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The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories
DOYNE DAWSON
History and Theory 35 February, 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.
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Rediscovering Collingwood's Spiritual History (In and Out of Context)
DAVID BATES
History and Theory 35 February, 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.
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L'Entrée dans la posthistoire: critères de définition
ILIE PAUNESCU
History and Theory 35 February, 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.
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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)
MALACHI HAIM HACOHEN
History and Theory 35 February, 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.
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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)
NED JACKSON
History and Theory 35 February, 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.
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