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"New" New History: A Longue Durée Structure
IGNACIO OLÁBARRI
History and Theory 34 February, 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.
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Chaos, Clio, and Scientistic Illusions of Understanding
PAUL A. ROTH and THOMAS A. RYCKMAN
History and Theory 34 February, 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.
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Scientism without Tears: A Reply to Roth and Ryckman
GEORGE REISCH
History and Theory 34 February, 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.
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Exorcising Laplace's Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History and Metahistory
MICHAEL SHERMER
History and Theory 34 February, 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.
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Is It Possible to Misrepresent the Holocaust?
BEREL LANG
History and Theory 34 February, 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.
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