Society, Nature, Emancipation

This chapter is predominantly concerned with the thought tendencies grouped under the heading ‘the Enlightenment’, with regulation caveats about variations in character, national and otherwise, of the intellectual traditions denoted by the term: the French, Scottish, and German cases are each given separate attention. The governing concern is with the most theoretically self-conscious attempts to establish the utility of History as a way of understanding the human experience in light of influential concepts like Volksgeist, circonstance, esprit général, represéntations, and even ‘relations of production’, that elucidated human diversity across time and place. When explaining the broad sweep of human history providential accounts were replaced by secular ones, though in some instances the latter were structurally similar to the former and so had some of the character of History as Speculative Philosophy. On the whole the scholarship under examination evinced a liberal spirit as regards confessional and national differences, though it was frequently marked by a partiality to occidental civilization. Overall, we see a shift away from the study of religious and political institutions and towards—or back towards, insofar as there was some crossover with the French ‘new History’ of the sixteenth century—civic morals, culture, and the structural conditions of social life. History expanded further from being an instruction in statecraft for public men to proffering more rounded edification in the form of vicarious experience of different spheres of life.

Turns to the Present

Varieties of social History comprised the most successful initial challenge to political History, especially from the middle of the twentieth century. From the 1980s social History was gradually supplanted in prominence by a cluster of related historiographical developments concerned with language and culture. In the last fifteen years or so newer fashions have waxed, and to those too this chapter will attend, but, in terms of justifications for History, social History and the linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ remain especially important. Social-scientific social historians were more apt to assert History’s predictive value or at least its pragmatic contemporary importance at a time of industrialization beyond the north Atlantic—this was an update of History as Practical Lesson. Other social historians were to be found revising prevailing conceptions of the past with a view to altering politics in the present—disturbing ‘whiggish’ narratives, or inserting the marginalized into the historical record to fortify their voices now. This was History as Identity fused with History as Emancipation. ‘New cultural historians’ specialized in a version of History as Travel as they invoked exotic worlds past. They, like historians under the influence of Michel Foucault, who addressed culture through the prism of power, might adapt the Travel rationale, contrasting past ways of doing things with present ways in order to unmask the conventional, made and remade, character of social relations and of human-being, and thus the possibility of changing them. This was a Marxist agenda of History as Emancipation adapted for a post-Marxist philosophy.

Renaissances and Reformations

The chapter begins with History’s place in Renaissance Italy. Then it shows how the historiographies of various states were influenced by tendencies in Italian humanism, as well as by the Reformation. France is accorded special attention, then more briefly England and parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Then the chapter addresses the historiographical battles that corresponded to the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were battles of ecclesiastical History, centring on ancient sources. The polemical nature of some of the disagreements reinforced existing scepticism about the reliability of historical knowledge. Yet an increasingly bipartisan critical methodology developed, based on a combination of humanist philology and new palaeographical techniques, with established religious hermeneutics playing their part. Here the dictates of self-serving confessional History as Identity sometimes stood in tension with the demands of a proceduralist History as Methodology even as all sides agreed on the importance of History as Communion. The chapter concludes by addressing a ‘scientific’ seventeenth century for whose dominant intellectual figures historical enquiry supposedly had little use. Like previous chapters, this one addresses conceptual concerns of a general nature as they arise. Different sorts of contextualization are addressed, along with their implications for thinking about the past. Particular consideration is given to how a heightened attention to historical contextualization could be reconciled with ongoing demands for the relevance of History as Lesson for the present. Topical reading was one established solution, but another was resurrected with the ancient doctrine of similitudo temporum.

History, Faith, Fortuna

Chronologically and conceptually, this chapter links classical antiquity to the middle ages. Most of its focus is on the second to sixth centuries, and especially the overlap of ‘late antiquity’ and the ‘patristic era’, or the era of the church fathers. It addresses historical thinking in Christianity in the context of Christianity’s relationship to Greco-Roman and Jewish influences. It is a story of intellectual novelty, and of imposition, but just as much it is a tale of syncretism. Of the rationales for History identified in the introduction, the two figuring largest in this chapter are History as Speculative Philosophy and History as Identity, the latter especially in its genealogical form. Along the way in the chapter, attention is devoted to the relationship between grand conceptualizations of the overall historical process and the study of human choice and agency. That discussion illustrates similarities as well as contrasts in the way causal explanations can operate in disparate sorts of historical account, whether or not divine or quasi-divine forces are involved. The point looking forward is that at certain levels secular and non-secular Histories need not conflict.

Classical History between Epic and Rhetoric

This chapter establishes the foundations on which the rest of the book is built since post-classical scholarship largely develops from classical models or is shaped by its reaction against those models. The chapter addresses a series of conceptual issues that have recurring relevance, including: differing conceptions of the nature of historical truth; the relationship between History and ethnography; the relationship between rhetoric and historianship; the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and History; and the relationship between ‘useful’ and ‘pleasurable’ Histories. In a more empirical vein the chapter discusses the relationship between Greek and Roman historianship and accounts for different tendencies in the development of historiography in each culture—tendencies like a greater or lesser interest in the outside world, and a greater or lesser interest in individuals as opposed to power structures or the study of society and culture. The question of the consciousness of qualitative historical change is also discussed in the case of a number of historians. In the 900 or so years of historianship covered in this chapter no rationale for History that is present at or near the outset was ruled out by the end, though of course many avenues of possibility were more fully explored. It is more than coincidence that the survey opens and closes with species of History as Identity, beginning with the most elementary type of that genre: genealogy.

Justifying History Today

This chapter tackles rationales for History on their own merits. It assesses for coherence all of the rationales hitherto mentioned in the book, insofar as they still have any currency. Then it makes some suggestions of its own. This work is less sanguine than many about the prospects for History as Emancipation, and more optimistic than many about forms of History as Practical Lesson. History as Method has something going for it but even on its own best ethical terms it needs to be bolstered by concerns related to the content of the past rather than just to procedures for researching and writing History. History as Identity remains arguably the most important of all the substantivist rationales. It is so often at issue even when the identity question is addressed only indirectly via History as Travel, since it is difficult to get away from the matter of how one defines oneself in relation to other, different ways of being and doing. Furthermore, those historians who engage in Emancipatory History à la Foucault would be more effective if they engaged more directly in Identity History, which would mean engaging in straightforwardly normative arguments about right and wrong. Extending the discussion of normativity, the final pages of the book turn to the matter of moral evaluation by the historian, suggesting evaluation is not a category error or an anachronistic residue of the days when History was commonly seen as a fount of Moral Lessons.

Nationalism, Historicism, Crisis

In the nineteenth century the general trend was away from grand comparative stadial theories and towards particularist accounts. The dominant historical rationale of the age was History as Identity, specifically national Identity. The first section of this chapter addresses the political context of so much historical thought across the Continent, with the French Revolution and its aftershocks prominent. The second section focuses on the main trends of the influential German historiography. At the same time, there were challenges to the prevailing German model of historiography even in its heyday: challenges in the 1860s are examined in the third section. Given the grand fluctuations in German political fortunes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the accompanying turmoil in historical philosophy, Germany also features quite heavily in most of the remaining sections of the chapter. Here we examine how the particularizing, relativizing, tendency of a brand of historical thought turned in upon itself from around 1870, as some of the certainties of the nation-through-history were undermined by the effects of modernization and world conflict, and the social function of the historian became the subject of renewed debate. One upshot was a series of manifestos for scholarly neutrality, and a proceduralist emphasis on History as Methodology alone. As the German model of national History was weakened in the first half of the twentieth century, more space was created for competing methodologies within Germany too. The final section of this chapter considers some of those new alternatives.

Introduction

The introduction sets the book in the context of relevant historiographical debates and related works. In particular it addresses, with a view to problematizing, orthodoxies about the extent to which and ways in which the discipline of History, and historical thought more generally, has changed over the course of two and a half thousand years. Then it introduces the justifications for History whose rising and falling fortunes constitute the major thematic threads of the book. These justifications are History as: Entertainment; Memorialization; Speculative Philosophy; Practical Lesson; Moral Lesson; Travel; Method; Communion; Identity; Therapy; and Emancipation. Note that all but the final two justifications were present in historical thinking at the chronological outset of this book, in ancient Greece. Many of these justifications thrive today.

The ‘Middle Age’

The first two sections of the chapter illustrate continuity with late antique and classical historiography in the areas of History as Identity, History as Memorialization, and History as Lesson. Remaining sections show that within historically oriented medieval thought there were three tendencies for which the medieval world is not generally renowned: the conceptualization of human cultural difference over time, with its associations of an awareness of anachronism and accompanying debates over the relevance of the past to the present; a literal sense of the past, with its associations of specificity and accuracy; and the capacity for often quite sophisticated source criticism. As we traverse time and place, distinctions between Latin and vernacular Histories also become relevant, as do distinctions between, say, monastic Histories and urban Histories, or baronial and royal genealogies. Each of these sorts of History had the potential to imply a different scale and periodization of time—a different ‘temporality’—as did technical and economic developments. A section is devoted to religious hermeneutics and theological–philosophical shifts, some of which cohered with Christian History as Speculative Philosophy, some of which ran separately to it, and some of which stood in tension with it. In the eleventh–thirteenth centuries the clergy made a great contribution to developments in source evaluation, and increasingly their endeavours took account of the different contexts in which the sacred texts had been written and those in which they were read.