Volume 25
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “What Thucydides Saw," History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 1-16.
Three basic assumptions distinguish Thucvdides' historical perspective from the perspective of the debate speeches in his history: he did not assume that events are continuous or repeatable, that human nature in unchangeable, and that the ultimate causes of human affairs are within human ken. In Thucydides' history, statesmen and citizens are judged by their capacities to do as Thucydides himself tried to do -judge novelty and greatness clearly. Lastingly effective good judgment unifies people because it stems from and appeals to respect for the imponderables of human affairs, the unpredictability of the future and the fragility of human nature. Those who can appreciate novelties know that the future will not be lacking in them, as those who can appreciate greatness know that its causes are ultimately beyond analysis. Like Thucydides himself, such people are storytellers rather than moralists.
Larry Shiner, “Writing and Political Carnival in Tocqueville's Recollections, “ History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 17-32.
Unlike Tocqueville's other writing, Recollections, which was never intended for publication, contained the internally contrary, multiple viewpoints characteristic of carnivalesque discourse. Its greater spontaneity may allow'us more easily to see some of the ways in which writing can undermine the intentions of the writer. In following the Recollections' treatment of the February revolution, the writing soberly sets out to embody the story of a deadly struggle between the bourgeoisie and the people over the issue of property but steadily veers off in the direction first of irony, then satire, and finally carnival. Tocqueville's rhetorical ending shows him trying to turn his unruly text back into a cautionary tale of the moralistically ironic type. But the text keeps getting out of hand and dissolves moralism in a bath of satire and burlesque.
CLASSICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Lionel Gossman and Wilhelm Vischer, “The Boundaries of the City: A Nineteenth Century Essay on ‘The Limits of Historical Knowledge,’" History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 33-51.
Wilhelm Vischer's 1877 paper on the limits of historical knowledge expressed clearly, effectively, and with moderation what had become a minority viewpoint in his time. Vischer's deep sense and acceptance of the limits of every human enterprise was characteristic of the historical and philological culture of Basle. To the well-born, deeply conservative citizen, the notion of limits had to be fundamental: not only the property and privileges of his class, and the freedom it required in order to pursue its economic and spiritual interests, but the continued existence of his small homeland as an autonomous polity and the survival of Christian religion and morality in a scientific age depended, in his eyes, on respect for boundaries and frontiers. To the champion of the German Empire, on the other hand, limits, zones of autonomy, and particularisms of every kind were obstacles to be overcome.
Kenneth S. Sacks, “The Meaning of Eunapius' History,’" History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 52-67.
Eunapius, pagan historian of the fourth century, wrote a history of the contemporary Roman Empire. Scholars have understood Eunapius'animosity toward Christianity as coloring his judgment and supplying him with a purpose for writing. Though his history did reflect contemporary religious tension, it is primarily shaped by traditional approaches to historiography. Eunapius attempts to analogize and explain human behavior in terms of the natural laws which pervade the history. His message is founded on classical values independent of current concerns; Eunapius inculpates an apparently innocent pagan to prove one point. He was not only participant in the sectarian struggle which divided the Empire; he was also part of a thousand-year-old culture that served to unify it.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Frederick A. Olafson on Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History by Michael Allen Gillespie, History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 68-74.
Elizabeth G. Traube on L'Invention de la Mythologie by Marcel Detienne, History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 75-87.
Harry Liebersohn on Crisis in Consciousness. The Thought of Ernst Troeltsch by Robert J. Rubanowice and James Luther Adams; Ernst Troeltsch Bibliographie by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Hartmut Ruddies; Troeltsch-Studien, Volume 1: Untersuchungen zur Biographie und Werkgeschichte. Mit den unveröffentlichten Promotionsthesen der "Kleinen Göttinger Fakultät" 1888-1893 by Horst Renz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf; and Troeltsch-Studien, Volume 3: Protestantismus und Neuzeit by Horst Renz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 87-95.
Daniel P. Tompkins on Thucydides by W. Robert Connor, History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 95-106.
Bonnie G. Smith on The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment by Suzanne Gearhart, History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986), 106-112.
ARTICLES
David Carr, "Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity," History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 117-131.
Narrative and the real world are not mutually exclusive. Life is not a structureless sequence of events; it consists of complex structures of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their meaning from within action itself. It is also not true that life lacks a point of view which transforms events into a story by telling them. Our focus of attention is not the past but the future, because we grasp configurations extending into the future. Action involves the adoption of an anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. The actions of life can be viewed as the process of telling ourselves stories. The retrospective view of the narrator is an extension and refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself. Because storytelling is a social activity, the story of one's life is told as much to others as to oneself. Social human time, like individual human time, is constructed into configured sequences. The practical first-order narrative process that constitutes a person or a community can become a second-order narrative whose subject is unchanged but whose interest is primarily cognitive or aesthetic.
Kerry H. Whiteside, "Perspectivism and Historical Objectivity: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Covert Debate with Raymond Aron," History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 132-151.
Raymond Aron's perspectivism stressed the inherent subjectivity and historicity of any interpretation of the past or present. Merleau-Ponty develops a theory of objectivity consistent with perspectivism. Historical objectivity consists in the demonstration of thematic continuities in the superficially heterogeneous activities, beliefs, and events of an era. A society's ideologies, politics, religions, and economics all express "the same structure of being." Instead of talking about one structure or unity, Merleau-Ponty should have stuck with thoughts that phenomena be unified in relation to their meanings; that these meanings be constituted in part by the participant; that the historian has insight into the intentions of the people. Aron's perspectivism denied the possibility for objectivity and hence for responsible radical political action; it is not necessary to look for one grand unity to refute Aron.
John Love, "Max Weber and the Theory of Ancient Capitalism," History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 152-172.
Weber in his early years had taken very seriously the idea that capitalism played an important, perhaps decisive, role in the life of ancient societies. Over time he came to understand the uniqueness of historical structures, and particularly of "rational capitalistic enterprises with fixed capital, free labor, the rational specialization and combination of functions, and the allocation of productive functions on the basis of capitalistic enterprises, bound together in a market economy," which characterizes the modern world. Non-market types of profit-making occur in the ancient world but are not the heart of it. Weber's concept of "political capitalism" assists in explaining those acquisitive activities that possess capitalistic features without identifying the ancient forms with modern capitalism, avoiding the extremes of primitivism and anachronistic modernism.
George Makdisi, "The Diary in Islamic Historiography: Some Notes," History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 173-185.
The Muslim Banna' (1005-1079) kept the world's earliest extant diary, but diary keeping was a widespread practice even in the tenth century. Hadith criticism, which was concentrated mainly on the chain of transmitters of the words and deeds of the Prophet of Islam and his followers, brought about the publication of the diary. The ta'rikh-diary in Islam was a diary kept for personal use, a dated record of notes kept by the author for use in writing other historical compositions. The substance of biographical dictionaries and annalistic histories was drawn from these diaries.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Patrick H. Hutton on The Structure of Mind in History: Five Major Figures in Psychohistory by Philip Pomper, History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 186-192.
Dale H. Porter on Substance and Form in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History by Leon Pompa and W. H. Dray, History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 193-199.
Stephen Bann on Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History by Michael Ann Holly, History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 199-205.
Jonathan Rée on Philosophy in History by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 205-215.
Eugene O. Golob on Logic, Philosophy, and History: A Study in the Philosophy of History Based on the Work of R. G. Collingwood by Anthony F. Russell, Brooke Williams, and R. G. Collingwood, History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986), 215-219.
ARTICLES
Adrian Kuzminski, "Archetypes and Paradigms: History, Politics, and Persons,” History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 225-247.
The Left is scientific, rational, paradigmatic; its concern is with the networks of relationships within which all things are located and through which all things have their significance. The Right is aesthetic, emotional. It attempts to understand in terms of some concrete specific, an archetype. Hybrids of these two, such as Christianity, Communism, and Fascism, mix paradigm and archetype and are dangerous. With the reification of form and idolatry of image, inhuman criteria of reality are automatically set up and give license to idealists and fanatics to ignore the integrity of individual persons in the name of those theories and images. Countervailing factors (such as Christian compassion or Communist equality) can be swept away. Human events stand to one another both as parts and wholes; historians need to recognize events as simultaneously episodes and narratives. Paradigms and archetypes are half-truths only and deny the experiential openness that is history. A mysticism of persons would defuse and absorb the Left and Right while transcending them, putting to the fore instead the diversity and novelty of history.
Geoffrey Waite, "Lenin in Las Meninas: An Essay in Historical-Materialist Vision,” History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 248-285.
The bourgeois visual consensus has denied any substantial links between the concrete history of alienated, exploited labor and the realm of culture, for example in Velázquez's painting "Las Meninas." Literary and artistic historians hail Spain in the 1600s for its achievements while political, social, and economic historians speak of its decline. Imagine Lenin staring at "Las Meninas." He sees that it reflects both personal disintegration, decadence, and impotence and social, economic, and political rape. Put Lenin inside the actual picture, and he sees what everyone else has looked at but no one has seen: the abyss between culture and material conditions. Historical materialists need to bridge the gap between infra- and superstructure by developing dialectical images and a vision which puts the vanguard into the servants (las meninas) and the servants into the vanguard: Lenin in "Las Meninas."
Peter Hanns Reill, "Narration and Structure in Late Eighteenth-Century Historical Thought,” History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 286-298.
A new scientific mentality of the late eighteenth century, dissatisfied with mechanistic and mathematical models of reasoning and demonstration, replaced static concepts with dynamic ones and defined reality in terms of complex interconnections. These thinkers believed there were basic regulative patterns common to all living entities which could be grasped only by analogical reasoning and comparison. But they also believed that the specific content, such as laws, languages, and nations, existed within a specific historic context. Historical understanding was seen as combining a sense for the formal pattern of development with an acute awareness of the specific force field of historical and environmental determinants existing at a given moment.
Richard A. McNeal, "Protagoras the Historian,” History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 299-318.
Protagoras, a contemporary of Herodotus, deserves some credit for developing Greek historical consciousness. Protagoras' theory of a two-stage development of mankind does postulate a sequence of events in a linear progression from simple to more complex, higher. That Protagoras engaged in myth indicates that he hadn't the foggiest notion of how to go about an historical answer to questions of human origins; the methods of historical inquiry were so new in his time that there was no body of existing research upon which to base an answer. Protagoras shows us how the historical habit of mind struggled, not altogether successfully, to free itself from the antihistorical thought which was far more congenial to the Greeks.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Robert Anchor on Neue Ansätze in der Geschichtswissenschaft by Herta Nagl-Docekal and Franz Wimmer, History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 319-331.
William H. Dray on Justifying Historical Descriptions by C. Behan McCullagh, History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 331-336.
G. R. Elton on The Reformation in Historical Thought by A. G. Dickens, John M. Tonkin, and Kenneth Powell, History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 336-342.
Peter Janssen on Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas by David Boucher, History and Theory 25, no. 3 (1986), 342-354.
Knowing and Telling History: The Anglo-Saxon Debate
F. R. Ankersmit, “The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History," History and Theory, Beiheft 25 (1986), 1-27.
The narrativist philosophy of history and the epistemological philosophy of history are opposed to each other and have remarkably little in common. Within the epistemological philosophy, the debate between the coveringlaw model advocates and the analytical hermeneutists has always been moving towards synthesis more than towards perpetuation of the disagreement. But the revolution from epistemological to narrativist philosophy of history enacted in Hayden White's work made the philosophy of history finally catch up with the developments in philosophy since the works of Quine, Kuhn, and Rorty. White stresses the "making" or "poetic" function of narrative at the expense of the "matching" function so dear to the mimetic epistemology of positivism. Philosophers of history should shake off this positivistic past and make history narrativist.
Frederick A. Olafson, “Hermeneutics: ‘Analytical’ and ‘Dialectical,’" History and Theory, Beiheft 25 (1986), 28-42.
A new hermeneutical theory is needed that will avoid both the "analytical" fixation on the epistemic functions of the historian and the "dialectical" tendency to "ontologize" interpretation to the point where questions of truth in the sense of fidelity to the past become increasingly marginal. The prospects for such a theory are not particularly good. We do not have what would be required to reconcile these ways of thinking about interpretation. That would be a new and more powerful way of conceiving the unity of theoretical and practical reason based on a much deeper understanding of what it is to be hurnan. But the antihumanistic temper of much contemporary thought makes a revival of constructive philosophical inin that question unlikely.
Murray G. Murphey, “Explanation, Causes, and Covering Laws,’" History and Theory, Beiheft 25 (1986), 43-57.
The real issues in the debate over whether historical explanations conform to the covering-law model concern not only history but human nature, human action, and human freedom. Modifications of the coveringlaw model are possible which may remove some of the objections to it. Human behavior is rule-governed. Rules are made by human agents and learned by human actors. Cultural rules alone do not explain behavior and cannot be used as "covering" generalizations. But when they are combined with appropriate deviance data to yield conformity statements, these statements can be used as explanatory generalizations - with a certain amount of leeway and the understanding that such rules can be changed or eliminated. These generalizations, such as those found in anthropology, perform the function of general laws in history.
L. B. Cebik, “Understanding Narrative Theory," History and Theory, Beiheft 25 (1986), 58-81.
Any comprehensive theory of narrative must accommodate both the justificational and the creative elements of narrative, the activities leading to narrative, and reflections upon the finished product. This examination of four levels of theory reveals the incompleteness of most extant theories, including those of Hayden White and Ricoeur. The four levels are: 1. narrative discourse and temporal language; 2. narrative and historical constructions; 3. narrative objects or stories; and 4. narrative functions and purposes. We remain far from our goal of achieving a comprehensive theory. However, by placing theories and partial theories within a metatheoretical framework, we can see more clearly their nature, ramifications, and limits, thereby differentiating between the contributions and the philosophical fads.
Leon J. Goldstein, “Impediments to Epistemology in the Philosophy of History," History and Theory, Beiheft 25 (1986), 82-100.
If history is to be taken seriously as a cognitive - not merely literary - discipline to which considerations of truth or falsity are relevant, it is because of the progress made over the course of centuries in the sharpening of the methodology of the infrastructure of history. By not attending to the way in which the historical past actually emerged in the course of work at the level of the infrastructure, philosophical writers, such as Mandelbaum, Pompa, McCullagh, and Gorman, have tended to perpetuate a myth of historians' selection. This has been the basic impediment to epistemology in philosophy of history. There is no selection from an antecedently established stock of fact-containing statements. The facts and the account are constructed in the course of the same intellectual endeavor, within the framework of an historians' tradition that is shaped by their work.
Cover image: “Las Meninas,” by Diego Velázquez (1656-1657)
