Volume 29
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
David Ingram, “Blumenberg and the Philosophical Grounds of Historiography," History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 1-15.
Blumenberg's rejection of Karl Lowith's secularization thesis, as presented in Lowith's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and Blumenberg's defense of an alternative theory of functional reoccupations raises questions about the kind of progress he finds operant in historiography and historical understanding. These questions are best addressed within the framework of his recent Work on Myth, which defines the legitimacy of an age or myth in terms of progressive adaptability rather than autonomy. Neither this work nor the study on legitimacy, however, succeeds in establishing a transcendental warrant for the historiographic deployment of categories of progress and novelty. Blumenberg would have us believe that historical understanding and action are functionally legitimated by defacto institutions, be they traditional authorities or rationally adaptive "instrumental" mechanisms, whose own normative, teleological legitimacy remains largely unquestioned. The rational subject of self-legislation who was originally constituted as an autonomous member of a community of ends has been replaced in his philosophy of history by an irrational subject of selfassertion, who can only be functionalized for the "arbitrarily chosen ends" of the system.
Alan B. Spitzer, “John Dewey, the ‘Trial’ of Leon Trotsky and the Search for Historical Truth," History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 16-37.
The problematic nature of the relation between a politicized historical rhetoric and the presumed authority of brute fact was starkly outlined in the irreconcilable interpretations of the purge trials that tore apart the political Left in the 1930s. The conclusions of the Commission, headed by John Dewey, on the mock trial of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in April 1937 rested on the evidence of the factual fabrications of key confessions. The critical contemporary responses were more or less predictable in light of political partis pris. They either disparaged the entire procedure as a Trotskyite "court," where the driving purpose was to acquit Trotsky of guilt, deftly disposed of the key factual allegations, or saw the trial as attacking the Soviet system of justice itself, thus making irrelevant Trotsky's actual guilt or innocence. We now find the Commission's conclusions more persuasive than those of William Z. Foster, Malcolm Cowley, or F. L. Schuman not because of their superior tropological strategies, nor because of a skillful parade of rhetorical figures, nor because of the hermeneutic fusing of historical horizons, but because they satisfy familiar criteria of empirical inference and rational discourse.
Melvin Richter, “Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, “ History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 38-70.
The program of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, formulated primarily by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, calls for relating conceptual change to structural transformations of government, society, and economy in German-speaking Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, of Cambridge, identified the range of alternative and competing political discourses available to early modern writers, while Quentin Skinner, also of Cambridge, treated political theories in terms of those historical contexts and linguistic conventions which both facilitate and circumscribe legitimations of political arrangements, and he described such theories as intentional speech acts. Despite the differences in the German and Anglophone modes of treating political language, however, there are no major obstacles in bringing them together. The GG could profit from Pocock's technique of analysis and comparison in identifying early modern political languages, and the issues raised by Skinner about political thought and theorizing as forms of linguistic action, as well as the effect of general linguistic conventions upon available modes of legitimating political arrangements. The Anglophone mode might profit from considering the GG's non-reductive use of social history in conjunction with that of concepts, and from the GG's systematic use of contemporary sources of language and linguistic definitions.
REVIEW ESSAYS
William H. Sewell, Jr. on Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 71-82.
David Konstan on Marx on Classical Antiquity: Problems of Historical Methodology by Padelis Lekas, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 83-94.
Asa Briggs on Explanation in Social History by Christopher Lloyd, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 95-99.
Christopher J. Hill on Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England by Stephen Greenblatt, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 100-104.
W. B. Carnochan on Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 by Patricia B. Craddock, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 105-111.
Noël Carroll on The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto; The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art by Arthur Danto; and The State of the Art by Arthur Danto, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (1990), 111-124.
ARTICLES
Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream, “ History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 129-157.
Objectivity can be effectively described as striving for detachment -a capacity to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally. Novick's treatment of objectivity satisfies the requirements of objectivity, while on a rhetorical level he rejects the notion as unrealistic. Detachment enables an intellectual, specifically an historian, to operate with self-reflexivity and simultaneously socializes him or her. The ultimate power in a community of detached intellectuals striving for objectivity is a powerful argument. Under Novick's notion of objectivity, the conflict for historians between scholarly integrity and political alliance is unresolvable. Removing neutrality from the definition of objectivity resolves this conflict, enabling historians to strive for detachment and fairness, not disengagement from life. Postmodern disclaimers, such as Novick's on the futility of objectivity, fail, through being overly dismissive, to help us establish criteria for evaluating individual historical accounts. Having objectivity as a goal enables us to establish those criteria.
Adrian Vickers, "Balinese Texts and Historiography," History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 158-178.
There is a Balinese sense of history, albeit one different from most Western notions of history in that it stresses continuity with patterns from the past, not the past as a "foreign country." Balinese do not narrate events in chronological order for the purposes of writing history, as is the bent of Western scholars. Rather, they tell stories about other things that we would call "mythical" or "legendary" in order to refer to events. Balinese historical writing serves to establish and reflect patterns of social and cultural organization, where things "happen" fortuitously, and truth becomes manifested in the well-performed or well-written text. The textual form of "commemorations" makes the coincidental connections between texts and events quite explicit; they show that most Balinese texts are written as part of a process of writing history. The commemorations intimate that an event is not just an event. It is a moment selected from a temporal continuum by an act of remembering. The texts of Bali were written into the historical moment, in a two-way process of contextualizing and historicizing.
Stephen Brockmann, "The Politics of German History," History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 179-189.
What is startling about the debate that emerged between Ernst Nolte and Jiirgen Habermas with the Historikerstreit of West Germany in the summer of 1986 is not just the two scholars' sometimes fervent opposition to each other, but the similarity of their arguments. While Nolte argues for a new sobriety and matter-of-factness in dealing with history and Habermas for an engaged, critical history leading to a "postconventional," postnational identity, both are in agreement in their implicit assumption about the necessary role of history/historiography in politics as an ideological provider of meaning, a Sinnstifter, and both sides see the political present as intimately connected with the interpretation of the past. What is surprising also is the apparent wish on both sides to ignore the historical precedents for the debate: the concept of Sonderweg, or German historical uniqueness, and the idea of history as the privileged location for the Kulturnation of Germany. The debate about German history in a Federal Republic newly conscious of its own strength is only just beginning.
Jörn Rüsen, "Rhetoric and Aesthetics of History: Leopold von Ranke," History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 190-204.
Ranke's work marks a turning point in the development of historiography: it changed from literature to science. Ranke's introduction of reason into historiography gave it a certain aesthetic quality, which modern historical studies have forgotten. Traditional rhetoric, or the use of language for strategic purposes, was discarded for its fictitious nature. In its place, Ranke advocated a synthesis of the scientific principles of research and the more artistic principles of writing history. This synthesis initiated the aesthetics of historiography, and yielded a hidden rhetoric in the form of linguistic patterns of significance, or topoi, which give the facts of the past their sense and meaning for present-day life. Historiography, by its aesthetics, addresses its audience in a way that makes visible the mental forces which constitute the identity of the addressed people in the temporal course of their life. The postmodern recognition of rhetoric in historiography should not lead us back to premodern rhetoric but forward to a rhetoric of historiography which preserves the necessity of liberating reason in historiography and which reflects this reason not simply as a technique of research, but 'With a much wider and deeper approach to historical studies as a question of the aesthetics of historiography.
Rex Martin, "G. H. von Wright on Explanation and Understanding: An Appraisal," History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 205-233.
Two jarring results concerning the main theses of Georg Henrik von Wright's Explanation and Understanding are reached through an examination and criticism of his project. It is shown, contrary to his settled judgment both in EU and subsequently, that the schema of practical inference is a causal principle, and that it is nomological in character. But one feature of von Wright's overall analysis holds up and continues to show promise: his idea of understanding explanation. This idea combines the EU account of the schema and its instantiation with the notion of an intelligible connection of these instantiating elements with one another. Here the schema is deployed in conjunction with the test of intelligible connection as one of its conditions of application. The schema, so deployed, is revisable on the basis of experiences that do not conform to what we expect them to be when they are regimented in accordance with the model of understanding explanation; thus, even though the schema is not a general law, we have a basis for characterizing it as nomological, nonetheless.
REVIEW ESSAYS
William H. McNeill on Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History by Ernest Gellner, History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 234-240.
David P. Jordan on La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry, 1770-1880 by François Furet, History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 241-248.
Judith Butler on Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France by Michael S. Roth, History and Theory 29, no. 2 (1990), 248-258.
ARTICLES
Perez Zagorin, "Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations,” History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 263-274.
Zagorin presents a critique of F. R. Ankersmit's postmodernist philosophy of history ("Historiography and Postmodernism," History and Theory 28 ([1989], 137-153) as fallacious and opposed to some of the fundamental convictions and intuitions historians feel about their discipline. It questions Ankersmit's conclusion that the overproduction of historical writings and continuing generation of new interpretations has obliterated the past as an object of knowledge. It argues that Ankersmit's attempt, in accord with Hayden White, to aestheticize historiography and regard it as a linguistic construction indistinguishable from literature, must sever it from its necessary grounding in reality and truth. It also rejects as groundless Ankersmit's claim to have deconstructed causality, and concludes that the postmodernist conception trivializes historiography and deprives it of its essential function in education and culture.
F. R. Ankersmit, "[Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations]: Reply to Professor Zagorin,” History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 275-296.
That narrative language has the ontological status of being an object; that it is opaque; that it is self-referential; that it is intentional and, hence, intrinsically aestheticist; that the narrative meaning of an (historical) text is undecidable in an important sense of that word and even bears the marks of self-contradiction; that narrative meaning can only be identified in the presence of other meaning (inter-textuality); that as far as narrative meaning is concerned the text refers, but not to a reality outside itself; that criteria of truth and falsity do not apply to historical representations of the past; that we can only properly speak of causes and effects at the level of the statement; that narrative language is metaphorical (tropological) and as such embodies a proposal for how we should see the past; that narrative representations of the past have a tendency to disintegrate; all these postmodernist claims can be given a formal or even "modernist" justification if we are prepared to develop a philosophical logic suitable for dealing with the narrative substance.
David Carrier, "Art History in the Mirror Stage: Interpreting Un Bar aux Folies Bergères, “ History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 297-320.
There are a variety of interpretations of Manet's Un Bar aux Folies Bergères, but there is no genuinely neutral standpoint from which to judge their seemingly opposed accounts. T. J. Clark's analysis involves placing the work in the context of critical commentary by the artist's contemporaries, and examining the exact place and role of the mirror. Just as Manet painted two versions of the picture, so Clark has published two analyses of it; and just as we can ask whether the artist thus resolved the ambiguities of his first image, so an analogous question can be asked about Clark's commentaries. When we have two such pictures or texts, how do we understand their relationship? Perhaps the best way is to find a further commentary. A Lacanian interpretation is proposed. We may see in the picture a triangular structure of perception; between the gaze and the subject stands the screen on which the image is cast. This view, even more speculative than Clark's, offers a new suggestive way of grasping the relation between picture and texts interpreting it.
Andrus Pork, "History, Lying, and Moral Responsibility,” History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 321-330.
Two types of lying in history and in politics are the "direct lie" method and the "blank pages" method. "Direct lying" is morally more blameworthy than the "blank pages" method. Distortions on the level of semi-theoretical, general, historical statements are ethically more justifiable than distortions on the level of concrete, factual, empirical statements. Historians are morally responsible for lying even when their false account is due to a lack of talent, or when they know the truth but do not make it publicly known, especially if they are one of the few who has access to direct evidence. Historians are possibly excepted from moral responsibility for lying in the case of sanctions imposed upon them, including the martyr and hostage situations, where either their own or their family's property or life are threatened. Sanctions force some historians into an escapist strategy, such that they attempt to study other topics where their cognitive activities are not so heavily restricted by taboos.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Eero Loone on Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory by Alex Callinicos, History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 331-339.
Michael S. Roth on Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty, History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 339-357.
Irmline Veit-Brause on Die Oekumene der Historiker: Geschichte der Internationalen Historikerkongresse und des Comité International des Sciences Historiques by Karl Dietrich Edrmann, History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 358-375.
Robert D. Richardson Jr. on The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600-1835 by Hiram Caton, History and Theory 29, no. 3 (1990), 375-383.
Reassessing Collingwood
James Patrick, “Is ‘The Theory of History’ (1914) Collingwood's First Essay on the Philosophy of History?" History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), 1-13.
The J. A. Smith collection at Magdalen College, Oxford, contains an unsigned carbon copy, dated 1914, titled "The Theory of History." The manuscript, if Collingwood's, is his earliest essay on the philosophy of history. That "The Theory of History" may be Collingwood's is established by considerations of chronology, geography, and the appearance of certain intellectual interests mirrored in his other writing of the period 1913 to 1920. Present in the manuscript also are: the principles of the ideality of history, or the unity of past and present in the historian's thought; the principle that historical knowledge presupposes judgment, and therefore, like knowledge generally, changes both knower and known; the conviction that the past is necessarily contemporary; the dialectic between judgment and evidence which is somehow not purely subjective but yields genuine knowledge, and the analogous rejection of the positivistic notions that history is unknowable; and the interest in and identification or near identification of philosophy and history. All these are seminal to everything Collingwood would write on history from 1913 to 1940.
James Connelly, “Was R. G. Collingwood the Author of ‘The Theory of History’?" History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), 14-20.
There are strong grounds for believing that Collingwood cannot have been the author of "The Theory of History." First, the "Theory of History" is a typescript, and while Smith had papers typed up from time to time, Collingwood generally did not. Second, Collingwood, who kept good records, did not refer to "The Theory of History" either in his Autobiography or in his detailed "List of Work Done." Third, Collingwood always held the firm belief that good philosophy could only arise out of a reflection upon the philosopher's own personal experience, yet the work, written in 1914 when Collingwood was busy working on archaeological excavations at Ambleside, contains no archaeological references. Fourth, the philosophical content of "The Theory of History" is anachronistic for the young Collingwood writing in 1914, for at that time he had no marked interest in the philosophy of history. Fifth, the semi-colon, used quite frequently by Collingwood and indicating a genuine stylistic characteristic, is used at a much less frequent rate by the author of the "The Theory of History."
W. Jan van der Dussen, “Collingwood and the Idea of Progress," History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), 21-41.
The idea of progress was lent much importance by Collingwood, but it is difficult to elucidate his views on the idea. Considering his views of other related concepts -change, development, and process-aids the understanding of his idea of progress. Collingwood's treatment of the concept of historical progress shows a lack of consistency, when he denies on the one hand that ways of life can be grasped, while on the other he believes that historical periods may be understood. Collingwood denies the possibility that historical periods can be compared, for each period is characterized and judged in terms of its own problems and the solutions it find's for them. It is possible to distinguish four different positions in Collingwood's attitude to the concept of progress: a) It is dependent on a point of view; b) It is meaningless when used in the realms of art, happiness, and morality; c) It is meaningful when applied to the identity of a certain problem; d) It is necessary in solving practical and theoretical problems.
Leon J. Goldstein, “The Idea of History as a Scale of Forms," History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), 42-50.
The principle which guides the construction of Collingwood's The Idea of History, with the exclusion of the "Epilogomena," is an attempt to trace the stages through which the concept of history expresses itself as a scale of forms. Collingwood has important things to say in An Essay on Philosophical Method about concepts of certain sorts, but is mislead in his attempt to distinguish philosophical from non- philosophical concepts, owing to the positivist strictures current to the time, and his desire to protect philosophy and its concepts. Collingwood would like to offer in The Idea of History an account of the development of the idea of history-as- research, but cannot because he lived before the material needed for such an exposition to be possible was available. Had Collingwood been more sensitive to the way in which the contingent pushes the development of concepts along and leads to the reshaping of their generic essence, he might have come to see that the sort of concept he actually discusses in An Essay on Philosophical Method is not the only kind of concept in which the variable changes, and might have recognized that the idea of history is itself a scale of forms.
Michael A. Kissell, “Progressive Traditionalism as the Spirit of Collingwood's Philosophy," History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), 51-56.
There are certain leading ideas in the philosophy of Collingwood which can be unmistakably identified, despite the ambiguities and inconsistencies found in his thought. One such idea is progressive traditionalism, which has as a key component the idea of cumulative change, explained by Collingwood in the notion of "scale of forms" elaborated in An Essay on Philosophical Method. Progressive traditionalism sprang from the dialectic between philosophy, dealing with the eternal and immutable, and history, meaning change. Philosophy somehow deals with thought and thought is progressive by its very nature, while tradition is the vehicle of cumulative change. The progress of philosophy lies in the increasing degrees of understanding of the fate of absolute presuppositions and of the prospects of human civilization; the absolute presuppositions lying at the foundation of human civilization are the basic elements of tradition. Return to healthy traditions is one of the elements of Gorbachev's "new thinking," which reinforces the necessity of conserving something of the old which is living in order to create more satisfying social conditions.
G. S. Couse, “Collingwood's Detective Image of the Historian and the Study of Hadrian's Wall," History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), 57-77.
The most searching elaboration of the detective image of the historian has come from the pen of R. G. Collingwood. His short detective story "Who Killed John Doe?" implied that, in spite of the often tentative nature of the question-answer process in a successful historical investigation, the pieces of the puzzle fit together and their coherence becomes self-evident. The predominance of physical evidence in Collingwood's detective story had its counterpart in his research on Hadrian's Wall. In examining the questions raised by his investigations, and distinguishing between direct and circumstantial evidence, Collingwood was able to formulate a comprehensive theory concerning the date of the Wall's construction, the purpose of the Wall, the date of the related turf wall at Birdoswald, the chronological position of the fourteen forts along the Wall, and the role and date of the Vallum following the Walls' course. The pattern of research into the mysteries of Hadrian's Wall has hardly conformed to the linear, step-by-step schema of Collingwood's logic of question and answer. As with much detective work, it has embodied its share of informed guesswork, mistaken inference, false leads, and fortuitous revelations.
Cover image: Untitled, by Artem Beliaikin (5 August 2020)
