Volume 35
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Doyne Dawson, “The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories," History and Theory 35, no. 1 (1996), 1-28.
This article surveys the history since the Enlightenment of the controversy over the origins and functions of warfare, focusing on the question of whether war is caused by nature or nurture. In the earlier literature (before 1950) five positions are distinguished. (1) The Hobbesian thesis: war is part of human nature and serves both the internal function of solidarity and the external function of maintaining the balance of power. (2) The Rousseauean thesis: war is not in human nature but was invented by states for the functions mentioned above. (3) The Malthusian thesis: war serves the grand function of reducing population, quite apart from its conscious proximate functions. (4) The Spencerian thesis: a combination of Hobbes and Malthus--war serves the grand function of human evolution. (5) The cultural anthropologists' thesis: an extreme version of Rousseau--war is a dysfunctional historical accident. Most of the article is devoted to the recent controversy, distinguishing three major theories: (1) sociobiology, an updated version of the Spencerian thesis; (2) cultural ecology, an updated version of the cultural-anthropological thesis, combining Rousseau and Malthus; (3) cultural Darwinism, which holds that the process of cultural evolution mimics natural selection. The last theory is favored here. It implies that warfare has no grand functions, either sociobiological or ecological. War is neither nature nor nurture, but nurture imitating nature. Hobbes was right in thinking war has always been around; Rousseau was right to think primitive warfare was not the same thing as the wars of states.
David Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood's Spiritual History (In and Out of Context)," History and Theory 35, no. 1 (1996), 29-55.
Collingwood has often been depicted as a neglected and isolated thinker whose original ideas on the contextual nature of truth (in both history and philosophy) anticipated important trends in postwar thought. The spiritual aspects of his thought, however, have often been problematic, precisely because they seem to conflict with his more influential ideas. Although Collingwood's overtly theological and metaphysical writing can be safely confined to an early, perhaps even juvenile phase of his career, the spiritual dimension of some of his later work, including, for example, the famous doctrine of reenactment, has often been marginalized, repressed, or domesticated in order to preserve Collingwood's historical place in twentieth-century philosophy of history. This radical conflict continues to disrupt both the reception of Collingwood's ideas and attempts to contextualize them historically. However, if the spiritual and theological nature of Collingwood's thought is taken seriously, and not marginalized, it is hard to see his career as discrete stages of development. The problem of transcendent identity was a central concern for Collingwood throughout his career, and it unifies much of his thinking on divergent topics. The problematic idea of reenactment actually opens up a complex connection in Collingwood's thought between ethical action, historical time, and our relationship with divine reality. It is this rediscovery of Collingwood's spiritual ideas on history that leads to a reevaluation of his own historical context, for it becomes clear that these ideas were neither eccentric nor old-fashioned. The problems Collingwood was addressing link him with a much broader movement of European thought in the interwar period, one that was trying to mediate transcendent reality and concrete historicity in a situation of crisis and fragmentation.
Ilie Paunescu, “L'Entrée dans la Posthistoire: Critères de Définition," History and Theory 35, no. 1 (1996), 56-79.
À partir du moment où le chasseur-cueilleur préhistorique devenait agriculteur, une nouvelle société et une culture originale créées par et créatrices de l'organisation sociale de la production marquaient le début d'un monde inédit, le début de l'histoire. À partir du dix-neuvième siècle le déterminant historique du comportement et de l'évolution de l'homme, l'organisation sociale de la production, devenait, dans un intervalle extrêmement court, le subalterne d'un facteur décisif inhabituel, de l'organisation sociale de l'invention. Le monde généré par et générateur de toujours autres inventions qui bouleversent à un rythme soutenu l'humanité et la nature est essentiellement différent du monde historique. C'est un monde posthistorique. Tout en se transformant sans cesse, la société et la culture posthistoriques ont poussé si loin la transformation de leur univers qu'on assiste déjà à l'implantation dans la nature terrestre de deux macro-créations artificielles: d'un nouveau règne, le règne technique, dû à l'invention physique, et d'une nouvelle forme de vie, la paravie, produite par l'invention biologique. Les menaces inquiétantes à l'adresse de l'homme et de la nature multipliées par ces deux systèmes insolites ont leur origine dans le caractère sauvage de l'actuelle organisation sociale de l'invention.
Malachi Haim Hacohen, “Leonard Krieger: Historicization and Political Engagement in Intellectual History" (a Review Essay of Leonard Krieger, Ideas and Events: Professing History and Time's Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New), History and Theory 35, no. 1 (1996), 80-130.
This essay explores the methodological and historiographical legacy of Leonard Krieger (1918-1990), one of the most sophisticated and influential intellectual historians of his generation. The author argues that Krieger's mode of historicization exemplifies essential methodological practices neglected by contemporary historians and provides a model for scholarly political engagement. The essay is divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of Krieger's last two works: Time's Reasons, a methodological and historiographical study, and Ideas and Events, a posthumously published collection of essays written throughout Krieger's life. The second section, focusing on the essays on Sartre, Kant, and Pufendorf in Ideas and Events, defines Krieger's mode of historicization as the pursuit of theoretical tensions in conceptual structures and their explanation through the dilemmas of thinkers. Krieger's historicization of tensions and dilemmas was constrained, however, by his privileging of internal theoretical explanations over external contextual ones. The author argues that opening theories to broader historical contexts may provide more satisfactory historical explanations. Seeking to explain Krieger's apprehension about radical historicization, the third section traces Krieger's problem with coherence--the construction of historical patterns--from Ideas and Events to Time's Reasons. Krieger's conflicting commitments to the historicist conception of history and to universal values resulted in fear that historicization would lead to a complete dissolution of historical coherence and meaning. The fear, suggests the fourth section, was rooted in Krieger's political experience. Like many in his generation, Krieger believed that German Historismus was implicated in National Socialism. He sought to liberalize Historismus through a synthesis with natural law. This impossible project failed, but Krieger's engagement of the past to address contemporary problems remains exemplary. By constructing histories of current problems and historicizing his own position and concerns, he rendered history useful to the present. Such political engagement can provide a model for those seeking to re-engage history for radical political reform.
Ned Jackson, “The First Death of Louis Althusser or Totality's Revenge" (a Review Essay of Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever; Yann Moulier Boutang, Louis Althusser: une biographie; Gregory Elliot, ed., Althusser: A Critical Reader; E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy; Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory), History and Theory 35, no. 1 (1996), 131-146.
In 1980, the late French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, a long-time sufferer of manic-depressive illness, murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Never allowed to stand trial, he was eventually released and spent the years until his 1990 death in fitful obscurity. The posthumous publication of his autobiography, especially when taken in tandem with the first volume of the biography by his friend Yann Moulier Boutang, allows his readers hitherto unavailable insights into the man, and even into the possible interpenetration of the man and his philosophy. Contrary to the claims of his editors, however, Althusser's autobiography is far from a portrait of madness from the inside. The author's attempt at an "objective" self-portrait, even with its objective mistakes and ellipses, is at a very far remove from the depiction of madness as experienced by the madman. The entire thrust of Althusser's self-interpretation, moreover, with its psychoanalytic excavation of neurotic determinants, appears to aim at the reduction of psychosis to more readily comprehensible mental turbulence. A similar reduction is at work in the author's seeming inability, or unwillingness, to trace the links between the institutional and political contexts of his life and the more intimate, personal sphere--and that remains the case even when he seems to be tracing those very connections. The question remains--and it is the overriding question of this article--whether any relationship can be traced between Althusser's interpretation of Marxist philosophy and his selfinterpretation. The answer lies in Althusser's ultimately fissured and fragmented account of the social "whole" as a "structure of structures," in which psychic factors are irrelevant to historical understanding and vice-versa. The limitations of Althusser's self-understanding are thus seen to parallel the limitations of his conception of Marxism.
ARTICLES
Raymond Geuss, "Kultur, Bildung, Geist, “ History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 151-164.
I distinguish three strands in the discussion of "culture" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. One is centered around the analysis of the diverse folkways of various human groups. A second focuses on the cultivation of individual talents and capacities. The third treats aesthetic experience and judgment and its relation to forms of sociability. I discuss some of the various ways in which these three strands of discussion interacted historically and suggest some ways in which the study of this historical episode might be relevant to contemporary discussions of "culture."
Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, "The Origins of the Modern Historiography of Ancient Philosophy," History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 165-195.
A new approach to the historiography of the history of philosophy was first proposed near the end of the eighteenth century. It is useful to regard it as an alternative to two others, sometimes conceived of as exhausting the possibilities: a purely philosophical approach, and a purely historical one, both of which I consider in section I. The bulk of the paper is devoted to what I call "the modern historiography of the history of philosophy" (briefly characterized in section II). Its origins are closely tied to the renewal of philology. Section III recounts the methodological innovations of the New Philology and their relevance for approaching texts--including philosophical ones--from the past. In section IV, I consider some moves made by early proponents of "modern historiography"--in particular their implicit demand for an internal rather than an external history of philosophy, that is, an account that allows us to understand how and why philosophy has changed through time, in terms of philosophical factors: how, for example, one set of philosophical considerations led to a certain view; how reflecting on that view led philosophers to perceive various difficulties, and to perceive philosophical responses to those difficulties, and so on. The goal is to exclude, to as great an extent as possible, external factors, that is, factors which are not themselves philosophical views or arguments. In section V, I turn to Christian A. Brandis (1790-1867) whose methodological reflections and historiographical practice mark an enormous advance over his predecessors and even over some of his successors, like W. Jaeger. I conclude (section VI) by arguing that some "philosophical" objections brought against the way of proceeding advocated by Brandis fail. In the course of describing this new approach and its origins, I hope also to make clear why it is more attractive than the two other possibilities briefly considered in section I.
Aviezer Tucker, "Shipwrecked: Patočka's Philosophy of Czech History," History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 196-216.
Czech history defies dominant Western progressive historical narratives and moral evolutionism. Czech free-market democracy was defeated and betrayed three times in 1938, 1948, and 1968. The Czech Protestants were defeated in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, Czechs have a different perspective on the traditional questions of speculative philosophy of history: Where are we coming from? Where are we going? What does it mean? They ask further: where and why did history go wrong? Jan Patocka (1907-1977), the leading Czech philosopher and the author of Charter 77 of human rights, traced the repeated historical tragedies of the Czechs to the origins of their national movement in the imperial liberation of the serfs in the eighteenth century, debating the dominant nationalistic belief in national historical continuity, leading to linguistic nationalism. Patocka accused his nation of being "petty," of low social origins and interests, unlike their elitist neighbors. Despite his obsession with aristocracies bent on any transcendence, Patocka thought that the Czechs should have fought the Nazis in 1938 for the transcendental ideal of democracy. Linguistic nationalism led the Czechs and their leaders to choose life in slavery in their Hegelian conflict with the German masters. The Czech reception of Patocka's philosophy of Czech history has been mixed. I criticize the philosophical, political, and historical shortcomings of Patocka's discussion. Contemporary Czech attitudes to their history are forgetfulness; new Czech historicism tracing a continuity from Jan Hus to Václav Havel; and a search for historical truth and philosphical understanding of history that has political implications.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Christina Crosby on History after Lacan by Teresa Brennan, History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 217-224.
John J. Compton on The Flux of History and the Flux of Science by Joseph Margolis, History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 224-234.
Chris Lorenz on Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945-1990 by R. J. B. Bosworth, History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 234-252.
Denis Shemilt on Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics by Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, William L. Barney, History and Theory 35, no. 2 (1996), 252-275.
ARTICLES
Philip Pomper, "Historians and Individual Agency,” History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 281-308.
Historical works on Hitler and Stalin or on specific aspects of their regimes reveal how historians differ in their treatment of individual agency. Historians' practices are examined in the light of W. H. Dray's findings about historians' concepts of causation and A. Giddens's structuration theory. Marxist and revisionist historians rejected approaches that endowed Hitler and Stalin with immense power and personal control over events. Works by Isaac Deutscher, A. J. P. Taylor, and J. Arch Getty exhibit historians' methods for reducing or nullifying agential power. Robert C. Tucker's work on Stalin offers a different approach to the problem of the interaction of structure and individual agency. Allan Bullock may be correct in his view that historians are now less likely to exaggerate or underestimate either individual agency or structure when dealing with Hitler and Stalin; and Christopher Lloyd may be correct to say that historians' practices suggest a tacit acceptance of structuration theory in some form, but it does not follow that historians are now more likely to agree about the agential power of individuals. The assessment of agential power still requires interpretation, and it is doubtful that consensus about structuration theory would affect the range of interpretation very much. However, theories of cultural evolution and comparative investigation of the "selection" of political-cultural "genes" at certain historical junctures might provide a useful framework for studying how individuals like Hitler and Stalin acquire an unusual degree of power and authority.
Brian C. J. Singer, "Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking Their Opposition,” History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 309-337.
This paper begins with the opposition common to almost all discussions of the nation and nationalism: that between the cultural and the civic (or contractual) nation. Behind this opposition, however, one can detect a certain "complicity" between the two conceptions. And in order to understand the nature of this complicity, the paper proposes to re-examine the origins of the modern nation during the French Revolution. The first nation, it is argued, was conceived in strictly contractual terms; and yet within only a few years the revolutionaries began stumbling towards a more cultural understanding of the nation, which served to complement its contractual definition. This turn to a more cultural discourse must be understood as responding to three rather pressing problems faced by an exclusively contractual conception. First there is the need to find a stable anchorage for the nation in space and time. Second are the difficulties posed by a purely voluntarist conception of national citizenship. Third, and above all, there are the seemingly uncontrollable conflicts borne by the identification of the nation with its political "constitution," and with the revolutionary regime said to embody that constitution. In this perspective, the emergence of a more cultural discourse must be seen as an attempt to stabilize the post-revolutionary regime by depoliticizing the "idea" of the nation. As such, this discourse's emergence is inseparable from "the discovery" of (a national) society separate from the instance of democratic, political institutions. The nation, then, has two discourses because it has a dual nature, both political and social. The paper concludes with a reflection on the hyphen in the term "nation-state," as indicating the need to bring society and polity together, but also to keep them apart.
Ann Rigney, "The Untenanted Places of the Past: Thomas Carlyle and the Varieties of Historical Ignorance,” History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 338-357.
This article argues that to the extent that a representation is historical it is necessarily selective or incomplete with respect to the real world: not everything is known and not everything known can be included in discourse. (In contrast, fictional representations are by definition complete in themselves.) It follows from the incompleteness of historical representations that historians and readers may more or less thematize what has been left out of a historical text: what it ignores or fails to understand. Through an analysis of the manner in which Thomas Carlyle thematized his own ignorance in the face of the past, it is argued that the very limitedness of historical writing may be the source of a distinct aesthetic effect, the historical sublime. This effect is particular to historical writing and rooted in its cognitive function, although it may also be simulated for rhetorical purposes.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, "Symbols, Positions, Objects: Toward a New Theory of Revolutions and Collective Action” (a review article of Debating Revolutions, ed. Nikki R. Keddie), History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 358-374.
Many scholars now agree that the study of revolutions and other types of collective action ought to focus more attention on culture, while not losing sight of the importance of social structures. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that while culture has begun to receive much more sustained attention, no generally accepted theoretical synthesis has yet emerged in this field. The very title of the recent collection of essays on revolution edited by Nikki Keddie reflects this impasse. In this essay, we sketch a synthetic theoretical perspective on revolutions and collective action that encompasses not only culture and social structure, but also social psychology and agency, a concept that we analytically disaggregate. Moreover, we integrate the various elements of this perspective through a consistently relational focus, one that views ties and transactions as the appropriate unit of analysis. We begin by outlining three structural or relational contexts of action: the cultural, social-structural, and social-psychological. Social action is shaped and guided at one and the same time by all three of these transpersonal environments, which intersect and overlap with one another and yet are mutually autonomous. We also suggest, however, that action is never completely determined by the relational contexts in which it is embedded. Our framework also points to the importance of agency, which we define as the engagement by actors of their different contexts of action, an engagement that reproduces but also potentially transforms those contexts in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. This synthetic theoretical framework helps both to sharpen the causal statements that analysts of revolutions and collective action generate and to broaden the range of causal mechanisms that their research identifies.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Berel Lang on The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age by Steven T. Katz, History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 375-384.
Susan Dunn on Romanticism and the Rise of History by Stephen Bann, History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 384-390.
Mark Bevir on Objectivity and Its Other by Wolfgang Natter, Theodore R. Schatzki, and John Paul Jones III, History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 391-401.
Stanley Rosen on Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy by Carl Page, History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996), 401-411.
Chinese Historiography in Comparative Perspective
EDITED BY AXEL SCHNEIDER AND SUSANNE WEIGELIN-SCHWIEDRZIK
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Introduction," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 1-4.
Jörn Rüsen, “Some Theoretical Approaches to Intercultural Comparative Historiography," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 5-22.
Intercultural comparative historiography raises fundamental methodological problems: Is there any ground for comparison beyond the peculiarities and differences of cultures to be compared? One must avoid taking the Western cultural tradition of historical thinking as the basis for the comparison. Therefore one has to conceptualize the theoretical grounds for comparison and explicate elements of historical thinking which operate in every culture. Then cultural differences in historiography can be analyzed as peculiar constellations of these elements. In order to develop this comparative groundwork, one has to start with some fundamental considerations about historical memory as the universal cultural means of orienting human practical life in its temporal dimensions. On this foundation one has to erect a theory of historical consciousness and its constitutive factors, procedures, and functions. In a systematized form the relationship of these elements can be used to identify the varieties of historical thinking in different contexts over time. This approach has as one objective an intercultural exchange of knowledge about history as a medium for identity-forming. It should enable the participants in this exchange to overcome the widespread logic of exclusion in favor of a more inclusive manner of historical self-understanding.
Benjamin Schwartz, “History in Chinese Culture: Some Comparative Reflections," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 23-33.
This article explores the differences and similarities between China and the West in terms of history. While the term itself is of ancient Greek origin, the "semantic field" of history resonates in many ways with the semantic field covered by the word hi in China. The original Greek usage, derived from Herodotus, means an inquiry into human affairs. The inquiry involved narrative (as well as what we might call anthropological observation) over large stretches of time and space, but many of its main concerns were metahistorical in terms of nineteenth-century western historicism. This is true of Thucydides and later even of Machiavelli. History was a casebook and a "mirror" of metahistorical experiences which could be used in an entirely unhistorical way to shed light on many areas of human ethical, political, and other modes of thought and behavior. The nineteenth-century western "historicist" view of history as a "master narrative" reflecting an irreversible, inexorable process of development shaping the entire destiny of the human race may have some of its roots in the Heilsgeschichte of the Hebrew Bible, particularly in its "progressivist" version. Historicism also implied that human beings were basically formed by their loci within their historical epoch and raised serious questions concerning the role of human agency in human affairs. In China--in contrast to the West--we find particularly in the Confucian stream of thought the early emergence of the idea of a metahistorical ideal order which had been realized within the human sphere in the past. Here the historical problem was the fatal human capacity to fall away from the principles of this normative order (the dao). The problem became: why does humanity depart from the good order and to what extent can it be restored? Despite the vastly different framework, we can find in China (particularly in the "Spring and Autumn" tradition, and elsewhere) both the kind of "unhistorical" history which regards history as a reservoir of metahistorical experience in ethical, political, and other aspects of life, and a view which projects something like the image of an inexorable and impersonal historical process involving both the flourishing and decline of the normative order. Within the latter framework we find some dilemmas concerning the role of human agency that we find in post-Enlightenment, western "master narratives."
Michael Quirin, “Scholarship, Value, Method, and Hermeneutics in Kaozheng: Some Reflections on Cui Shu (1740-1816) and the Confucian Classics," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 34-53.
The first part considers a possible indigenous line of descent for modern Chinese historical scholarship. It argues that further research on late imperial kaozheng-studies is needed that should concentrate on the question of the relationship between scholarship and Confucian values in kaozheng-discourse. The second part uses the case of the late traditional scholar Cui Shu (1740-1816) to exemplify the hypothesis that in kaozheng-studies scholarship and value were still highly integrated and that this falls into line with the general position of history in the Confucian context. This hypothesis is further elaborated in the third part of the article which contrasts Cui Shu's heuristic approach with some of the basic ideas on method as they were developed within the historicist tradition. The author comes to the conclusion that the dissimilarities prevail. In the fourth part analogies between the heuristic discourse in kaozheng and in the European hermeneutic tradition are briefly discussed. It argues that analogies indeed exist but that these analogies are to be sought in the premodern or early modern stages of the development of European hermeneutics rather than in contemporary philosophical hermeneutics.
Axel Schneider, “Between Dao and History: Two Chinese Historians in Search of a Modern Identity for China," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 54-73.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century Chinese historians have struggled to reform Chinese historiography and to establish a new identity for the Chinese nation. In this article I analyze the historiography of Chen Yinke and Fu Sinian as a case study for this ongoing process of reform. Although both were bound into the dichotomy of dao and history as established by Benjamin Schwartz, they represent quite different solutions to the question of how the relationship between norm and fact has to be conceptualized. Chen Yinke's historiography is one of the first examples of the emerging pluralization of the relationship between dao and history, since he is aware of the subjective influences that affect a historian's research and seems to recognize that these influences can be positive. Fu Sinian's historiography on the other hand is an example of the reintegration of dao and history. He explicitly refutes the claims of theory and interpretation, but actually reintroduces theoretical explanations without identifying them as such. Thus his methodology can be described as a hidden reintegration of dao and history, of norm and fact. These different methodological views imply two divergent approaches to the nature of Sino-Western cultural relations, and to the role of the historian in modern Chinese society. Chen recognizes the fundamental differences between China and the West and assumes the equality of the unequal, that is, the principle that there are no absolute values that could function as norms for comparing different cultures. Because of the pluralization of the relationship between dao and history, the historian is no longer in a position to guide society ideologically and philosophically. He is freed from the constraints of political engagement and assumes the role of a kind of cultural guardian. By contrast Fu assumes a single world civilization based on a universal methodology for accumulating knowledge. He is unable to establish continuity between the particular Chinese past and its present and therefore cannot establish an identity that is both new and at the same time Chinese. Fu also takes a position different from Chen on the role of the historian. He postulates a complete separation from politics, but in historiographical as well as in political practice, he adopts the role of ideological leader and moral critic of those in power.
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “On Shi and Lun: Toward a Typology of Historiography in the PRC," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 74-95.
The discussion of shi and lun is the discussion of the relationship between historical data on the one side and theories of history on the other. It is the only methodological discussion historians in the PRC have been going through since the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded in October 1949. The question of how to relate data to theory gained a new dimension as not only the quality of historical research but also historians' loyalty to the Communist regime was evaluated according to the methodological approach they preferred. In this article the political aspect of discussions of historiography in the PRC is left aside; here the discussion of the relationship between data and theory is used to develop a typology of Marxist historiography in the PRC. This discourse is characterized by three "slogans": theory has to take the lead over data (yi lun dai shi); data and theory have to be combined (shi lun jiehe); and interpretation has to emerge from data (lun cong shi chu). The theory-oriented first slogan coincides with a way of writing history in which data are used to show the plausibility of Marxist theory. In contrast to this, the slogan demanding the combination of data and theory is aimed at finding the specific laws governing the historical process in China by applying Marxism as a kind of methodology to Chinese history, whereas the third idea of having interpretations emerge from the data is based on the idea of probing the quality of Marxism by having interpretations come out of historical research which might or might not prove to be compatible with Marxism. The typology suggested in this article results from discussions with both the "European" and the Chinese. By borrowing from both Hayden D. White and Jörn Rüsen on the one side, and by introducing on the other side the debate Chinese historians have been carrying on, a solution is found that is specific with regard to answers concerning Marxist historiography in China, but which might be of further interest insofar as the method of establishing this typology might be of broader use when trying to understand historiography organized around philosophical concepts rather than plot structures borrowed from literature.
Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism," History and Theory, Theme Issue 35 (1996), 96-118.
The discussion develops Edward Said's thesis of orientialism. Said approached "orientalism" as a construction of Asia by Europeans, and a problem in Euro-American modernity. This essay argues that, from the beginning, Asians participated in the construction of the orient, and that orientalism therefore should be viewed as a problem in Asian modernities as well. The essay utilizes Mary Louise Pratt's idea of "contact zones" to argue that orientalism was a product of the circulation of Euro-American and Asian intellectuals in these contact zones, or borderlands. While orientalism has been very much implicated in power relations between Euro-America and Asia, the question of power nevertheless should be separated analytically from the construction of orientalism. In support of this argument, the essay points to the contemporary "self-orientalization" of Asian intellectuals, which is a manifestation not of powerlessness but newly-acquired power.
Cover image: Astronomical Clock in Prague, Czech Republic, by Jack Hunter (1 May 2019)
