Volume 34
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Ignacio Olabarri, “’New’ New History: A Longue Durée Structure," History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 1-29.
Historians of historiography have paid more attention to differences and innovations than to similarities and constants. This article investigates the importance of "longue durée structures" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography. The first part shows the extent of the common philosophical ideas shared by the "new histories" on the rise from the 1920s to the 1970s: the Annales school, Marxist historiography, the American social science historians, the Past and Present group, and the "Bielefeld school." It suggests continuity between German Historismus and these "new histories." From the postmodern point of view, all "new histories" are also "modern histories"; since the 1970s various types of history have come to be regarded as postmodern and, therefore, radically different. The second part of the article brings to light major continuities running from modern to postmodern thought, from the "new histories" to the "new new histories." The article ends with some ideas on how to "reconstruct" a plural historiographical community.
FORUM: CHAOS THEORY REVISITED
Paul A. Roth and Thomas A. Ryckman, “Chaos, Clio, and Scientific Illusions of Understanding," History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 30-44.A number of authors have recently argued that the mathematical insights of "chaos theory" offer a promising formal model or significant analogy for understanding at least some historical events. We examine a representative claim of each kind regarding the application of chaos theory to problems of historical explanation. We identify two lines of argument. One we term the Causal Thesis, which states that chaos theory may be used to plausibly model, and so explain, historical events. The other we term the Convergence Thesis, which holds that, once the analogy between history and chaos theory is properly appreciated, any temptation to divide history from the rest of science should be greatly lessened. We argue that the proffered analogy between chaos theory and history falls apart upon closer analysis. The promised benefits of chaos theory vis-à-vis history are either fantastic or, at best, an extremely loose heuristic which, while retaining nothing of the considerable intrinsic interest of nonlinear dynamics, easily seduces the unwary into taking at face value terms and concepts that have a specifically precise meaning only within the confines of mathematical theory.
George Reisch, “Scientism Without Tears: A Reply to Roth and Ryckman," History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 45-58.In response to Roth and Ryckman, I explain in more detail why narratives fashioned with ideal, quantitative covering laws cannot be combined into large-scale covering-law explanations and specify further reasons for supposing that history can be conceived as dynamically nonlinear. I also appeal to an episode in the history of science to examine the idea that dynamical complexity is local in historical space and time and to suggest that such complexity does not pose a unique problem for historical narration. Finally, I suggest that Roth and Ryckman's critique of the use of nonlinear dynamical concepts in historical explanation must extend to explanations employing concepts from linear science. I conclude that their warning against the incoherence of scientism is not convincing.
Michael Shermer, “Exorcising Laplace's Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History and Metahistory," History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 59-83.The analysis of physical and biological systems through models and mathematics of chaotic behavior and nonlinear dynamics rose to prominence in the 1980s. Many authors, most notably Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, made glancing references to applications of this new paradigm to the social and historical sciences, but little fruit was harvested until this decade. Physiologists studying irregular heart rhythms, psychologists examining brain activity, biologists graphing population trends, economists tracking stock price movements, military strategists assessing the outbreak of wars, and sociologists modeling the rise of cities, found nonlinear dynamics refreshingly stimulating in reevaluating (and often restructuring) old theories and creating new ones. Modeling the past was an inevitable extension of this trend, and theorizing on the new historiography soon followed, with the terms of the debate outlined from 1990 to 1993 by Alan Beyerchen, Katherine Hayles, Stephen Kellert, Charles Dyke, myself, and, in the pages of History and Theory, by George Reisch and Donald McCloskey. The subject of "the chaos of history" is now enjoying a healthy exchange of ideas from all sides. This essay: (I) reviews the precedence for integrating chaos and history; (II) gives a brief history of this integration including an evaluation of a critique of Reisch and McCloskey by Roth and Ryckman, and presents a metahistory of how chaos theory explains its own development; (III) defends a chaotic model of historical sequences; (IV) gives a specific historical example of nonlinear history; (V) explores the latest trends in the field of self-organization, antichaos, simplexity, and feedback mechanisms, providing data to show that modern and historical social movements change in a parallel fashion; and (VI) exorcises Laplace's demon by showing it was always a chimera.
Berel Lang, “Is It Possible to Misrepresent the Holocaust?" History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 84-89.The essays by Hans Kellner, Wulf Kansteiner, and Robert Braun in the Forum, "Representing the Holocaust" (History and Theory, May l994) attack historical realism as a legitimate form of such representation. Like any other part of narrative, "facts" do not speak for themselves in respect to the Holocaust or any other historical "event"; they are context-dependent and thus speak only in the voice of their interpreters. The symposiasts adopt this view on the assumption that an alternative to historical realism will yet reaffirm the primary data of the Holocaust: the number of deaths, identities, places, dates. But I argue to the contrary: that ontologically there is but one alternative to historical realism, and that this alternative offers no ground even in principle for acknowledging a contradiction between an assertion and a denial that, for example, "On January 20th, l942, Nazi officials at Wannsee formulated a protocol for the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question.'" Thus, at least in respect to items of chronicle, historical realism (and the principle of contradiction) must be granted--unless one is ready to affirm, as the symposiasts apparently are not, a radical epistemic and moral (and of course historical) skepticism.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Richard Buel Jr. on A History of Warfare by John Keegan, History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 90-106.
Josef Chytry on Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture by Robert B. Pippin, History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 106-121.
Robert Anchor on Michel Foucault: Subversions of the Subject by Philip Barker and Michel Foucault, History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 122-132.
Cecilia Miller on Vico: A Study of the "New Science" by Leon Pompa, History and Theory 34, no. 1 (1995), 132-138.
World Historians and Their Critics
EDITED BY PHILIP POMPER
Philip Pomper, “World History and Its Critics," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 1-7.
William H. McNeill, “The Changing Shape of World History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 8-26.
After surveying the development of world-historical views from Herodotus and Ssu-ma Chen to Spengler and Toynbee, the author sketches his own current understanding of the best approach to the subject. The organizing concept is hard to name, being the geographically largest circle of effective interaction among peoples of diverse cultures and circumstances. In recent times interaction has become literally world-wide; but before 1500 several different communications nets co-existed, each with a dynamic of its own, though the largest was always situated in Eurasia and now embraces the globe. Competing terms exist: "interactive zone," "world system," and "ecumene," but none is completely satisfactory or generally accepted by world historians. Nonetheless, the author asserts that a perceptible drift towards recognizing the reality and centrality of this large structure in the human past has begun to show up among practicing world historians; and the balance of the essay sketches how key alterations in patterns of Eurasian communication mark the principal stages in the expansion and intensification of interaction within the Eurasian ecumene.
Francis Fukuyama, “Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 27-43.
The argument contained in The End of History and the Last Man consists of an empirical part and a normative part: critics have confused the two and their proper relationship. The assertion that we have reached the "end of history" is not a statement about the empirical condition of the world, but a normative argument concerning the justice or adequacy of liberal democratic political institutions. The normative judgment is critically dependent on empirical evidence concerning, for example, the workability of capitalist and socialist economic systems, but ultimately rests on supra-empirical grounds. The empirical part concerns whether there is something like the Hegelian-Marxist concept of History as a coherent, directional evolution of human societies taken as a whole. The answer to this is yes, and lies in the phenomenon of economic modernization based on the directional unfolding of modern natural science. The latter has unified mankind to an unprecedented degree, and gives us a basis for believing that there will be a gradual spread of democratic capitalist institutions over time. This empirical conclusion, however, does no more than give us hope that there is a progressive character to world history, and does not prove the normative case. The normative grounding of modern liberal democracy has indeed been put in jeopardy by the philosophical "crisis of modernity" inaugurated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Contemporary postmodernist critiques of the possibility of such a grounding have not, however, adequately come to terms with the destructive consequences of their views for liberal democratic societies. This aporia, discussed most seriously in the Strauss-Kojève debate, is the central intellectual issue of our age.
Ashis Nandy, “History's Forgotten Doubles," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 44-66.
The historical mode may be the dominant mode of constructing the past in most parts of the globe but it is certainly not the most popular mode of doing so. The dominance is derived from the links the idea of history has established with the modern nation-state, the secular worldview, the Baconian concept of scientific rationality, nineteenth-century theories of progress and, in recent decades, development. This dominance has also been strengthened by the absence of any radical critique of the idea of history within the modern world and for that matter, within the discipline of history itself. As a result, once exported to the nonmodern world, the historical consciousness has not only tended to absolutize the past in cultures that have lived with open-ended concepts of the past or depended on myths, legends, and epics to define their cultural selves, it has also made the historical worldview complicit with many new forms of violence, exploitation and satanism in our times and helped rigidify civilizational, cultural, and national boundaries.
Lewis D. Wurgaft, “Identity in World History: A Postmodern Perspective," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 67-85.
Since Erik Erikson's clinical and psychohistorical writings of the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of identity has served as a bridge between formulations of personality development and the psychosocial aspects of cultural cohesiveness. More recently, under the influence of a postmodern perspective, clinical writers have questioned the notion of a stable, integrative identity or self as an organizing agent in human behavior. In the area of gender identity, particularly, feminist theorists have criticized the construction of polarized gender identities both for their psychological inadequacy and their cultural bias. A parallel line of criticism has developed at the cultural or historical level. Writers such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner have effectively contrasted the shallow ideological and historical roots of nationalism with the effort to base national identity on the appeal to tradition and continuity. Other writers have emphasized the heterogeneous condition of the contemporary nation in a postcolonial world. They contrast a static concept of cultural or national identity to a more fluid notion which incorporates the ongoing process of displacement that, they argue, characterizes national discourse. The identity structures that emerge from this critique, both within a clinical and a historical setting, are more ambiguous and unstable, and reflect the heterogeneous experience of contemporary culture. World historians such as William McNeill and Theodore von Laue have cited the boundedness of historians within their own cultural identities as a significant obstacle to the development of an intercultural approach to world history. These postmodern reformulations of identity theory challenge the notion of cultural boundedness by emphasizing the discontinuities endemic to modern life and the inescapably plural character of contemporary identity.
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, “The World-System Perspective in the Construction of Economic History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 86-98.
This essay examines the experience of rewriting historical narratives from a world-system perspective, drawing on the author's attempt to construct an integrated image of the world economy in the thirteenth century. Searching for an intermediate epistemological path between unanchored postmodern hermeneutics and overconfident positivism, the author argues that three apparent deviations from the "ideals of positivist social science," which she ironically labels eccentricity, ideology, and idiosyncrasy, can yield significant "remakings" of world history. Eccentricity, namely, recognizing perspectives other than those that conventionally view the world through the eyes of the West, can help historians to escape from ethnocentrism or Eurocentrism. Ideology, more conventionally called theory, is essential if historians are to select and integrate new material. And idiosyncrasy in the interests and backgrounds of historians can often be the source of the re-vision so essential for challenging earlier historical narratives. The author alludes to parallels with ethnographic research methods and cautions against substituting these three aids to research for rigorous attention to empirical sources and "the real world."
William A. Green, “Periodizing World History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 34 (1995), 99-111.
Periodization is rooted in historical theory. It reflects our priorities, our values, and our understanding of the forces of continuity and change. Yet periodization is also subject to practical constraints. For pedagogical reasons, world historians must seek reasonable symmetry between major historical eras despite huge discrepancies in the availability of historical data for separate time periods and for different areas of the world. Political issues arise in periodization. Should world history provide integrated treatment of the evolution of civilization, focusing upon the most developed societies (chiefly Eurasian)? Or should it provide equal time to cultures outside the evolutionary mainstream (sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America)? If integration is to be preferred--as this article advocates--it is incumbent upon integrationists to provide some overarching theory (or theories) of change to demonstrate how the destinies of the world's peoples have been linked through the millennia. Although the article attempts to demonstrate how comprehensive theories of change can facilitate the formulation of world history periodization, it does not minimize the difficulty of developing a universally operative organic theory of change. It examines several theoretical orientations, but principal attention is given to world-systems analysis, the most fully refined and well articulated body of theory currently commended as a vehicle for structuring world history. Acknowledging that no body of theory currently achieves a satisfactory universal integration of world history and that this situation may prevail in the future, the author recommends, for the present, an eclectic periodization of four epochs divided at roughly 1000 B.C.E., 400-600 C.E., and circa. 1492.
ARTICLES
FORUM: THE MEANING OF HISTORICISM AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR CONTEMPORARY THEORY
F. R. Ankersmit, "Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis," History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 143-161.According to German theorists historicism was the result of a dynamization of the static world-view of the Enlightenment. According to contemporary Anglo-Saxon theorists historicism resulted from a de-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing. It is argued that, contrary to appearances, these two views do not exclude but support each other. This can be explained if the account of (historical) change implicit in Enlightenment historical writing is compared to that suggested by historicism and, more specifically, by the historicist notion of the "historical idea." Aspects of the contemporary debate about the nature and the task of historical writing can be clarified from the perspective of the differences between Enlightenment and historicist historical writing.
Georg G. Iggers, "Comments on F. R. Ankersmit's Paper, ‘Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,’" History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 162-167.My differences with F. R. Ankersmit's essay are historiographical and theoretical. On the historiographical plane I disagree with the sharp distinction he draws between the "ontological realism" of Enlightenment historiography and the historical outlook of classical historicism. An examination of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shows that Gibbon indeed takes into account internal changes in the Roman Empire. Ranke and Droysen on the other hand assume that the rubjects of their study, whether the Papacy or the Prussian state, preserve their identity through time. And in their attempt to "raise history to the rank of a science" (Droysen), historicists in seeking to show wie es eigentlich gewesen (Ranke), go farther in the direction of realism than do Enlightenment historians who are keenly aware of the role of perspective and of the literary and aesthetic aspects of historical writing. On the theoretical plane, although I agree with Ankersmit that metaphor occupies a central role in historical discourse, I disagree when he writes that "coherence has its source either in reality or in the language we use about it. There is no third possibility." I argue that while reality can be approached only through the mediation of language and metaphor, these presuppose a reality which can be known, no matter how complex and mediated the process of cognitive approximation may be. Rejecting historical realism, Ankersmit nevertheless wants to "encounter the past with the same directness with which the anthropologist encounters the alien culture," and thus to escape "all the ideological and emancipatory pretensions of its historiographical predecessors." Yet the very "new cultural history" he takes as an example shows that this cannot be done.
F. R. Ankersmit, "Reply to Professor Iggers," History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 168-173.Professor Iggers's main target in his critique of my essay is my preference for the historicist over the Enlightenment conception of the past. I agree with Iggers that in contemporary historical theory and contemporary philosophy of language many effective arguments against historicism can be found. I argue, however, that these arguments lose much of their cogency if we recognize that the historicist notion of "the historical idea" can be redefined to satisfy both the requirements of actual historical practice and contemporary philosophy of language. The main task of the contempo- rary theoretician is not to reject historicism but to recognize and to discover its intellectual riches, and to repair it whenever and wherever necessary.
Jan R. Veenstra, "The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt: On Poetics of Culture and the Interpretation of Shakespeare," History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 174-198.
This essay on the much acclaimed critic Stephen Greenblatt deals extensively with the New Historicism he developed and for which he coined the name "Poetics of Culture." Contrary to many older interpretive methods and schools that tend to see historical and literary texts as autonomous entities, Poetics of Culture seeks to reveal the relationship between texts and their sociohistorical contexts. Cultural Poetics assumes that texts not only document the social forces that inform and constitute history and society but also feature prominently in the social processes themselves that fashion both individual identity and the sociohistorical situation. By means of an economic metaphor, Greenblatt explains how texts and other symbolic goods, by circulating in a society via channels of negotiation and exchange, contribute to the distribution of social energy, by which he means the intensities of experience that give value and meaning to life and that are also indispensable to the construction of self-awareness and identity. The beating heart, as it were, of this whole process of circulation is identified as a dialectics of totalization and differentiation, as a powerful social force that oscillates between the extremes of sameness and otherness. In several books Greenblatt has elaborated the various aspects of this Poetics of Culture, such as the circulation of social energy, the dialectics of totalization and differentiation, and the process of self-fashioning. This essay discusses some problems of this interpretive method and argues, in comparing it to a more traditional hermeneutics, that social energy, self-fashioning, and the earlier mentioned dialectic are only phenomena in Greenblatt's interpretation of texts and are not actual parts of sociohistorical contexts. Poetics of Culture, in spite of its radical claims, is a genuine hermeneutics operating in a more or less traditional vein.
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Gyan Prakash, "Orientalism Now," History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 199-212.
Notwithstanding its own authoritative status now, Edward Said's Orientalism has lived a seditious life and thrived on it. If its characterization of Orientalism as a political doctrine has infuriated critics into denouncing it as an ideologically-motivated work, this has also incited further assaults on the authority of Orientalist knowledge. More than anything else, what accounts for Orientalism's insurgent existence is its relentless transgression of boundaries drawn by disciplines of knowledge and imperial governance. Unsettling received oppositions between the Orient and the Occident, reading literary texts as historical and theoretical events, and cross-hatching scholarly monographs with political tracts, it forced open the authoritative modes of knowing the Other. An indeterminacy emerged in the authority of Western knowledge as it was brought down from its Olympian heights to expose its involvement in Western power. It is this indeterminacy that has served as a provocation to rethink the modern West from the position of the Other, to go beyond Orientalism itself in exploring the implications of its demonstration that the East/West opposition is an externalization of an internal division in the modern West. Even if Orientalism performs this task inadequately, the proliferation of the postcolonial "writing back" would be unimaginable without it.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Laura L. Frader, "Dissent Over Discourse: Labor History, Gender, and the Linguistic Turn" (A Review of Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis by Lenard R. Berlanstein and Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor by Ava Baron), History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995), 213-230.
Historians influenced by post-structuralism and the linguistic turn and feminist historians concerned to incorporate the category of gender into historical analysis have recently challenged the categories, methodologies, and questions of labor history as it has been practiced in the United States for the past thirty years. Those operating under the influence of the linguistic turn have challenged labor history's foundational assumption of class as both a category of analysis and as a social formation constituted primarily by material and productive relations. They have argued that class and class interest are constituted culturally and discursively rather than materially. Feminist critics have called attention to the importance of gender both as a subject of analysis and as an analytical lens through which to examine the ways in which class and class relations have been constituted on the basis of sexual difference. Their goal is to interrogate the ways in which notions of masculinity and femininity shaped relations of subjugation and domination and governed mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in work and in the labor movement. These challenges to the field have led some to charge that labor history is undergoing an epistemological crisis. Recent work by labor historians of France in Lenard Berlanstein's collection, Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis and by feminist American labor historians in Ava Baron's Work Engendered: Towards a New History of American Labor has taken up these challenges and demonstrates the potential of these new analytical frameworks to awaken new debates and produce new knowledge in the field. Essays in both collections suggest that labor history is less in crisis than it is in the process of an epistemological and methodological rebirth.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Paul A. Roth on Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge by Murray G. Murphey, History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995), 231-244.
Michael Kammen on Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995), 245-261.
Helen Liebel-Weckowicz on Bürgerliche Modernisierungskrise und historische Sinnbildung: Kulturgeschichte bei Droysen, Burckhardt und Max Weber by Friedrich Jäger, History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995), 261-270.
ARTICLES
Kerwin Lee Klein, "In Search of Narrative Mastery: Postmodernism and the People without History,” History and Theory 34, no. 4 (1995), 275-298.
This article traces the competing meanings of "master narrative" in current theoretical debates over history and culture. The phrase "master or meta narrative" has grown popular for describing stories which seem to assimilate different cultures into a single course of history dominated by the West. Master narrative, like its predecessors Universal History and speculative philosophy of history, has become something to avoid. But our increasingly global situations demand stories that can describe and explain the worldwide interactions of diverse cultures and communities. From this convergence--a growing wariness of global stories coupled with situations which seem to demand them--has emerged a popular new double plot of world history in which cultural differentiation and cultural homogenization go hand in hand. The development has led to some surprising homologies and contrasts among the new histories created by thinkers from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard to James Clifford and Francis Fukuyama. But our new "postmodern" distinctions between master and local narratives have carried over the venerable antinomy of people with and without history, and the search for timeless formal principles differentiating "historical" and "nonhistorical" modes of discourse and ways of being threatens to create new varieties of essentialism.
Fred Weinstein, "Psychohistory and the Crisis of the Social Sciences,” History and Theory 34, no. 4 (1995), 299-319.
Psychohistory is affected by problems similar to those affecting the broader discipline of history, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences generally: the heterogeneous composition of social movements, the phenomenon of discontinuity, and the capacity of people actively to construct versions of the world from their own idiosyncratic conflicts and in the context of the many different social locations they occupy. In particular, answers to the key question, how the social world is related to mind or events to cognitive and affective responses, seem as remote as ever. At the same time, ironically, a number of prominent social theorists, compelled to acknowledge the failure of rational choice and resource mobilization theories, have expressed a renewed interest in issues of collective identities, norms, values, moral obligations and transgressions, that is, in issues that have been central to psychohistory from the beginning. Historians no doubt will try to follow the paths taken by theorists, as they have in the past, but it is uncertain what paths they, in turn, will take.
FORUM: RAYMOND MARTIN, JOAN W. SCOTT, AND CUSHING STROUT ON TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT HISTORY
Raymond Martin, Joan W. Scott, and Cushing Strout on Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob History and Theory 34, no. 4 (1995), 320-339.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Daniel Gordon on History as an Art of Memory by Patrick H. Hutton, History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995), 340-354.
Joseph Fracchia on Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory by Moishe Postone, History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995), 355-371.
Raymond Grew on World Historians and Their Goals: Twentieth-Century Answers to Modernism by Paul Costello, History and Theory 34, no. 3 (1995), 371-394.
Cover image: “Everything is Energy,” by Darius Bashar (24 January 2018)
