Volume 28
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
A. A. van den Braembussche, “Historical Explanation and Comparative Method: Towards a Theory of the History of Society," History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 1-24.
What is the relevance of an analytical philosophy of history to the practice of history? There are four fundamental criticisms of the existing analytical philosophy: analytical philosophers have concentrated on old, dualistic traditions of history; they have not provided sufficient empirical validation for their explanatory theories; they have paid little attention to the preliminary operations necessary to the writing of historical explanation; and they have ignored important stages of growth within the study of history. These are criticisms of the existing apragmatic philosophies of history, which lack a necessary empirical basis and become static, tied to one research tradition within historical scholarship. A pragmatic philosophy of history would focus on the growth of historical scholarship. The "History of Society," a name for the global approach to history, operates under the rules of comparative history. In the framework of a typology of the comparative method, types of difference and contrast refer back to the dominating types of macrocausality, generality, and inclusion. The logic of historical explanations is greatly determined by the choice of a particular type of comparative history. A pragmatic analysis demonstrates that a plurality of shades of meaning are possible in historical explanation, and that the traditional apragmatic dualist theory of a tension between the global and particular provides insufficient description.
John Kadvany, “A Mathematical Bildungsroman," History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 25-42.
In his philosophical history of nineteenth-century mathematics, Proofs and Persuasions: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, Imre Lakatos asserts that mathematical criticism was the driving force in the growth of mathematical knowledge during the nineteenth century, and provided the impetus for some of the deepest conceptual reformulations of the century. The philosophy of mathematics represented by Proofs and Refutations also presents a rich analysis of how mathematics can be thought of as an essentially historical discipline. Despite protestations by Lakatos that he completely discarded Hegel when he discovered the work of Karl Popper, his philosophy of error closely resembles Hegel's in the Phenomenology of Spirit. According to Lakatos, the impact of proofs and refutations on naive concepts is to erase them completely and replace them by proof-generated concepts. His historical point about proofs and refutations is that this pattern in the growth of mathematical knowledge is a relatively recent innovation. Hegel's and Lakatos' shared vision of theoretical knowledge is that rather than being the inspired work of timeless, totally subjective, intellectual intuition (itself an oxymoron), it is, more often than not, mediated by a lengthy history of speculation and failure.
Michael E. Hobart, “The Paradox of Historical Constructionism," History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 43-58.
There is a paradox, or self-defeating supposition in the core of constructionism, for it would appear that any attempt to resolve a dispute in historical interpretation within a convention of self-contained criteria of confirmation by appealing to justificatory criteria outside the convention -to wit, the theory of constructionism -is self-defeating. Through the theoretical consideration of historians isolated in a vat, following Hilary Putnam's metaphor, it becomes clear that the vat language of the historians does not have the possibility of referring, intrinsically or extrinsically, to anything external. The implications of the vat metaphor for an understanding of historical inquiry are: 1) we need to recognize and insist upon different levels of abstraction both in historical writing and in the justification of its claims; 2) applied to history, the set paradox reveals the need to recognize that at the most abstract level of consideration we encounter inescapable incoherence; and 3) we need to recognize that in some important sense reference must be completed in the world, regardless of the problems in characterizing this sense philosophically.
Georg G. Iggers, “New Directions in Historical Studies in the German Democratic Republic," History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 59-77.
The sharp separation of Eastern, and particularly Soviet and GDR, scholarship from the West is in part owing to ideological self-isolation, and part due to lack of interest or unwillingness to accept this scholarship in the West - The institutional framework within which historical studies take place in the GDR has placed severe limits on diversity within the historical profession. The official theoretical basis of historiography is represented by dialectical materialism, as a theory of reality, and historical materialism, as the conception of historical development intertwined with it. The political historian is subject to much closer direction than in social or cultural history, while social history deals primarily with local or regional history, and has begun conducting empirical case studies. Interestingly, biographies have acquired a new significance as historical works in both the GDR and the Federal Republic. In dealing with the German past, there is a conscious attempt in the GDR, as there has been recently in the Federal Republic, to overcome the fixation on 1933 and to reestablish a sense of pride in the past. There has been a greater openness and commitment to understanding historical phenomena with the reevaluation of the course of German history.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Theodore H. von Laue on Leopold von Ranke und Die Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 78-94.
Martin Jay on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures by Jürgen Habermas and Frederick Lawrence, History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 94-112.
Joseph F. Byrnes on Festivals and the French Revolution by Mona Ozouf and Alan Sheridan, History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 112-125.
Joseph Rouse on Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences by Richard W. Miller, History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989), 125-132.
ARTICLES
F. R. Ankersmit, "Historiography and Postmodernism," History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 137-153.
We no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them. The evident multi -interpretability of a text causes it gradually to lose its capacity to function as arbiter in the historical debate. It is necessary to define a new link with the past based on a complete and honest recognition of the position in which we now see ourselves placed as historians. In recent years, many people have observed our changed attitude towards the phenomenon of information. For postmodernism, science and information are independent objects of study which obey their own laws. Language and art are not situated opposite reality but are themselves a pseudo-reality and are therefore situated within reality. Because of the relation between the historiographical view and the language used by the historian to express his view - a relation which nowhere intersects the domain of the past -historiography possesses the same opacity and intensional dimension as art. The essence of postmodernism is precisely that we should avoid pointing out essentialist patterns in the past. There is reason to assume that our relation to the past and our insight into it will in future be of a metaphorical nature rather than a literal one.
Fritz K. Ringer, "Causal Analysis in Historical Reasoning," History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 154-172.
Contemporary analytical philosophy has not provided historians with an adequate account of their causal reasoning. Attempts to apply the laws of scientific explanation to history have occasioned an artificial split between historical interpretation and historical explanation. The lawlike generalizations of the natural sciences are both perfectly universal and perfectly delimited, whereas the typical generalizations of the historian are imperfectly universal and imperfectly delimited. In historical analysis, a particular development is hypothetically posited as the ordinary course of events, or as the established "trend," and an intervening process or set of conditions is identified as the cause of some alteration in the expected outcome. It is important to differentiate between historical events and the actions of historical figures. The analysis of historical actions requires attention to a second layer of interpretation, that of intention. In a good narrative, everything "important" for the actual outcome will be clearly displayed and cogently ordered in a network of interacting causal sequences; for that is what the historian means when he proposes to "tell the whole story."
Nadine Fresco, "Parcours du Ressentiment: Pseudo-Histoire et Théorie sur Mesure Dans Le ‘Révisionnisme’ Français," History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 173-197.
A so-called revision of the history of World War 11, which began shortly after the war, was popularized in France in the 1980s through the progressively combined action of extreme-right and former ultra-left militants. This "revision," actually a negation of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews, has focused on what were precisely the means of this mass murder, that is, the gas chambers. Using traditional patterns of antiSemitism, this peculiar rewriting of history claims that the genocide never took place and was in fact a hoax, built up by an international Jewish plot, to extort gigantic amounts of money from the Germans as reparations. In today's France, where racism and exclusion are strongly encouraged by a growing extreme right, and where anti-Semitism progressively comes out of the silence it has been forced to keep since 1945, such a "revisionist" view could gain a certain popularity.
Roger Chickering, "Young Lamprecht: An Essay in Biography and Historiography," History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 198-214.
Karl Lamprecht's late nineteenth-century work, Deutsche Geschichte, illustrates that the specific intellectual positions of an historian can be fitted into a framework which takes shape in response to traumas the historian experiences as a child. Throughout his youth, Lamprecht's father compared Karl to his dead brother. The serious narcissistic injury which Lamprecht suffered as a result of this treatment led directly to his adult academic habits. Lamprecht's scholarship was shaped by his habits, acquired in childhood, of venturing out beyond established bounds and appropriating through collecting. Lamprecht's work, ostensibly discussing the history of the selffulfillment of the German nation, was on some level an autobiographical work, a veiled statement of the historian's understanding of his own growth. Lamprecht's historical vision was determined, at least in part, by childhood circumstances which affected his assimilation of his professional training, as they encouraged in him a drive toward self-affirmation by means of challenging established bonds.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Burton L. Mack on Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate: Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew by Terry L. Miethe, Gary R. Habermas, and Antony G. N. Flew, History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 215-224.
Dudley Shapere on The Genesis of the Copernican World by Hans Blumeberg and Robert M. Wallace, History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 224-236.
Peter Munz on The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time by Donald J. Wilcox, History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989), 236-251.
ARTICLES
David M. Halperin, "Is There a History of Sexuality?” History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 257-274.
Sexuality is a cultural production: it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its physiological capacities by an ideological discourse. Foucault made sexuality into a field of historical investigation. The next project is to fill in the outlines of the picture he has sketched. The study of classical antiquity has a special role to play in this historical enterprise, in that it exposes sexuality, as a domain of knowledge, power, and personal experience, as a uniquely modern production. Neither the isolation of sexuality as an autonomous entity nor the use of sexuality to individuate human beings can be exampled in Greek antiquity. The history of sexuality therefore cannot posit "sexuality" as a stable object of historical knowledge but must inquire into the various ways that sexual experience is constituted in society. The answer to the question "is there a history of sexuality" is yes, but only a relatively recent one.
Susan Dunn, "Michelet and Lamartine: Regicide, Passion, and Compassion,” History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 275-295.
Historians Jules Michelet and Alphonse de Lamartine envisaged compassion and pity as vital forces that could shape history. They interpreted the outpouring of pity following the execution of Louis XVI as having a profound effect on French history in the nineteenth century. They both felt that, by killing the defenseless monarch, the Jacobins had awakened and unleashed tremendous sympathy that purified the monarchy in the public imagination, laying the psychological and moral groundwork for the Restoration. Surprisingly, they attributed the Restoration to Jacobin pitilessness. However, they also traced what was for them the real failure - the moral failure - of the Revolution to the Terror and to the Terror's initial crime and founding act, the regicide. Politically, Jacobin mercilessness served the royalist cause; morally, it destroyed the Revolution and discredited republican ideology for decades to come. But not only was pity central to Michelet's and Lamartine's visions of nineteenth-century history and concepts of revolutionary and political morality, it also extended to their attitudes toward historiography. They envisaged pity as the basis for historiography and as the fundamental moral mission for the historian.
Christopher Lloyd, "Realism and Structurism in Historical Theory: A Discussion of the Thought of Maurice Mandelbaum,” History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 296-325.
The late Maurice Mandelbaum was one of the most consistent and determined defenders of philosophical and social realism and of what he called "methodological institutionalism." This can be seen as containing a theory of human agency and a theory of how the social world comes to be institutionally structured, or what can be called a "structurist" theory. Mandelbaurn has argued for the irreducibility of social concepts and the necessity of scientific social laws for social and historical explanation. Purpose and Necessity in Social Theory (1987) and the totality of Mandelbaum's work support the contention that in the task of developing substantive social explanations three basic issues are equally important: the problem of social reality and truth, the problem of social causation, and the problem of social change. Mandelbaum's concepts of behavior and institutions - their relative autonomy, symbiosis, and historicity -together provide the basis for a sociological structurism. Moreover, he provides powerful philosophical support from within the analytical tradition for a social theory that rejects atomism and empiricism and embraces the historical nature of society as both a real structure and an ongoing structuring process.
REVIEW ESSAYS
R. Jay Wallace on After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre, History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 326-348.
George Allan on The Reality of Time by Errol E. Harris, History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 348-356.
Alfred R. Louch on The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs by John S. Nelson, History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 357-366.
Kieran Egan on Perceptions of History. An Analysis of School Textbooks by Volker R. Berghahn and Hanna Schissler, History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989), 366-372.
Bibliography of Works in the Philosophy of History, 1983-1987
”Bibliography of Works in the Philosophy of History 1983-1987,” History and Theory, Beiheft 28 (1989), 1-147.
”1978-1982: Addenda. A Supplement to Bibliography of Works in the Philosophy of History 1978-1982,” History and Theory, Beiheft 28 (1989), 147-160.
”Index of Names,” History and Theory, Beiheft 28 (1989), 161-187.
”Index of Subjects,” History and Theory, Beiheft 28 (1989), 188-191.
Cover image: Walt Disney Concert Hall, by Vanessa Werder (31 July 2020)
