Volume 36
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Raymond Martin, “The Essential Difference between History and Science," History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 1-14.
My thesis is that there is a deep, intractable difference, not between history and science per se, but between paradigmatically central kinds of historical interpretations-call them humanistic historical interpretations-and theories of any sort that are characteristic of the physical sciences. The difference is that unlike theories in the physical sciences, good humanistic historical interpretations (purport to) reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning. I use the controversy provoked by Gordon Wood's recent reinterpretation of the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate this thesis. I also use it to support the claim that unless one attends to the ways in which humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning one has no hope whatsoever of getting the epistemology of historical studies right.
Gad Prudovsky, “Can We Ascribe to Past Thinkers Concepts They Had No Linguistic Means to Express?" History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 15-31.
This article takes a clear-cut case in which a historian (Alexander Koyré) ascribes to a writer (Galileo) a concept ("inertial mass") which neither the writer nor his contemporaries had the linguistic means to express. On the face of it the case may seem a violation of a basic methodological maxim in historiography: "avoid anachronistic ascriptions!" The aim of the article is to show that Koyré's ascription, and others of its kind, are legitimate; and that the methodological maxim should not be given the strict reading which some writers recommend. More specifically, the conceptual repertoire of historical figures need not be reconstructed solely in terms of the social and linguistic conventions of their time and place.
Jan van der Dussen, “Collingwood's ‘Lost’ Manuscript of The Principles of History,“ History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 32-62.
In his edition of The Idea of History Knox made use of parts of Collingwood's unfinished manuscript of The Principles of History, written during a voyage through the Dutch East Indies in 1938–1939. This manuscript, however, is not among Collingwood's manuscripts, available at the Bodleian Library at Oxford since 1978. It was therefore considered lost, but it has recently been discovered in the Electronic Abstracts of Oxford University Press. Originally, it consisted of ninety pages containing finished chapters on "Evidence," "Action," and "Nature and Action." The first chapter, the manuscript text of which has not been recovered, was included by Knox in The Idea of History under the title "Historical Evidence." He also made use of parts of chapter III. Before dealing with the content of The Principles of History, I discuss two questions: why Knox did not publish the complete manuscript, in spite of the fact that Collingwood explicitly gave his authorization for its publication, and why the manuscript was not finished, in spite of the fact that Collingwood himself placed a high value upon it. The Principles of History contains much that is informative and clarifying for some much debated and controversial aspects of Collingwood's philosophy of history. Examples are his discussion of the status of a philosophy of history, the interpretation of evidence, the nature of human action, the role of emotions, what is meant by the thought-side of history, the difference between history and biography, the relation between history and nature, and the autonomy of historical thought. The manuscript is of interest, too, because of the insight it offers into the way The Idea of History was edited by Knox. It makes it clear how Knox manipulated the text when editing the sections on "History and Freedom" and on "Hegel and Marx": in the latter he deleted an important paragraph, while in both he sometimes made changes in Collingwood's very words.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Barry Allen on Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory by Ian Hacking, History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 63-82.
Doyne Dawson on Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development by Stephen K. Sanderson, History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 83-92.
James Bohman on The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions by Stephen Turner, History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 93-107.
ARTICLES
Mark Bevir, "Mind and Method in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 167-189.
J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have led a recent onslaught on the alleged "myth of coherence" in the history of ideas. But their criticisms depend on mistaken views of the nature of mind: respectively, a form of social constructionism, and a focus on illocutionary intentions at the expense of beliefs. An investigation of the coherence constraints that do operate on our ascriptions of belief shows historians should adopt a presumption of coherence, concern themselves with coherence, and proceed to reconstruct sets of beliefs as coherent wholes. The history of ideas merges history with aspects of philosophy, where philosophy is understood as the study of the grammar of our concepts.
T. Carlos Jacques, "From Savages and Barbarians to Primitives: Africa, Social Typologies, and History in Eighteenth-Century French Philosophy," History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 190-215.
This article describes the conceptual framework (what I call a "style of reasoning") within which knowledge about Africa was legitimized in eighteenth-century French philosophy. The article traces a shift or rupture in this conceptual framework which, at the end of the eighteenth century, led to the emergence of new conditions for knowledge legitimation that altered Europe's perception of Africa. The article examines these two conceptual frameworks within the context of a discussion of the social theory of the time, which categorized Africans first as savages, and then, with the advent of our modern "style of reasoning," as primitives. The argument used to demonstrate this change in categorizations is historical. (In the terminology of Michel Foucault, the paper is an "archaeological" investigation of knowledge about Africa.) The greater part of the article analyzes in detail the principal social theory of Enlightenment philosophy, the stadial theory of society, with the aim of demonstrating how it determined what could be affirmed about Africa. The shift in the perception of Africans from savages to primitives involved an epistemological change in how societies were grasped. The article provides a greater understanding of the constitution of Africa as a cognitive construct, which is not only of theoretical concern; this construct shaped Europe's intervention in Africa, and continues to influence what we believe Africa is and should become.
Leonard Guelke, "The Relations between Geography and History Reconsidered," History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 216-234.
The ideas of Sauer, Darby, Clark, and Meinig have had a formative influence on the making of modern Anglo-American historical geography. These scholars emphasized the spatial- and place-focused orientation of geography, contrasting it with history's concern with time, the past, and change. Historical geography was conceived as combining the spatial interests of geography with the temporal interest of history, creating a field concerned with changing spatial patterns and landscapes. This idea of historical geography avoided issues in the philosophy of history by making the historical geographer a kind of spectator to external changes in the ways things were ordered and arranged on the face of the earth. This "natural history" view of historical geography failed to deal with history conceived as an autonomous mode of understanding in which the scholar's task is to understand human activity as an embodiment of thought. Historical geography is more adequately conceived as a Collingwoodian-type historical discipline, in which the task of the historical geographer is aimed at rethinking and displaying the thought of historical agents as their actions relate to the physical environment. The traditional subject matter of historical geography is not thereby redefined, but a change in the way geography is seen in its relation to history is necessitated.
REVIEW ESSAYS
John E. Toews on A New Philosophy of History by Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner, History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 235-248.
Geoffrey Roberts on On "What is History?": From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White by Keith Jenkins, History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 249-260.
David Konstan on Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History by Mary Lefkowitz and Black Athena Revisited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 261-269.
Henk de Jong on Historische Orientierung: Über die Arbeit des Geschichtsbewusstseins, sich in der Zeit Zurechtzufinden by Jörn Rüsen, History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 270-288.
Daniel Gordon on Philosophie et Histoire by Bernard Groethuysen and Bernard Dandois, History and Theory 36, no. 2 (1997), 289-311.
ARTICLES
Lucian Hölscher, "The New Annalistic: A Sketch of a Theory of History,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 317-335.
This article argues for the establishment of a new, "annalistic" model of history and historical investigation. This implies a new concept of historical event: instead of being seen as an element within a historical narrative, the historical event is defined as the common reference point of many narratives that can be told about it. The annalistic model also implies a new concept of historical change: instead of being defined as the change of an "object" within a set of given historical parameters, historical change has to be perceived as the change of parameters related to a given historical object. A new concept of history follows from the annalistic model: instead of history being a metaphysical unity of space and time (the destiny of mankind, the positivist's world of facts), in which everything is linked to everything, it is instead the product of historical judgment carried out by those who design stories about their own past, present, and future. To the "annalist" a world is imaginable in which no history has existed, exists, or will exist. The article analyzes three aspects of the concept of historical time: it demonstrates the huge variety of temporal structures in history; it argues for the foundation of the representation of historical time in linguistic concepts; and it discusses the relationship of fictionality and reality in historical discourse. Finally, the annalistic model is compared to the traditional concept of history established by historicism in the nineteenth century.
Nikolai S. Rozov, "An Apologia for Theoretical History: In Memory of Sir Karl Raimund Popper,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 336-352.
Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. One can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of long-term historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.
Jacob Neusner, "Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking: The Case of Rabbinic Judaism,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 353-377.
The idea of history, with its rigid distinction between past and present and its careful sifting of connections from the one to the other, came quite late onto the scene of intellectual life. Both Judaism and Christianity for most of their histories have read the Hebrew Scriptures from within an other-than-historical framework. They found in Scripture's words paradigms of an enduring present, by which all things must take their measure; they possessed no conception whatsoever of the pastness of the past. Rabbinic Judaism invented an entirely new way to think about times past and to keep all time-past, present, and future-within a single framework. For that purpose, a model was constructed, consisting of selected events held to form a pattern that imposes order and meaning on the chaos of what happens, whether past or present or future. Time measured in the paradigmatic manner is time formulated by a free-standing, (incidentally) atemporal model, not appealing to the course of sun and moon, nor concerned with the metaphor of human life and its cyclicality. Not only so, but the paradigm obliterates distinctions between past, present, and future, between here and now and then and there. The past participates in the present, the present recapitulates the past, and the future finds itself determined, predetermined really, within the same free-standing structure comprised by God's way of telling time.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Patrick H. Hutton on The Memory of the Modern by Matt K. Matsuda and Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 378-391.
Dena Goodman on Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man by Joan Wallach Scott, History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 392-405.
J. L. Gorman on History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor by F. R. Ankersmit, History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 406-415.
Allan Megill on Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism by Charles R. Bambach, History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997), 416-429.
Producing the Past: Making Histories Inside and Outside the Academy
EDITED BY ANN-LOUISE SHAPIRO
Ann-Louise Shapiro, “Whose (Which) History Is it Anyway?" History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 1-3.
Vivian Sobchack, “The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical Consciousness," History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 4-20.
Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness in a mass-mediated culture where historical discourse takes the form of both showing and saying, moving images and written words. The title draws upon and argues with Roland Barthes's critique of the duplicity of the "insistent fringes" that supposedly reduce and naturalize "Roman-ness" to fringed hair in popular historical film. Barthes presumes a "certainty" in such a cinematic image, and hence deems it mythological-that is, "it goes without saying." Countering Barthes with Walter Benjamin, one might argue that the "insistent fringe" is insistently historical and constitutes, in its insistence, a "dialectical image": a site and sight full of contradictions and open to excavation. That is, it concretizes historiographic saying by showing. Neither historiographic saying nor showing are privileged in medias res-in a culture saturated in images and textuality, in competing modes of expression each of which has its limits. Historical consciousness is sparked and constituted from both showing and saying. Indeed, the "insistent fringe" is precisely not clear-cut-and, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated nature, its articulation as a limit that differs from, but is constituted by, the elements of the two distinct domains which it both separates and connects. Similarly, there is a dynamic, functional, and hardly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywood cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories written by scholars. They co-exist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratio-thus constituting the "rationality" of contemporary historical consciousness.
James E. Young, “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust," History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 21-43.
In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of "relativist" and "positivist" history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of "middle-voicedness" may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's "deep memory" and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of "deep memory" and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed "deep memory" of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that "What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history." That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, "How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?" Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call "received history"-a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings-both his telling and mine-on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind-my "vicarious past."
Susan A. Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum," History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 44-63.
Museums are conventionally viewed as institutions dedicated to the conservation of valued objects and the education of the public. Recently, controversies have arisen regarding the representation of history in museums. National museums in America and Germany considered here, such as the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the German Historical Museum, have become sites of contention where national histories and personal memories are often at odds. Contemporary art installations in museums which take historical consciousness as their theme similarly raise contentious issues about public knowledge of and personal interest in the past. When members of publics find that their memories of the past or their expectations for museum experiences are not being met, a kind of "distortion" occurs. The "distortion" related to memory and history in the museum is not so much of facts or interpretations, but rather a distortion from the lack of congruity between personal experience and expectation, on the one hand, and the institutional representation of the past on the other. This essay explores the possibilities for a redefined relationship between personal memory and history that is experienced in contemporary museums.
Marita Sturken, “Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone's Docudramas," History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 64-79.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, American popular culture has been increasingly rife with conspiracy narratives of recent historical events. Among cultural producers, filmmaker Oliver Stone has had a significant impact on popular understanding of American culture in the late twentieth century through a series of docudramas which reread American history through the lens of conspiracy theory and paranoia. This paper examines the films of Oliver Stone-in particular Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Nixon-asking why they have achieved popularity and brought about catharsis, why they are the subject of attack, and why it is useful to look beyond the debate about truth and falsehood that has surrounded them. It analyzes the ways in which Stone's status as a Vietnam veteran allowed Platoon to be accorded the authenticity of survivor discourse, whereas JFK and Nixon were subject to almost hysterical attack, not only because of Stone's assertions of conspiracy, but also because of his cinematic style of tampering with famous images. Taking these films as its point of departure, this paper examines the role of images in the construction of history, the form of the docudrama, the reenactment of historical images, fantasies of history, and ways in which paranoia is part of the practice of citizenship.
Jill Godmilow and Ann-Louise Shapiro, “How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film? " History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 80-101.
Documentary film, in the words of Bill Nichols, is one of the "discourses of sobriety" that include science, economics, politics, and history-discourses that claim to describe the "real," to tell the truth. Yet documentary film, in more obvious ways than does history, straddles the categories of fact and fiction, art and document, entertainment and knowledge. And the visual languages with which it operates have quite different effects than does the written text. In the following interview conducted during the winter of 1997, historian Ann-Louise Shapiro raises questions about genre-the relationship of form to content and meaning-with documentary filmmaker Jill Godmilow. In order to explore the possibilities and constraints of non-fiction film as a medium for representing history, Godmilow was asked: What are the strategies and techniques by which documentary films make meaning? In representing historical events, how does a non-fiction filmmaker think about accuracy? authenticity? invention? What are the criteria you have in mind when you call a film like The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl "dishonest"? How does the tension between making art and making history affect documentary filmmaking? Should documentary filmmakers think of themselves, in the phrase of Ken Burns, as "tribal storytellers"? What kind of historical consciousness is produced by documentary film?
Nancy Partner, “Hayden White (and the Content and the Form and Everyone Else) at the AHA," History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 102-110.
The special session at the January 1997 annual meeting of the American Historical Association honoring the achievement of Hayden White and examining the impact and influence of his work on the historical discipline was an enlightening experience, at least to this participant, in many more ways than had been planned or promised. The session itself, albeit fairly routine by the standard of such occasions, seemed to take on a metanarrative of its own as each of the speakers (not excluding the honoree who was present and participating) confidently spoke at length, proceeding from deep premises which bore no relation to any of the others. My own initial anticipation that this event would produce limited variations on a coherent theme-the impact of the linguistic turn and of narrative theory in particular on the practice and self-definition of academic history-turned gradually to rather disconcerted bemusement, especially when my turn came to listen to myself. My previous engagement to report on the AHA session in a paper for the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University became an opportunity to confide some of my freshest reactions to the event in a fairly small and very select audience. Narrating the ephemeral metanarrative I perceived as spinning itself out over the blunter facts of the AHA occasion, turned out to be the inner topic of my Wesleyan paper (this present essay), not excluding the mysterious impulses of the audience and the existential atmosphere of the never to be forgotten Princess Ballroom.
Ann-Louise Shapiro, “Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France," History and Theory, Theme Issue 36 (1997), 111-130.
For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their ability to recognize themselves-to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness-depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history-"la pédagogie centrale du citoyen"-the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity. Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s-a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France-and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century-a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.
Cover image: Olin Memorial Library, Wesleyan University, by Smartalic34 on Wikimedia Commons (2008)
