Volume 22
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Michael Gordy, “Reading Althusser: Time and the Social Whole," History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 1-21.
Althusser believed the Marxist conception of history broke from all previous conceptions of the social whole. Hegel's idealism conflated the knowledge of the object with the object itself. Within his social totality, no practice or thought can run ahead of its time. For Marx, all knowledge is the result of theoretical knowledge, not the revelation of the real. Every structure of a social whole has its own history; there is no central concept of which the various social structures are merely expressions. All of the superstructure affects, and is affected by, the economic infrastructure, although it is the economy that is the determinant in the last instance. Historical materialism seeks to delineate the structural and conjunctural articulation of the various social practices. Marxist philosophy is fully aware of its place and function within the social order, hence of the irreducibly political nature of all philosophical discourse.
Luciano Canfora, "Analogie et Histoire," History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 22-42.
In his preface Thucydides claims that historical knowledge is possible only insofar as facts can be compared with similar facts. Analogy is thus essential in "finding" them. This conception has been important in subsequent historians and philosophers of history. In Droysen's Historik analogy is perhaps the most important heuristic for the historian. Dilthey, in his attempt to make a critique of historical reason, points to the importance of analogical thinking in historical judgment, but leaves the nature of analogical association as a vehicle of historical comprehension as an open question. Analogy is a kind of a priori form of historical knowledge; different analogies will naturally arise in different historical circumstances, and only subsequent events can determine which are the most useful ones.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative," History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 43-53.
Beneath the apparent narrative disarray, the paratactic disjunction of episodic units, and the seeming logical incoherence which scholars have assumed to be the necessary by-product of narrative parataxis in medieval historiography, lay a metaphor of procreative time and social affiliation which brought together into a connected historical matrix the core of the chronicler's material. Genealogy, as a complex of metaphoric structure, narrative "grid," and social context, represents one of many possible cases of the sensitivity of medieval historical narratives to social realities and indicates how medieval chroniclers responded to these realities as well as to the aesthetic conventions of literary tradition.
Kenneth J. Dover, "Thucydides ‘As History’ and ‘As Literature,’" History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 54-63.
Some students of ancient history treat Thucydides as an "authority," not a "source," creating an obstinate resistance to criticism and a readiness to explain away his apparent omissions and distortions. Others, especially students of ancient literature, focus attention on "understanding Thucydides as a whole" through the internal relationships -echoes, analogies, and symmetries, as well as contradictions - which can be uncovered in his work, rather than through its external relationships with events. The apparent omissions, distortions, and incoherencies should remind us that Thucydides, like all pioneers, imported irrelevant preconceptions or had not yet formed necessary conceptions to do a truly systematic inquiry. Criticism of Thucydides should thus be more pluralistic; the reasons why one passage is unsatisfactory and perplexing may be different in kind from the reasons which hold in another, and two or more reasons may account for the difficulties in the same passage.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Paul F. Bourke on American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry by Gene Wise, History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 64-74.
Georg G. Iggers on Ideologie des Deutschen Weges. Die Deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie Zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus by Bernd Faulenbach and Grundformen Historiographischen Denkens. Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Methodologie. Dargestellt an Ranke, Treitschke und Lamprecht. Mit Einem Anhang Über Zeitgenössische Geschichtstheorie by Karl Heinz Metz, History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 74-83.
George Allan on The Emergence of the Past: A Theory of Historical Explanation by Dale H. Porter, History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 83-93.
Katherine A. Lynch on The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction by E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Schofield, Ronald Lee, and Jim Oeppen, History and Theory 22, no. 1 (1983), 93-100.
ARTICLES
Robert Anchor, "Realism and Ideology: The Question of Order," History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 107-119.
Critics of Realism such as Foucault assert that "reality" has no existence until prefigured by acts of the literary imagination, and that the literature of Realism falsely and ideologically creates the impression that it is continuous with life itself. For Foucault, discursive practices are the only possible objects of historical inquiry since human activity can never be understood apart from the ways in which it is articulated. He mostly investigates order, the codes of order, reflections upon order, and the experience of order. The fetishization of order, the substitution of the order of words for the disorder of events, is postmodernism as ideology. Realism does not provide a definition of reality at all -rather a description of the world which does not impose order on chaos. Instead it reveals disorder amidst apparent order. No knowledge of language or discursive practices can disclose the particular experiences which shape our sense of reality.
Christopher Parker, "English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism," History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 120-145.
Virtually all important figures in the development of historiography and of history as an academic subject from the 1850s to the end of the Victorian era were explicitly hostile to positivism and to its chief practitioners, Comte and Buckle. The positivists were looking for a system to implement their revolutionary political, social, economic, religious, and ethical intentions. The generally conservative antipositivists defended free will, individualism, and divine will against the high degree of determinism of positivism, and they were skeptical of man's ability or desire to know himself or his future. Their strength lay in their sociopolitical and religious role in the English universities. Nineteenth-century positivism has been confused with individualism, whereas it was individualism which defeated positivism.
Robert J. Tristram, "Explanation in the New Science: On Vico's Contribution to Scientific Sociohistorical Thought," History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 146-177.
The principles Vico offers for his science indicate that his conception of his science is flawed and inconsistent. But this does not mean his conception of explanation is inadequate and inconsistent. Vico's method of science contains three different perspectives which can be called the providential, institutional, and ideational perspectives. Vico does distinguish between description and explanation and the providential perspective involves the former. Explanations of the world of nations are made by looking at institutions and ideas. The institutional perspective aims at knowledge of what is true of things while the ideational perspective studies human thoughts. They are associated with the disciplines of philosophy and philology. These disciplines do complement each other; they are both concerned with ideas and institutions. The complementary workings of these perspectives in producing explanations can be understood in terms of a Vichian explanatory circle.
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Robert Harding, "Pierre Goubert's Beauvais et le beauvaisis: An Historian ‘Parmi les hommes’," History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 178-198.
When Goubert's Beauvais et le beauvaisis appeared in 1960, his exhaustive investigation of local life was seen as a model for future history. He sought to recapture the unity of the common people, the land, and the city in the light of agrarian history and economic changes over the longue durée. But Goubert's work was flawed in key respects. He virtually omitted mentaliti; we see people who produce, eat, pay, and die, but not ones who play, pray, dream, and love. Extremely wary of theories and systems, Goubert avoided using concepts such as "capitalism" and "feudalism," even though the interplay of theory and historical data is fruitful when done with intelligence and caution. Studies inspired by Beauvais confirmed his finding and quickly reached a point of diminishing returns. Goubert was most successful in writing popular histories for ordinary people, allowing them to see through the hypocrisy and mythology of traditional history to recapture their own past.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Stephen Bann on The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Lionel Gossman, History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 199-207.
George A. Kelly on As Sociology Meets History by Charles Tilly, History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 207-221.
Samuel Cohn, Jr. on Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance by Eric Cochrane, History and Theory 22, no. 2 (1983), 222-227.
ARTICLES
James Smith Allen, "History and the Novel: Mentalité in Modern Popular Fiction,” History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 233-252.
The historical use of literature poses a methodological challenge, used directly as a document, fiction is unreliable. Postformalist criticism and theory suggest approaches to the novel more appropriate than those historians have traditionally used. Historians should not conceive of the text as document but think of it instead as a structuralist system, discourse, or code. Reader-response criticism merits the historian's serious attention; by studying how readers in the past responded to fiction, the social historian may read the novel to understand its audience and the socially significant conventions it preferred in the novel. The novel is a mental world with an actual historical context peopled by ordinary readers through which mentalities can be investigated.
Willem A. DeVries, "Meaning and Interpretation in History,” History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 253-263.
The translationist theory of meaning can provide a plausible understanding of the reenactment methodology of history, although there are disanalogies. It takes as primitive our ability to recognize synonymy relations between linguistic episodes, either within the same language or other languages. In translating a complex linguistic object translators must possess an incredibly large stock of background knowledge about a culture and be sensitive and resourceful speakers of the language into which they are translating. Since there is no codified set of rules which guarantees a good translation, translators need to use creativity. Similarly, in deciding which of the possible meanings to assign to an event or document, historians can follow little better advice than to insert themselves imaginatively into the situation and let their ability to understand their contemporary events and other historical events come to bear upon the events of the past.
Wilda C. Anderson, "Dispensing with the Fixed Point: Scientific Law as Historical Event,” History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 264-277.
Hayden White's tropes of the imagination purport to give the historian the vantage point from which the historical object can be stabilized and eventually understood. Ludwik Fleck, a scientist, found that all scientific, all creative thinking is a highly figurative procedure, a complex weaving together of a conversation of voices from past traditions, historical and mythical, as well as voices from the present. The fixed or the real or the unrelevatized can always be shown to be a construction, if one moves to another vantage point. Some of the best scientific thinking, such as Einstein's and Heisenberg's, has been done by those who dispensed with the necessity of a fixed epistemological vantage point. White's discourse analysis cannot claim to be a fixed point from which the other texts are formalized.
Suzanne Fleischman, "On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages,” History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 278-310.
There are six, to a degree overlapping, parameters which might be used to explore the limits of a distinction between history and fiction in the Middle Ages. 'They are authenticity, intent, reception, social function, narrative syntax, and narrator involvement. Intent and reception, specifically writers; claims of historical authenticity, and the influence of purportedly historical literature on society and on history, are the two key parameters. There was a concept of history which was distinct from fiction, but historical truth did not imply, as it does for us, authenticity of facts and events. Rather, history was what was willingly believed, historical truth anything that belonged to a widely accepted tradition.
REVIEW ESSAYS
James P. Scanlan on Sovremennaia filosofiia istorii by Eero N. Loone, History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 311-317.
John L. Herkless on Vorlesungen zur Geschichtstheorie II by Kurt Kluxen, History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 317-328.
Annette Lavers on Rethinking History by Marie-Rose Logan and John F. Logan, History and Theory 22, no. 3 (1983), 328-334.
The Philosophy of History Teaching
Denis Shemilt, “The Devil's Locomotive," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 1-18.
That history has its characteristic logic, methods, and perspectives follows from its being what Paul Hirst calls a "form of knowledge." The British Schools Council Project "History 13-16" was founded on the assumption that history should be taught to adolescents as such a form. An analysis of "History 13-16" suggests that adolescents can address highly abstract questions when they are appropriately presented. There are four general, selective, simplified, and idealized models of adolescent construction of historical narrative. At Level I historical narrative is seen as lacking inner logic; logic enters the story as the simple linkage of events contiguous in time. At Level 11 historical narrative is seen to embody a Calvinistic logic in which everything is connected and continuous. At Level III adolescents are impressed by the complexity and density of the story. At Level IV adolescents develop an inkling of period as something more than a chronological connection. There is a firm understanding that events cannot be dissociated from their specific contexts. "History 13-16" students show a more sophisticated grasp of history than do children following conventional content-based courses, although only a minority construe at Level IV. If the levels of construal can be interpreted as developmental stages, as seems reasonable, it should be possible to "spiral" a history curriculum around basic structural concepts. The aim of teaching history should be the liberal one of enabling children to make sense of and to see the value of history, not the vocational one of training historians.
P. J. Lee, “History Teaching and Philosophy of History," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 19-49.
The work of Bruner and Hirst suggested to history teachers that history might have its own structure but left open the answer as to what that structure might be. The three most popular approaches to new ways of teaching history state that teaching history: 1. is a matter of handing on substantive historical concepts; 2. must in the end come down to developing children's understanding of structural second-order concepts; and 3. is teaching historical skills, abilities, or procedures. Much of the emphasis of the "new history" has been on giving children experience in handling evidence; not until recently has there been a corresponding interest in historical understanding, explanation, and connected notions of empathy and imagination. A discussion of empathy and imagination shows some of the ways in which assumptions about them affect arguments about history teaching. Philosophy of history is necessary in any attempt to arrive at a rational way of teaching history.
David Stockley, “Empathetic Reconstruction in History and History Teaching," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 50-65.
As Collingwood notes, every historian has not only a personal perspective but also the constraint of operating within a public tradition of truth and acceptability. This background of knowledge, experience, emotions, and so forth may necessarily be more truncated for an adolescent than for a mature historian. Empathetic reconstruction is both an imaginative and analytic act. The process of bringing about empathetic reconstruc - tion in the history classroom will take a long time, will need to be structured and systematic, and so will require constant striving on the part of the teacher. The essential point is that children must be encouraged to grasp the world-view and frame of reference of the historical agents and to overcome their own prejudices and misconceptions. This is best achieved through such devices as the structured dilemma.
Kieran Egan, “Accumulating History," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 66-80.
There is no logical or empirical connection between the successes of the Schools Council Project "History 13-16" and the "forms of knowledge" approach out of which it was composed. A sounder process whereby children can be led to historical understanding can be sketched as a gradual accumulation of particular skills, concepts, and knowledge, within four distinct, relatively discontinuous paradigms. The process is designed to capitalize on dominant interests at each stage. The ironic paradigm, achieved last, is made up of the contributions of each of the earlier paradigms, and it provides the epistemological sophistication which controls and gives proportion to the gradually developed constituents of mature historical thinking. It combines the affective-orienting, mythic ability with the vivifying, romantic imagination with the generalizing, pattern-seeking philosophic search.
James Fitzgerald, “History in the Curriculum: Debate on Aims and Values," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 81-100.
Three powerful arguments have dominated discussion on the educational purposes of historical study: 1. history serves as the collective memory of mankind; 2. it enlarges our experience and extends our perspective; 3. the actual process of acquiring historical knowledge offers reward in itself. Recent debate has restated and sharpened, rejected and superseded this traditional framework. In the United States, the inquiry approach, which emphasized historians' tools, has been criticized by those who feel the new "social studies" have moved too far in the direction of the social sciences. In Britain, the "form of knowledge" approach has been highly influential. Clearly, skills cannot be divorced from content. The nature and structure of history is such that it embraces not only methodology, inquiry, and concepts, but also message and experience. It is the narrative framework of history which informs understanding. We need history as story as well as history as inquiry.
M. B. Booth, “Skills, Concepts, and Attitudes: The Development of Adolescent Children's Historical Thinking," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 101-117.
Research into children's historical thinking based on a view of Piaget's theory which emphasizes the age-stage structure and the development of hypothetico -deductive thinking appears to be inappropriate, for such thinking has only limited connection with imaginative, empathetic response, which is the hallmark of historical understanding and the purpose of historical study. Content and teaching technique are more important than increased maturity and intelligence. A teacher's concern should be with the elements of historical thinking - knowledge, concepts, cognitive skills, empathy, interest, personal experience -and the ways in which these can be woven together to produce adductive historical thought. The eight-yearold's historical understanding can be considered on its own terms: genuine historical thinking which is more limited than the older pupil's, but comparable and equally valid.
Frances Blow, “A Note on Computers, the Counterfactual, and Causation," History and Theory, Beiheft 22 (1983), 118-121.
The computer is an appropriate tool for three levels of activity in teaching history. It is efficient in analyzing quantities of statistical data into manageable and relevant units of information. It is effective in making the structure of events salient. Above all, it is a valuable device for exploring the structure of the possible. The simultaneous presentation of actual and alternative pasts can be effected, for example, by programs embodying the counterfactual principle. The computer program can, by virtue of its prescribed logical structure, force the pupil to recognize and reflect upon his own mental processes. The computer is a great asset in teaching history, a subject so complex and replete with information that the significance of that information is often obscured for the child.
Cover image: The Genealogy of the Minamoto Clan, Ukiyo-e, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1843)
