Theme Issue 49
History and Theory: The Next Fifty Years
+ BRIAN FAY, History and Theory: The Next Fifty Years, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010).
No abstract.
+ DAVID CHRISTIAN, The Return of Universal History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 6-27.
The prediction defended in this paper is that over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of “universal history”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods. Until the end of the nineteenth century, universal history of some kind seems to have been present in most historiographical traditions. Then it vanished as historians became disillusioned with the search for grand historical narratives and began to focus instead on getting the details right through document-based research. Today, however, there are many signs of a return to universal history. This has been made possible, at least in part, by the detailed empirical research undertaken in the last century in many different fields, and also by the creation of new methods of absolute dating that do not rely on the presence of written documents. The last part of the paper explores some of the possible consequences for historical scholarship of a return to a new, scientific form of universal history. These may include a closer integration of historical scholarship with the more historically oriented of the sciences, including cosmology, geology, and biology. Finally, the paper raises the possibility that universal history may eventually be taught in high schools, where it will provide a powerful new way of integrating knowledge from the humanities and the sciences.
+ NOËL BONNEUIL, The Mathematics of Time in History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 28-46.
The themes of connectedness and continuity, which are also mathematical properties, have run like a red thread through the last fifty years of History and Theory, notably in the theory of the narration of action in history. In this essay I review various answers to the question of the driving force that motivates action and that propels a sequence, continuous or discontinuous. These answers underpin narrative strategies intended to solve the problem of human agency and thereby to provide the basis for historical narratives. I argue that both continuous and discontinuous conceptions of history have to do with the restrictive concept of trajectory. Most of our familiar concepts such as trajectory, equilibrium, optimum, probability, and sensitivity to initial conditions are taken from mathematics and physics, but how well adapted are they to dealing with the time of actors, whose actions are intermingled with uncertainty? I shall present alternative concepts of dynamics, ones that no longer lead toward just one particular future or that reflect a single past. On this basis I suggest reorganizing our view of historical time along the principles of maintenance, acquisition, and victory. Historical sources trace back not to one story or one process that is plausible or that appeals to common sense, but to a whole family of processes. From the past, we can obtain sets of constraints that circumscribe sets of stories rather than a single scenario. I shall then propose a topology of the time of action based on my alternative conception of dynamics, a topology made of what I call viability kernels, capture basins, and victory domains.
+ EELCO RUNIA, Crossing the Wires in the Pleasure Machine: Lenin and the Emergence of Historical Discontinuity, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 47-63.
If it is true, as I have argued in an earlier essay, that discontinuity is not an unintended side-effect of our ambition to attain goals that are in line with our identity, but the result of our giving in to a sublime “why not?,” then how can we conceive of history as a process? In this essay I will explore the thesis that my notion that the discontinuities of history spring from a dehors texte squares well with an evolutionary view of history. I will do so by giving an account of how Lenin and Trotsky brought off one of the primordial discontinuities of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution. Starting with Trotsky’s remark that Lenin owed his success to his “imagination,” I show that the October 1917 coup d’état was not guided by strategy or driven by ideology, but by a series of “inspired” improvisations in which the protagonists fled forward into the unknown. Trotsky describes Lenin’s “intuition of action” as the fruit of his ability to take leave of the system of complexity reduction that is stored in conventions, received wisdom, and other things we take for granted. Trotsky in effect says that Lenin’s improvisations were most successful when he was so completely “possessed” by his deeds that he didn’t fully know what he was doing—when, that is, he was in (as psychiatrists would say) a state of dissociation. In Lenin’s inspired deeds the “latent powers of the organism” that humans have “inherited from animal ancestors” rose up, Trotsky said, and “smashed through the doors of psychic routine and—together with the highest historico-philosophical generalizations—stood up in the service of the revolution.” Acting out the dehors texte, Lenin brought about one of the metamorphoses in which humanity mutates to new—though not necessarily higher or happier—levels. The essay includes some remarks on what all this means for the relation between history and theory in the upcoming years.
+ AVIEZER TUCKER, Where Do We Go from Here? Jubilee Report on History and Theory, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 64-84.
Progress in understanding, clarifying, forming, and devising methods for analyzing, eliminating, or resolving the problems of the philosophies of history and historiography requires integration with other branches of philosophy such as metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. Conversely, mainstream philosophical theories would benefit from confronting the problems of the philosophies of history and historiography. Solving the problems of the philosophies of historiography and history requires considering historiography as continuous with philosophy. This approach is exemplified by examining metaphysical issues in the philosophy of history—historical contingency, necessity, determination, causation, over-determination, and under-determination—as well as investigating the epistemology of testimony for its relevance to the epistemology of our knowledge of the past. Inference from multiple testimonies is a particular case of a general model of inference, one in which scientists infer a common cause from multiple sources of evidence that preserve similar information about their common causes. The historical sciences—history, phylogeny, evolutionary biology, comparative historical linguistics, and cosmology—all infer common causes or origins. The theoretical sciences are not interested in any particular token event, but in types of events, whereas, in contrast, the historical sciences attempt to infer common-cause tokens. The main reasons for the absence of decisive progress in the philosophy of historiography along the promising directions the article outlines are external: random, adverse institutional and market conditions that block the professionalization of the field.
+ CAROLYN J. DEAN, Minimalism and Victim Testimony, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 85-99.
This essay renews a discussion of how historians do, and should, represent atrocity. It argues that the problems of representing extreme violence remain under-conceptualized; in this context it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of minimalism, a style prevalent both in historiography and in an intellectual culture that values understatement in approaches to violence. The essay traces the general cultural preference for minimalist narratives of suffering, which, it claims, is driven by the widespread conviction that experimental and exuberant narratives convert victims’ suffering into kitsch. It then focuses on two works, by Saul Friedländer and by Jan Gross, on the history of Jewish victims during and after the Second World War in order to assess how each uses sophisticated minimalist understatement to represent suffering, but with radically different effects. Finally, it asks historians to reflect upon the representation of extreme events by focusing on narrative style, on questions of ethics, and on the cultural narratives within which their own work on suffering and violence is inevitably embedded—especially given that historians are paying increasing attention to violent events that generate tremendous difficulties in relation to the representation both of victims and perpetrators.
+ ANN RIGNEY, When the Monograph is No Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 100-117.
Over the last fifty years there has been much discussion about the value of narrative in the production of historical knowledge whereby it is generally assumed that “narrative” is a given and that the only thing at issue is its epistemological value. This article critically examines this assumption. It shows how conceptions of “narrative” have mutated in response to changes in cultural practice and, as importantly, how they have been implicitly modeled on the particular medium envisaged for telling stories: the stand-alone monograph. The belief that history’s natural form is a book written by an individual historian has thus informed most discussions of narrative in the twentieth century, meaning that the primacy of language, the autonomy of the author, and the finished, self-contained character of the work have been taken for granted. The “naturalness” of the stand-alone monograph can no longer be taken as a given, however, in the new media ecologies. Digitization and the internet offer new technologies for producing and disseminating historical knowledge and, in the process, present both opportunities and challenges to professional historians. Beyond their practical implications, the digital media also provide a new theoretical model for viewing historical narrative in terms of its social production by multiple agents across different platforms, and this can change our understanding both of past and of future practices.
+ SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM, Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Tarikh in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean World, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 118-145.
This essay reflects on the future of world history by reflecting on its past. It looks to how Iberian historiography in the early modern period “rediscovered” Islamic historiography in the course of Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean region in the sixteenth century. However, since the Iberians had deliberately cultivated a form of amnesia regarding this historiography as a result of the so-called Reconquest, new modes and methods of appropriation had to be found. Further, whereas medieval contact had largely been with materials in Arabic, the sixteenth-century world was far more centrally concerned with materials in Persian. The essay proposes that these materials and their perspective had a significant impact on humanist historians such as João de Barros as well as on their successors. Equally, access to European historical writings in Latin had some impact on Indo-Persian chroniclers at the Mughal court and elsewhere. However, it may be argued that an even greater impact on the Mughals was that of “Hindu” writings regarding the ancient past of India. All in all, the essay suggests that the past of such historical writing was crucially mediated by philological practice. Nor can philology be neglected for future projects in the writing of world history or global history. The essay thus questions the presumptions of both neo-skeptics, who neglect how historians have worked in the past, and of scientistic historians, who oppose the central place of humanistic disciplines in the future writing of history.
+ WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR., A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 146-166.
This article attempts to account for professional historians’ relative neglect of the history of economic life over the past thirty years, looking mainly at the American case. This neglect seems paradoxical, considering the remarkable transformations that have taken place in world capitalism during this same period. I trace the neglect to the capture of the once interdisciplinary field of economic history by mathematically inclined economists and to the roughly simultaneous turn of historians from social to cultural history. I conclude by suggesting some topics in the history of economic life that seem both timely and exciting. I also suggest some intellectual resources that other disciplines, particularly economic sociology and economic history, could offer should historians decide to tackle the history of economic life once again.