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Monadology. That notion radically separated the historian's present from the world of the eyewitness's past. Historical knowledge was, from this point on, essentially ex post facto, and autopsy was reduced to the status of that which offers essentially questionable historical evidence. This amounted to the greatest revolution in Western historical thought, and it led to the birth of historist professional writing as it still exists today. Unfortunately, after the 1850s, historist reflection on professional historical writing was abandoned for a neo-Kantian approach. Since then, many other approaches have been tried out on professional historical writing; pragmatism is the most recent variant. None of these approaches produced lasting results, nor are any such results to be expected. Results were never cumulative: Each time the blackboard was wiped clean again in order to write a new attempt. This is because historical writing must be seen from its historist inside and not from an external perspective. This article is a manifesto that invites philosophers of history to recognize that historist professional historical writing was born from Leibniz's Monadology and that Leibniz's thought is, therefore, the inside of its inside. Accepting this is necessary in order to bring about a more fruitful and, above all, more interesting philosophy of history than we've had for almost two centuries.

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