Volume 31
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime," History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 1-20.
This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding in the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jürgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Ariès, and Roger Chartier shows that the "authentic public sphere" articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the "new culture" of private life identified by Ariès was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenth-century France. Having superimposed the "maps" of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Ariès upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution.
Peter Kosso, “Observation of the Past," History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 21-36.
A careful analysis of the role of observation in the natural sciences, with particular attention to the epistemic evaluation and evidential contribution of observations, is used as the basis for an argument that the opportunities for meaningful observations in studies of the human past (history and archaeology) are no fewer and no less important that in the natural sciences. Observation is described in terms of the acquisition of information through interaction with the world, a description which brings out the significant epistemic features of observation in science while avoiding the controversial and misleading issue of distinguishing the observable from the unobservable. This description applies as effectively and with equal epistemological sensitivity to empirical studies of the human past and it shows that they are not disadvantaged with respect to the sciences in terms of their ability to observe, directly or indirectly, the objects of study.
Dale S. Wright, “Historical Understanding: The Ch'an Buddhist Transmission Narratives and Modern Historiography," History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 37-46.
This paper analyzes the kind of historical understanding presupposed in the writing of classical Chinese Ch'an Buddhist "transmission" narratives and places this historical understanding into comparative juxtaposition with modern Western historiographic practice. It finds that fundamental to Chinese Ch'an historical awareness are genealogical metaphors structuring historical time and meaning in terms of generations of family relations and the practices of inheritance. These metaphors link the Ch'an historian to the texts of historical study in ways that contrast with the posture of modern historians. The essay outlines four basic differences between the self-understanding presupposed in Ch'an Buddhist historical writing and that assumed in modern historical research and concludes by suggesting how contemporary historical thinking might benefit from reflection on these differences.
REVIEW ESSAYS
R. A. McNeal on Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 by Martin Bernal, History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 47-55.
Leon J. Goldstein on Human Nature and Historical Knowledge: Hume, Hegel and Vico by Leon Pompa, History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 56-65.
Marilyn A. Katz on Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination by Paul Veyne and Paula Wissing, History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 65-81.
Helen Liebel-Weckowicz on History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt by Felix Gilbert, History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 81-87.
Fred Weinstein on Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication by John B. Thompson, History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992), 87-93.
ARTICLES
HISTORY AND FICTION
Bruce Mazlish, "The Question of The Question of Hu, “ History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 143-152.The article examines Jonathan Spence's book The Question of Hu, asking the central question as to what difference it makes if the book is viewed as history or fiction. (Spence's own question is whether Hu, the Chinese, is mad.) In addition to raising specific questions as to Spence's treatment of his materials, the article addresses the question of the historical novel, following on the work of Georg Lukács and Sir Walter Scott, and concludes that Spence's work is not of this genre. Neither is it a history à la Herodotus or Thucydides, where analysis--the raising of historical questions and sharing the evidence and inference with the reader--and narrative must go together. The article concludes that, wonderful as is The Question of Hu as literature, it is not a true piece of historical narrative. In coming to this judgment, the article has used Spence's book as a way of reflecting on fundamental questions concerning the nature of history, fiction, analysis, and narrative.
Cushing Strout, "Border Crossings: History, Fiction, and Dead Certainties, “ History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 153-162.Simon Schama's Dead Certainties is assessed in the light of the complex relationship between history and fiction, which share some limited common territory. Examples are cited from Mary Chesnut, Oscar Handlin, Georg Lukács, Herman Melville, Robert Penn Warren, P. D. James, and Wallace Stegner. Schama's book has some kinship to the skepticism found in "the new historicism" and "deconstruction," but also has its own differences from the fashionable "inverted positivism" which concludes that since evidence is not an open window on reality, it must be a wall precluding access to it. Only two of Schama's three narratives cohere, and while uncertainty may be a common theme, his historian's judgment tends to dissipate much of the mystery his fictionalizing technique creates. His idea of historical uncertainty arises from a fallacy that a "communion with the dead" (as in Henry James's The Sense of the Past), possible only for a time-traveler, represents authentic knowledge. Affirming that asking questions and relating narratives are not mutually exclusive, Schama joins the company of philosophers (Collingwood, Dray, Mink, Ricoeur) and historians (Hexter, John Lukacs, Veyne, and Strout) who have also made this case.
Elliot L. Jurist, "Recognizing the Past," History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 163-181.
The philosophical past, once a thing of the past, is with us again. I examine three recent positions about how to understand the philosophical past: the presentism of Richard Rorty, the traditionalism of Alasdair MacIntyre, and the interpretism of Charles Taylor. Rorty, MacIntyre, and Taylor all acknowledge a Hegelian influence upon their views; thus, I also explore Hegel's own view of the history of philosophy. Finally, I offer my own view that our relation to the past ought to be guided by "recognizing" it. Although the concept of recognition is found in Hegel, I argue that Hegel as well as Rorty and MacIntyre end up conceiving of our relation to the past as one of appropriation. Recognition as I define it eschews such appropriation; rather, it consists in a "working through" of the past in a sense the paper specifies.
Lydia Goehr, "Writing Music History," History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 182-199.
Influenced by methodological trends in contemporary cultural history, recent writings in music history now share a common and very basic concern: to reconcile the desire to treat musical works as purely musical entities with value and significance of their own with the desire to account for the fact that such works are conditioned by the historical, social, and psychological contexts in which they are produced. This essay places these modern reconciliations within a broader discussion of the uneasy relations that hold between the domains of the musical and the extra-musical. It shows how both the logic and the history of this relationship has reflected the need to establish borders of the musical domain, and, following upon that, criteria of relevance for determining what is and what is not to be included in the writing of music history.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Paul A. Roth on The Past within Us: An Empirical Approach to Philosophy of History by Raymond Martin, History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 200-208.
Ann Rigney on Between History and Literature by Lionel Gossman, History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 208-222.
Wolfgang J. Mommsen on The Unmasterable Past: Holocaust and German National Identity by Charles S. Maier, History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 222-224.
David Konstan on The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography by Arnaldo Momigliano, History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 224-230.
Theodore H. von Laue on Die Gesetze von Politik und Krieg: Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Geschichtswissenschaft by Robert Bossard, History and Theory 31, no. 2 (1992), 230-236.
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Steve Fuller, "Being There with Thomas Kuhn: A Parable for Postmodern Times,” History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 241-275.
Although The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most influential books of this century, its author, Thomas Kuhn, is notorious for disavowing most of the consequences wrought by his text. Insofar as these consequences have appeared "radical" or "antipositivist," this article argues that they are very misleading, and that Kuhn's complaints are therefore well placed. Indeed, Kuhn unwittingly succeeded where Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology tried and failed, namely, to alleviate the anxieties of alienated academics and defensive policy-makers by teaching them that they could all profit from solving their own paradigmatic puzzles. The influence of tructure is traced from the philosophy of science into the social sciences and science policy. Special attention is paid to the import of the General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard, in which Kuhn taught for most of the period prior to writing tructure. Harvard President James Conant had designed this curriculum in order to keep "pure science" in the good favor of the American public, in whose eyes it suffered after the use of the atomic bomb. While Conant was keen to stress the distinctiveness of science from other social practices, Kuhn's model seemed to provide a blueprint for reconstituting any practice as a science. This enabled potentially antiscientific academics to become scientists themselves, thereby neutralizing any radical challenges to the ends of scientific inquiry. The article concludes by reconstructing some of the inchoate possibilities for radical critique that Kuhn's success preempted, and by making some suggestions for how they may be recovered in the present academic environment.
ARTICLES
Mark Bevir, "The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism,” History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 276-298.
This article argues against both hard linguistic-contextualists who believe that paradigms give meaning to a text and soft linguistic-contextualists who believe that we can grasp authorial intentions only by locating them in a contemporaneous conventional context. Instead it is proposed that meanings come from intentions and that there can be no fixed way of recovering intentions. On these grounds the article concludes first that we can declare some understandings of texts to be unhistorical though not illegitimate, and second that good history depends solely on accurate and reasonable evidence, not on adopting a particular method.
Brian J. Whitton, "Universal Pragmatics and the Formation of Western Civilization: A Critique of Habermas's Theory of Human Moral Evolution,” History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 299-313.
The theory of human moral evolution elaborated in the later work of Jürgen Habermas represents one of the most challenging and provocative of recent, linguistically inspired attempts to reinterpret our understanding of Western history. In critically examining this theory, the present article identifies some major problems with Habermas's reinterpretation of the history of the formation of Western civilization as the universal pragmatic process of the evolution of human moral communicative competences. Drawing on the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, the article seeks to show how the formal grounding of Habermas's evolutionary theory in the categories of his universal pragmatic conception of communicative action ultimately prevents him from grasping the radically embodied nature of human discursive practice and its implications for the historical process of the formation of human moral will.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Lloyd S. Kramer on The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution by Ann Rigney, History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 314-325.
Richard H. King on Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Volume 1 by Orlando Patterson, History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 326-335.
Georg G. Iggers on Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (1945-65) by Ernst Schulin; Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft Nach 1945 by Winfried Schulze, History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 335-343.
Michael O'Malley on Chronotypes: The Construction of Time by John Bender and David E. Wellbery, History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 343-354.
Aviezer Tucker on Essais Hérétiques sur la Philosophie de L'Histoire by Jan Patocka and Erika Abrams, History and Theory 31, no. 3 (1992), 355-363.
History and Feminist Theory
EDITED BY ANN-LOUISE SHAPIRO
Ann-Louise Shapiro, “Introduction: History and Feminist Theory, or Talking Back to the Beadle," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 1-14.
Bonnie Smith, “Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 15-32.
For the past century French intellectuals have increasingly censured Athénaïs Michelet as an "abusive widow" who mutilated the work of her husband. This article explores the role such censure, often vituperative and emotionally charged, has played in the development of French historiography and argues that it has been crucial in constructing the revered figure of Michelet. Further, the figure of Michelet is itself central to the more important trajectory of historiography that depends on the establishment of "authors" as focal points of disciplinary power. Because the authorship of Michelet is so reliant on the scientific scholarship deployed to prove that Athénaïs Michelet was no author herself, the historiographic enterprise of establishing authorship is more than a little tainted with gender--not immune to it, as the profession claims to be. To the contrary, Michelet scholarship, like other historiographical debates, has taken great pains to establish the priority of the male over the female in writing history. If, as Howard Bloch as noted, this pointing to a male "original" and a female "copy" is the archetype of misogyny, then, the paper asks, is not scientific history so grounded?
Carolyn Steedman, “La Théorie qui n'en est pas une, or, Why Clio doesn't Care," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 33-50.
This article considers the practice of women's history in Britain over the last quarter century in relation to general historical practice in the society, to the teaching and learning of history at all educational levels, and to recent theoretical developments within feminism, particularly those developments framed by postmodernist thought. It makes suggestions about the common processes of imagining--or figuring--the past, and advances the view that because of shared cultural assumptions and shared educational experience, women's history in Britain has constituted a politics rather than a theoretical construct. The use of historical information by literary critics and theorists is discussed as forming a series of historical stereotypes of women that then, in their turn, shape historical investigation. The written history (specifically, women's history) is discussed as genre, and the author uses her recently published work on Margaret McMillan and late nineteenth-century British socialism to explore the narrative conventions governing the writing of autobiography, biography, and history, the differences among them, and the cognitive effects of employing them, as writer or as reader. A consideration of the sources used for the writing of McMillan's life highlights the particular constraints presented by women's history and the biography of women on the historian who wishes to discuss a woman who lived a public and political (rather than an interior or private) life.
Regina Morantz-Sanchez, “Feminist Theory and Historical Practice: Rereading Elizabeth Blackwell," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 51-69.
This essay assesses the value of social constructivist theories of science to the history of medicine. It highlights particularly the ways in which feminist theorists have turned their attention to gender as a category of analysis in scientific thinking, producing an approach to modern science that asks how it became identified with "male" objectivity, reason, and mind, set in opposition to "female" subjectivity, feeling, and nature. In the history of medicine this new work has allowed a group of scholars to better explain not only how women were marginalized in the profession but also the manner in which politics, male anxiety about shifts in power relations between the sexes, social and political upheaval, professional concerns, and changes in the family all had an impact on the production of knowledge regarding the female body, including the "discovery," definition, and treatment of a wide range of female ailments, from anorexia nervosa to fibroid tumors. Building on the work in the history of medicine already accomplished, the essay offers a critical rereading of the writings of Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer nineteenth-century woman physician and leader of the woman's medical movement. It contends that Blackwell, who lived through a revolutionary change in medical thinking brought on by discoveries in immunology and bacteriology, remained critical of "objectivity" as the "best" form of knowing and suspicious of the laboratory medicine that promoted it so enthusiastically. Moreover, her critiques of radical objectivity and scientific reductionism deserve to be recognized as foreshadowing the maternalist strain of thinking among contemporary feminist philosophers and thinkers such as Sara Ruddick and others.
Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and "The Status of Women" in Ancient Greece," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 70-97.
This essay investigates the constitution of the principal research question on women in ancient Greece, namely, the status of women in ancient Athens, and attempts to formulate a historiography for it under three headings. "Patriarchy and Misogyny" reviews the history of the question, from the time of its canonical formulation by A. W. Gomme in 1925, back to its initial constitution as a scholarly question by K. A. Böttiger in 1775, and up to its conceptualization in contemporary and feminist scholarship. This section concludes with a statement on the historiographical inadequacy of this research question, and suggests that a historiographically appropriate formulation must be based on a reconsideration of the ideology which informed the initial constitution of the research issue. "Women in Civil Society" investigates the ideological underpinnings of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarly orthodoxy, concluding that it was founded on a historiographical tautology--with the example of women in ancient Athens providing the basis for eighteenth-century views on women's exclusion from civil society, and with the latter serving as the foundation for the investigation of women in ancient Greece. This section concludes with a discussion of some recent work in which the areas of investigation have been reformulated, but notes the overall exclusion from this work of issues having to do with race and sexuality. "Race, Culture, and Sexuality" takes up the treatment of women in ancient Greece by Christoph Meiners who, in 1778, was one of the earliest to bring together considerations of cultural (later equivalent to racial) particularity with that of women's status. This section goes on to show how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformulations of ancient medical theory generated the notions of race and sex as biological essences, and invented also, and also with reference to ancient Greece, a theory of sexual degeneracy. This section concludes with a discussion of the current debate in the scholarly literature of the nature of sexuality, and in particular, of homosexuality, in Greek antiquity, and notes that this discussion has inadequately integrated questions having to do with female sexuality in antiquity and modernity.
Sylvia Schafer, “When the Child is the Father of the Man: Work, Sexual Difference and the Guardian-State in Third Republic France," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 98-115.
This article examines the place of gender and gendered identities both in representations of "the state" and the substance of social policy under the early Third Republic in France. In conceiving programs of assistance for abandoned or endangered children at the end of the nineteenth century, representatives of the state drew upon broad representation of the state and its relationship to the populace at large which universalized male identities and suppressed feminine specificity. The use of familial metaphors and the gendering of the valid (male) subject of the future was intrinsic to a process of interpreting collective and individual experience as the foundation for new institutions and new social policies. The case of the Ecole d'Yzeure, a state vocational school founded in 1887 exclusively for the training of female state wards, illustrates the manner in which the French Third Republic was forced to confront the ideological and practical contradictions imposed by its attribution--and suppression--of gendered identities. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Ecole d'Yzeure virtually disappeared from both the institutional infrastructure and the historical memory of Public Assistance in France, the victim of paradox and the state's fear of its own moral culpability; in producing female workers unable to support themselves on their "honest" wages or to resist the material and moral seductions of urban life, authorities came to admit that they had implicated the state itself in the "corruption" of women workers in nineteenth-century France. At a deeper level, the category of the state-produced "woman worker" proved irreconcilable with the larger historical and ideological frame within which Third Republic officials constructed the paradigms and institutions of state assistance to children.
Vron Ware, “Moments of Danger: Race, Gender, and Memories of Empire," History and Theory, Beiheft 31 (1992), 116-137.
This essay arises out of a concern to understand how categories of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference--particularly between women--have been constructed in the past, in order to explore how these categories continue to be reproduced in more recent political and ideological conflicts. Until very recently, feminist theory relating to the writing of history has tended to emphasize questions of gender and their articulation with class, with the result that issues of "race" have been overlooked. Focusing on ideas about whiteness and the various constructions of white racial identity can offer new avenues of thought and action to those working to understand and dismantle systems of racial domination. The recognition that the lives of women of color are inescapably prescribed by definitions of race as well as gender can also be applied to women who fall into the category "white." This essay argues for a feminist theory of history that inquires into the construction and reproduction of racialized femininities. Focusing on images and ideas about white womanhood produced at particular points in the past, examples from the author's book Beyond the Pale illustrate a range of questions that flow from having a perspective of race, class, and gender. The essay looks briefly at the idea of historical memory, using a discussion of oral history to consider ways in which social memory of Empire is continually affected and transformed by cultural forms in the present. Finally, by taking apart various constructions of white femininity in two narratives of cultural conflict, the essay demonstrates how a historically informed and "antiracist" feminism might intervene differently in debates about contemporary politics.
Cover image: London Poverty Map, 1898-1899 (sheet 3: northern district), uploaded by LSE Library
