Volumes 21-25: Abstracts
JAMES SMITH ALLEN, History and the Novel: Mentalité in Modern Popular Fiction, History and Theory 22 (October 1983), 233-252
The historical use of literature poses a methodological
challenge, used directly as a document, fiction is unreliable.
Postformalist criticism and theory suggest approaches to the novel more
appropriate than those historians have traditionally used. Historians
should not conceive of the text as document but think of it instead as a
structuralist system, discourse, or code. Reader-response criticism
merits the historian's serious attention; by studying how readers in the
past responded to fiction, the social historian may read the novel to
understand its audience and the socially significant conventions it
preferred in the novel. The novel is a mental world with an actual
historical context peopled by ordinary readers through which mentalities
can be investigated.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ROBERT ANCHOR, Realism and Ideology: The Question of Order, History and Theory 22 (May 1983), 107-119
Critics of Realism such as Foucault assert that "reality"
has no existence until prefigured by acts of the literary imagination,
and that the literature of Realism falsely and ideologically creates the
impression that it is continuous with life itself. For Foucault,
discursive practices are the only possible objects of historical inquiry
since human activity can never be understood apart from the ways in
which it is articulated. He mostly investigates order, the codes of
order, reflections upon order, and the experience of order. The
fetishization of order, the substitution of the order of words for the
disorder of events, is postmodernism as ideology. Realism does not
provide a definition of reality at all -rather a description of the
world which does not impose order on chaos. Instead it reveals disorder
amidst apparent order. No knowledge of language or discursive practices
can disclose the particular experiences which shape our sense of
reality.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
WILDA C. ANDERSON, Dispensing with the Fixed Point: Scientific Law as Historical Event, History and Theory 22 (October 1983), 264-277
Hayden White's tropes of the imagination purport to give
the historian the vantage point from which the historical object can be
stabilized and eventually understood. Ludwik Fleck, a scientist, found
that all scientific, all creative thinking is a highly figurative
procedure, a complex weaving together of a conversation of voices from
past traditions, historical and mythical, as well as voices from the
present. The fixed or the real or the unrelevatized can always be shown
to be a construction, if one moves to another vantage point. Some of the
best scientific thinking, such as Einstein's and Heisenberg's, has been
done by those who dispensed with the necessity of a fixed
epistemological vantage point. White's discourse analysis cannot claim
to be a fixed point from which the other texts are formalized.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
F. R. ANKERSMIT, The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 1-27
The narrativist philosophy of history and the
epistemological philosophy of history are opposed to each other and have
remarkably little in common. Within the epistemological philosophy, the
debate between the coveringlaw model advocates and the analytical
hermeneutists has always been moving towards synthesis more than towards
perpetuation of the disagreement. But the revolution from
epistemological to narrativist philosophy of
history enacted in Hayden White's work made the philosophy of history
finally catch up with the developments in philosophy since the works of
Quine, Kuhn, and Rorty. White stresses the "making" or "poetic" function
of narrative at the expense of the "matching" function so dear to the
mimetic epistemology of positivism. Philosophers of history should shake
off this positivistic past and make history narrativist.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
CHRISTOPHER J. BERRY, Hume on Rationality in History and Social Life, History and Theory 21 (May 1982), 234-247
Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Hume provides a formal
account of social life with a substantive theory of rationality. Hume
has a noncontextualist theory of human nature. Human nature possesses
certain constant and universal principles, the operation of which are
unaffected by history of sociocultural contexts. Some social practices
are more rational, more "in tune" with human nature, than others.
Although Hume is resigned to the fact that customs are too deep-rooted
to be eradicated, his theories of rationality and social life permit him
to identify and censure superstition.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
HORST WALTER BLANKE, DIRK FLEISCHER, and JÖRN RÜSEN, Theory of History in Historical Lectures: The German Tradition of Historik, 1750-1900, History and Theory 23 (October 1984), 331-356
The German tradition of Historik is reflection on
what historians do: on the writing of history, on historical research,
on historiography. Four different traditions of Historik can be discerned by evaluating lectures on Historik between
1750 and 1900: the humanistic-rhetorical, the scientificauxiliary, the
historico-philosophical, and the epistemological. Historik was pursued by many scholars as an integral part of their academic endeavor, and it serves didactic-preparatory purposes. Historik contributes
to the systematization of historical knowledge; the specialization into
distinct research methods and areas of work; the systematic foundation
of the autonomy and function of historical studies in relation to other
sciences and to the practical context of historians and their audiences;
and the historical safeguarding of standards arrived at in the
development of science.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
FRANCES BLOW, A Note on Computers, the Counterfactual, and Causation, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 118-121
The computer is an appropriate tool for three levels of
activity in teaching history. It is efficient in analyzing quantities of
statistical data into manageable and relevant units of information. It
is effective in making the structure of events salient. Above all, it is
a valuable device for exploring the structure of the possible. The
simultaneous presentation of actual and alternative pasts can be
effected, for example, by programs embodying the counterfactual
principle. The computer program can, by virtue of its prescribed logical
structure, force the pupil to recognize and reflect upon his own mental
processes. The computer is a great asset in teaching history, a subject
so complex and replete with information that the significance of that
information is often obscured for the child.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
M. B. BOOTH, Skills, Concepts, and Attitudes: The Development of Adolescent Children's Historical Thinking, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 101-117
Research into children's historical thinking based on a
view of Piaget's theory which emphasizes the age-stage structure and the
development of hypothetico -deductive thinking appears to be
inappropriate, for such thinking has only limited connection with
imaginative, empathetic response, which is the hallmark of historical
understanding and the purpose of historical study. Content and teaching
technique are more important than increased maturity and intelligence. A
teacher's concern should be with the elements of historical thinking -
knowledge, concepts, cognitive skills, empathy, interest, personal
experience -and the ways in which these can be woven together to produce adductive historical thought. The eight-yearold's historical understanding
can be considered on its own terms: genuine historical thinking which
is more limited than the older pupil's, but comparable and equally
valid.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
DAVID BOUCHER, The Creation of the Past: British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott's Philosophy of History, History and Theory 23 (May 1984), 193-214
Michael Oakeshott shared the general concerns of British
idealists and leaned heavily upon their conclusions. As with any mode of
understanding, historv creates its own object of inquiry. History is an
activity built upon postulates and capable of generating conclusions
appropriate to itself. The past in history is different from any other
past. It can only be evoked by means of subscription to the historical
present in which each artifact is recognized as the vestige of a
performance which is transformed into circumstantial evidence of a past
which has not survived. A great deal of what Oakeshott has to say,
especially about coherence, continuity, and identity in difference,
stands in sharp contrast to Collingwood's ideas on the reenactment of
the past. A living past, relevant to the present or evocative of a
future state of affairs, is modally irrelevant to history.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LUCIANO CANFORA, Analogie et histoire, History and Theory 22 (February 1983), 22-42
In his preface Thucydides claims that historical knowledge
is possible only insofar as facts can be compared with similar facts.
Analogy is thus essential in "finding" them. This conception has been
important in subsequent historians and philosophers of history. In
Droysen's Historik analogy is perhaps the most important
heuristic for the historian. Dilthey, in his attempt to make a critique
of historical reason, points to the importance of analogical thinking in
historical judgment, but leaves the nature of analogical association as
a vehicle of historical comprehension as an open question. Analogy is a
kind of a priori form of historical knowledge; different analogies will
naturally arise in different historical circumstances, and only
subsequent events can determine which are the most useful ones.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
DAVID CARR, Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity, History and Theory 25 (May 1986), 117-131
Narrative and the real world are not mutually exclusive.
Life is not a structureless sequence of events; it consists of complex
structures of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their
meaning from within action itself. It is also not true that life lacks a
point of view which transforms events into a story by telling them. Our
focus of attention is not the past but the future, because we grasp
configurations extending into the future. Action involves the adoption
of an anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. The
actions of life can be viewed as the process of telling ourselves
stories. The retrospective view of the narrator is an extension and
refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself. Because
storytelling is a social activity, the story of one's life is told as
much to others as to oneself. Social human time, like individual human
time, is constructed into configured sequences. The practical
first-order narrative process that constitutes a person or a community
can become a second-order narrative whose subject is unchanged but whose
interest is primarily cognitive or aesthetic.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
L. B. CEBIK, Understanding Narrative Theory, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 58-81
Any comprehensive theory of narrative must accommodate
both the justificational and the creative elements of narrative, the
activities leading to narrative, and reflections upon the finished
product. This examination of four levels of theory reveals the
incompleteness of most extant theories, including those of Hayden White
and Ricoeur. The four levels are: 1. narrative discourse and temporal
language; 2. narrative and historical constructions; 3. narrative
objects or stories; and 4. narrative functions and purposes. We remain
far from our goal of achieving a comprehensive theory. However, by
placing theories and partial theories within a metatheoretical
framework, we can see more clearly their nature, ramifications, and
limits, thereby differentiating between the contributions and the
philosophical fads.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LEON CHAI, Remarks on the Development of Theoretical Structure in Nineteenth-Century Thought, History and Theory 21 (February 1982), 75-82
Theoretical structure cannot exist independently of
content and thus cannot be developed by restricting analysis to
discourse alone. Through analysis, content becomes theoretical structure
and this becoming is its theoretical appearance. The need for content
within theoretical structure is lost sight of in recent speculation on
the history of thought by Derrida and Heidegger. Histories of
nineteenth-century thought ought to make the development of theoretical
structures rather than the structures themselves the object of analysis.
Many nineteenth-century systems make the nature of theoretical
structure identical with that of its content. This leads theoretical
structure to become appearance. Many late nineteenth-century systems
made becoming or force the content of a development of thought. To
become theoretical structure, force would have to become something
different from itself. A resulting theoretical structure can only be
appearance.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
SHAYE J. D. COHEN, Josephus, Jeremiah, and Polybius, History and Theory 21 (October 1982), 366-381
Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest who surrendered to
the Romans in the first Jewish revolt and then spent the rest of the war
trying to convince the Jews to surrender. After the war he wrote Jewish War to
explain why he surrendered and why the Jews did not. Josephus explains
the fall of Jerusalem by adopting and adapting a Jewish and a Greek
response; the former Jeremiahic and the
latter Polybian. Josephus to some extent was a Jeremiah and to some
extent a Polybius, with the Jeremiahic element preponderant. Jeremiah
and other Jews opposed to revolutions believed that God will redeem the
Jews in his own way at his own time; meanwhile, the Jews should support
their foreign overlords and maintain the peace.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
WILLEM A. DEVRIES, Meaning and Interpretation in History, History and Theory 22 (October 1983), 253-263
The translationist theory of meaning can provide a
plausible understanding of the reenactment methodology of history,
although there are disanalogies. It takes as primitive our ability to
recognize synonymy relations between linguistic episodes, either within
the same language or other languages. In translating a complex
linguistic object translators must possess an incredibly large stock of
background knowledge about a culture and be sensitive and resourceful
speakers of the language into which they are translating. Since there is
no codified set of rules which guarantees a good translation,
translators need to use creativity. Similarly, in deciding which of the
possible meanings to assign to an event or document, historians can
follow little better advice than to insert themselves imaginatively into
the situation and let their ability to understand their contemporary
events and other historical events come to bear upon the events of the
past.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS, The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History, History and Theory 23 (May 1984), 151-169
The methodological trend of contextualism has almost come
to dominate current discourse in intellectual history. But the genesis
of a text may defy the immediate context of time and space. Insofar as
authors of texts may reflect upon the complex act of their creation in
the process of composing them, the texts'
"meaning" may have as much to do with the internal demands of mind as
the external pressures of the cultural or political environment. The
status of ideas in history is more complex than a contextualist
reduction of meaning to usage would imply, and the act of knowing on the
part of a thinker is not necessarily determined by the available means
of knowing, the paradigms of language and discourse. There are thinkers
whose depths of knowledge surpass the ordinary range of words, in whom
some truths we feel are introspectively discoverable.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
KENNETH J. DOVER, Thucydides "As History" and "As Literature", History and Theory 22 (February, 1983), 54-63
Some students of ancient history treat Thucydides as an
"authority," not a "source," creating an obstinate resistance to
criticism and a readiness to explain away his apparent omissions and
distortions. Others, especially students of ancient literature, focus
attention on "understanding Thucydides as a whole" through the internal
relationships -echoes, analogies, and symmetries, as well as
contradictions - which can be uncovered in his work, rather
than through its external relationships with events. The apparent
omissions, distortions, and incoherencies should remind us that
Thucydides, like all pioneers, imported irrelevant preconceptions or had
not yet formed necessary conceptions to do a truly systematic inquiry.
Criticism of Thucydides should thus be more pluralistic; the reasons why
one passage is unsatisfactory and perplexing may be different in kind
from the reasons which hold in another, and two or more reasons may
account for the difficulties in the same passage.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
J. J. DRYDYK, Who Is Fooled by the "Cunning of Reason"?, History and Theory 24 (May 1985), 147-169
After 1807, Hegel contrasts microhistorical chaos with
macrohistorical order, the "cunning of reason." Agents interact blindly,
but reason integrates all interactions, and this is the development and
expression of rationality. No particular state dictates or precludes
any subsequent outcomes; to allow the cunning of reason is to deny that
causal relations are decisive for historical events. Ends are extraneous
to objects, which suffer violence in achieving them. Consequently
historical progress must also be regarded as extraneous to the objective
social world, and this world must be assumed to suffer violence as
progress is achieved. If anyone was fooled by the "cunning of reason,"
it was Hegel.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
MICHEL-MARIE DUFEIL, Histoire classique, histoire critique, History and Theory 21 (May 1982), 223 -233
Classical history concentrated on finding and making
critiques of written texts. Critical history can now demonstrate the
limitations of its notions both of "text" and of "critique." Rather than
conceiving of history as starting with the invention of writing, we
must now see writing itself as the result of a long historical process.
We should treat written texts as objects; and at the same time see all
the vestiges of the human past as texts. To decode these vestiges
(including traces of the oral tradition as well as fossils, potsherds,
etc.) methods similar to those of structural linguistics are required;
and these show the configurations of words in a manner quite different
from the quasi-mythological constructions of the late nineteenth
century. History can now start again with written texts, but never
treating these in isolation; for at the beginning, throughout, and to
the end there are the object and the Word.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
KIERAN EGAN, Accumulating History, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 66-80
There is no logical or empirical connection between the
successes of the Schools Council Project "History 13-16" and the "forms
of knowledge" approach out of which it was composed. A sounder process
whereby children can be led to historical understanding can be sketched
as a gradual accumulation of particular skills, concepts, and knowledge,
within four distinct, relatively discontinuous paradigms. The process
is designed to capitalize on dominant interests at each stage. The
ironic paradigm, achieved last, is made up of the contributions of each
of the earlier paradigms, and it provides the epistemological
sophistication which controls and gives proportion to the gradually
developed constituents of mature historical thinking. It combines the
affective-orienting, mythic ability with the vivifying, romantic
imagination with the generalizing, pattern-seeking philosophic search.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
NORMAN ETHERINGTON, Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism, History and Theory 21 (February 1982), 1-36
To test theories of economic imperialism by close
historical study of colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century is
a fundamental mistake. Lenin, Schumpeter, Luxemburg, Kautsky, and
Hobson all argue that monopoly organization, protection, autocratic
methods of government, and militarism are the inescapable companions of
the use of state power to pursue economic objectives beyond the state
frontier. Without this constellation of factors present, theories of
imperialism do not obtain, and what is there is properly called
colonialism. The unjustifiable extension of those theories - propounded
between 1898 and 1919 for the specific purpose of explaining the
behavior of developed nations in that era -to cover events long before
and after that era has misdirected research.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
JAMES FITZGERALD, History in the Curriculum: Debate on Aims and Values, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 81-100
Three powerful arguments have dominated discussion on the
educational purposes of historical study: 1. history serves as the
collective memory of mankind; 2. it enlarges our experience and extends
our perspective; 3. the actual process of acquiring historical knowledge
offers reward in itself. Recent debate has restated and sharpened,
rejected and superseded this traditional framework. In the United
States, the inquiry approach, which emphasized historians' tools, has
been criticized by those who feel the new "social studies" have moved
too far in the direction of the social sciences. In Britain, the "form
of knowledge" approach has been highly influential. Clearly, skills
cannot be divorced from content. The nature and structure of history is
such that it embraces not only methodology, inquiry, and concepts, but
also message and experience. It is the narrative framework of history
which informs understanding. We need history as story as well as history
as inquiry.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
SUZANNE FLEISCHMAN, On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages, History and Theory 22 (October 1983), 278-310
There are six, to a degree overlapping, parameters which
might be used to explore the limits of a distinction between history and
fiction in the Middle Ages. 'They are authenticity, intent, reception,
social function, narrative syntax, and narrator involvement. Intent and
reception, specifically writers; claims of historical authenticity, and
the influence of purportedly historical literature on society and on
history, are the two key parameters. There was a concept of history
which was distinct from fiction, but historical truth did not imply, as
it does for us, authenticity of facts and events. Rather, history was
what was willingly believed, historical truth anything that belonged to a
widely accepted tradition.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
JAN GOLDSTEIN, Foucault among the Sociologists: The "Disciplines" and the History of the Professions, History and Theory 23 (May 1984), 170-192
Foucault's model ofthe disciplines undermines the
sociological model of professions. Professionalism is the
quintessentially modern way of exercising power. Bourgeois liberalism is
sustained by a dark and unseen underside -the mechanisms of control or
discipline operated by the disciplines. The total and totally vulnerable
visibility of an individual under examination implements power
relations and makes possible the extraction and constitution of
knowledge. Hence the scientific method of induction appears to be a
chance offshoot or byproduct of the project of domination. It has been
thought that a prior knowledge base legitimated a profession; in fact,
political-cum-"disciplinary" considerations were anterior to
demonstrably superior knowledge.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LEON J. GOLDSTEIN, Impediments to Epistemology in the Philosophy of History, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 82-100
If history is to be taken seriously as a cognitive - not
merely literary - discipline to which considerations of truth or falsity
are relevant, it is because of the progress made over the course of
centuries in the sharpening of the methodology of the infrastructure of
history. By not attending to the way in which the historical past
actually emerged in the course of work at the level of the
infrastructure, philosophical writers, such as Mandelbaum, Pompa,
McCullagh, and Gorman, have tended to perpetuate a myth of historians'
selection. This has been the basic impediment to epistemology in
philosophy of history. There is no selection from an antecedently
established stock of fact-containing statements. The facts and the
account are constructed in the course of the same intellectual endeavor,
within the framework of an historians' tradition that is shaped by
their work.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
MICHAEL GORDY, Reading Althusser: Time and the Social Whole, History and Theory 22 (February 1983), 1-21
Althusser believed the Marxist conception of history broke
from all previous conceptions of the social whole. Hegel's idealism
conflated the knowledge of the object with
the object itself. Within his social totality, no practice or thought
can run ahead of its time. For Marx, all knowledge is the result of
theoretical knowledge, not the revelation of the real. Every structure
of a social whole has its own history; there is no central concept of
which the various social structures are merely expressions. All of the
superstructure affects, and is affected by, the economic infrastructure,
although it is the economy that is the determinant in the last
instance. Historical materialism seeks to delineate the structural and
conjunctural articulation of the various social practices. Marxist
philosophy is fully aware of its place and function within the social
order, hence of the irreducibly political nature of all philosophical discourse.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LIONEL
GOSSMAN, The Boundaries of the City: A Nineteenth-Century Essay on "The
Limits of Historical Knowledge" [Classics in the Philosophy of History],
History and Theory 25 (February 1986), 33-51
Wilhelm Vischer's 1877 paper on the limits of historical
knowledge expressed clearly, effectively, and with moderation what had
become a minority viewpoint in his time. Vischer's deep sense and
acceptance of the limits of every human enterprise was characteristic of
the historical and philological culture of Basle. To the well-born,
deeply conservative citizen, the notion of limits had to be fundamental:
not only the property and privileges of his class, and the freedom it
required in order to pursue its economic and spiritual interests, but
the continued existence of his small homeland as an autonomous polity
and the survival of Christian religion and morality in a scientific age
depended, in his eyes, on respect for boundaries and frontiers. To the
champion of the German Empire, on the other hand, limits, zones of
autonomy, and particularisms of every kind were obstacles to be
overcome.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
GORDON GRAHAM, Can There Be History of Philosophy?, History and Theory 21 (February 1982), 37-52
The understanding which a philosopher has, can have, or
ought to have of the work of his predecessors cannot be historical in
character. Collingwood is right about evidence and the nature of
historical understanding. But what a philosopher wrote is not evidence
of his thought, it is his thought. The ideas and doctrines of past
philosophers are not themselves in the past and do not therefore belong
to a special period of the past. Philosophic ideas cannot be said to be
in time at all. Different interpretations of particular passages are
strengthened or weakened by the citation of matters of historical fact,
just as they may be by linguistic or literary knowledge. Such a
clarification may enable us to resolve the question of the consistency
of a passage with the rest of an author's work, but it does not destroy
the philosophic character of the question.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ROBERT HARDING, Pierre Goubert's Beauvais et le beauvaisis: An Historian "Parmi les hommes" [A Review of Reviews], History and Theory 22 (May 1983), 178-198
When Goubert's Beauvais et le beauvaisis appeared
in 1960, his exhaustive investigation of local life was seen as a model
for future history. He sought to recapture the unity of the common
people, the land, and the city in the light of agrarian history and
economic changes over the longue durée. But Goubert's work was flawed in key respects. He virtually omitted mentaliti; we
see people who produce, eat, pay, and die, but not ones who play, pray,
dream, and love. Extremely wary of theories and systems, Goubert
avoided using concepts such as "capitalism" and "feudalism," even
though the interplay of theory and historical data is fruitful when done
with intelligence and caution. Studies inspired by Beauvais confirmed
his finding and quickly reached a point of diminishing returns. Goubert
was most successful in writing popular histories for ordinary people,
allowing them to see through the hypocrisy and mythology of traditional
history to recapture their own past.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
J. N. HILLGARTH, Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality, History and Theory 24 (February 1985), 23-43
The quest by Spaniards for the meaning of the history of
Spain and Spanish history itself has been influenced, oversimplified,
and distorted by the power of certain myths. The central myth of Spanish
historiography, that of "one, eternal Spain," grew out of an earlier
idea that Spanish history is the history of a crusade in which the
favored Catholic religion struggled with and triumphed over its rivals.
Historiographers subscribing to this notion have reacted violently and
even hysterically to the thought that the interaction of Christians,
Muslims, and Jews is a main key to Spanish history. They have been
influenced by the apparent success of Franco, who represented the
centralizing tradition of Castile. Now Spain's greatest problem is the
linguistic and regional separatist movements, and the failure to deal
with them in time is at least in part owing to the refusal to recognize
this too total concentration on Castile and its saving, "unifying"
mission.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
HANS JAEGER, Generations in History, History and Theory 24 (October 1985), 273-292
If one renounces the ambitious goal to derive a universal,
historical rhythm from a biological, generational succession, an
examination of limited phenomena from a generational perspective will
frequently turn out to be productive. New developments in intellectual
history and in the history of art will tend to be represented by new age
cohorts. In political, economic, and social history, generational
communities are often less easily recognizable. Pronounced generational
breaks which may affect an entire society apparently occur only after
decisive historical events, such as wars, revolutions, and great
economic crises. Even then, a generation is most easily recognized where
it is clearly (theoretically or artistically) articulated.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
PETER L. JANSSEN, Political Thought as Traditionary Action: The Critical Response to Skinner and Pocock, History and Theory 24 (May 1985), 115-146
A polemical and reductionist critical response to Skinner
and Pocock has inhibited an appreciation of the true potential of their
historiographical discussions for the practice of political theories. An
important step in understanding the history of political thought in its
duality - as both being about acts of political discourse over time and
as itself being political - is to recognize the "traditionary" nature
of discursive acts. Following Pocock and Skinner, we should speak not of
tradition as objects carried on, but of the nature of that carrying on,
that activity of handing down through language. A traditionary act
involves subscription to a fairly sophisticated account of the
development of a particular form of practices through time and the
identification by the actor of his act as part of that development. This
subscription allows us to overcome the categorical dichotomies such as
history versus philosophy, autonomy of texts versus ideas as expressions
of social relations, voluntarism versus determinism, and language as
either restrictive or instrumental, which underlie much of the
contemporary methodological dispute.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
PETER KNAPP, Can Social Theory Escape from History? Views of History in Social Science, History and Theory 23 (February 1984), 34-52
Social science can achieve falsifiable theory, but only if
dependencies of regularities upon milieu and context are explicitly
considered. Achieving falsifiable, general theory depends upon finding a
set of relationships which is in fact relatively independent of
context, and specifying the boundary conditions or domain of
applicability to models. Contemporary sociologists such as Herbert
Blalock and George Hornans believe theory is possible without recourse
to history, but Raymond Aron and especially Max Weber suggest how and
why history and theory are interdependent. Weber's image of the
historical as inexhaustible concrete adds the insight that whenever
theorists find a determined, lawful causal sequence, they will have to
understand the situation at the start of the sequence as a set of rich,
historical givens. Metatheoretical philosophy of explanation in social
science best addresses the problem of infinite residue and bridges the
gap between disciplines.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ADRIAN KUZMINSKI, Archetypes and Paradigms: History, Politics, and Persons, History and Theory 25 (October 1986), 225-247
The Left is scientific, rational, paradigmatic; its
concern is with the networks of relationships within which all things
are located and through which all things have their significance. The
Right is aesthetic, emotional. It attempts to understand in terms of
some concrete specific, an archetype. Hybrids of these two, such as
Christianity, Communism, and Fascism, mix paradigm and archetype and are
dangerous. With the reification of form and idolatry of image, inhuman
criteria of reality are automatically set up and give license to
idealists and fanatics to ignore the integrity of individual persons in
the name of those theories and images. Countervailing factors (such as
Christian compassion or Communist equality) can be swept away. Human
events stand to one another both as parts and wholes; historians need to
recognize events as simultaneously episodes and narratives. Paradigms
and archetypes are half-truths only and
deny the experiential openness that is history. A mysticism of persons
would defuse and absorb the Left and Right while transcending them,
putting to the fore instead the diversity and novelty of history.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
DOMINICK LACAPRA, Is Everyone a Mentalité Case? Transference and the "Culture" Concept, History and Theory 23 (October 1984), 296-311
The difficulty in historical research is to develop an
exchange with the "other" that is both sensitive to transferential
displacement and open to the challenge of the "other's" voice.
Contemporary sociocultural history has often tended simply to reverse
the assumptions of an abstracted history of ideas and replicate its
documentary treatment of artifacts as symptoms of society and economy
rather than of mind. Its populism replicates the scapegoating
propensities of populism in society. Even the best historians, Carl
Schorske and Robert Darnton, have tended to deny the contestatory
dimensions of high culture and the challenge of forging new links
between it and popular culture. Everyone is a mentalito~ case,
but certain artifacts are exceptional products of cultural activity with
critical power and an uncanny ability to play uncommon variations on
commonplace things.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
P. J. LEE, History Teaching and Philosophy of History, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 19-49
The work of Bruner and Hirst suggested to history teachers
that history might have its own structure but left open the answer as to
what that structure might be. The three most popular approaches to new
ways of teaching history state that teaching history: 1. is a matter of
handing on substantive historical concepts; 2. must in the end come down
to developing children's understanding of structural second-order
concepts; and 3. is teaching historical skills, abilities, or
procedures. Much of the emphasis of the "new history" has been on giving
children experience in handling evidence; not until recently has there
been a corresponding interest in historical understanding, explanation,
and connected notions of empathy and imagination. A discussion of
empathy and imagination shows some of the ways in which assumptions
about them affect arguments about history teaching. Philosophy of
history is necessary in any attempt to arrive at a rational way of
teaching history.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
MARVIN LEVICH, Interpretation in History: Or What Historians Do and Philosophers Say, History and Theory 24 (February 1985), 44-61
There is a bifurcation between philosophy and history, and
in particular, between the interpretations in the writings of
historians and in the conceptualizations of philosophers. Philosophers
believe analysis to be a supremely rational activity, and they are
right. But almost all interpretations are long, complex, and difficult
to reduce to the manageable object of philosophical analysis, and
philosophers sometimes conclude that what cannot be cut down to
analytical size is not worthy of cognitive study, Historical
interpretation, and therefore history itseif, has suffered grievously
from this inclination and from the attendant temptation to shnplify at
the expense of the subject.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
JOHN LOVE, Max Weber and the Theory of Ancient Capitalism, History and Theory 25 (May 1986), 152-172
Weber in his early years had taken very seriously the idea that capitalism played an important, perhaps decisive, role in the life of ancient societies. Over time he came to understand the uniqueness of historical structures, and particularly of "rational capitalistic enterprises with fixed capital, free labor, the rational specialization and combination of functions, and the allocation of productive functions on the basis of capitalistic enterprises, bound together in a market economy," which characterizes the modern world. Non-market types of profit-making occur in the ancient world but are not the heart of it. Weber's concept of "political capitalism" assists in explaining those acquisitive activities that possess capitalistic features without identifying the ancient forms with modern capitalism, avoiding the extremes of primitivism and anachronistic modernism.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
MICHAEL J. MACLEAN, Johann Gustav Droysen and the Development of Historical Hermeneutics, History and Theory 21 (October 1982), 347-365
Droysen sought to exploit, for practical political effect, a
vision of history as an integral, progressive, and fathomable
continuum, and hence in his writings subordinated historical
individuality to history's discernible teleology. Droysen's
methodological opponent, Rankean historicism, was to the right of his
centrist politics. Droysen insisted against Ranke that history is not
something "out there" that can be dispassionately and scientifically
analyzed but is man's ontological ground. He was basically a moderate
Young Hegelian: historians can be scholars and yet ally with and further
the rational dynamism of history's normative Ideas because those Ideas
are their own as progressive human beings. This battle between Ranke and
Droysen illustrates that the evolution of German historical
hermeneutics at mid-nineteenth century was generated both by a deep
conflict within the German historical tradition and by the confrontation
of that tradition with positivism.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
GEORGE MAKDISI, The Diary in Islamic Historiography, History and Theory 25 (May 1986), 173-185
The Muslim Banna' (1005-1079) kept the world's earliest
extant diary, but diary keeping was a widespread practice even in the
tenth century. Hadith criticism, which was concentrated mainly on the
chain of transmitters of the words and deeds of the Prophet of Islam and
his followers, brought about the publication of the diary. The
ta'rikh-diary in Islam was a diary kept for personal use, a dated record
of notes kept by the author for use in writing other historical
compositions. The substance of biographical dictionaries and annalistic
histories was drawn from these diaries.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
RAYMOND MARTIN, Causes, Conditions, and Causal Importance, History and Theory 21 (February 1982), 53-74
Judgments which assign relative importance to the causes
of particular results can be objective. Historians usually do and can
use a factual principle of selection to distinguish between causes and
conditions and between more and less important causes. The judgments
which distinguish between causes and conditions and the judgments which
distinguish between more and less important causes require radically
different analyses. In A. M. Jones's work on the decline and fall of
Rome, he argued that increased barbarian pressure on the West was the
most important cause of Rome's fall. It is possible to understand this
statement as an instantiation of the following: A was a more important
cause of P relative to 0 than was B if 1) A and B were each a cause of P
relative to 0 and 2) either A was necessary for P or B was not
necessary for P and 3) had B not occurred, something would have occurred
which more closely approximates P than had A not occurred.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
DONALD N. MCCLOSKEY, The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics: Rhetorical Thoughts on a Text by Robert Fogel, History and Theory 24 (February 1985), 1-22
Both history and economics have rhetorics which limit
their practitioners as to what sorts of evidence and what sorts of
logical appeals they can make if they wish to retain an audience. The
thesis of Robert Fogel's Railroads and Economic Growth could be
summed up by a three-line proof, but Fogel used courtroom procedure,
scientific jargon, statistics, simulation, and the traditions of
economic and historical argument to persuade an audience of both
historians and economists. It was a book about rhetoric in economics and
history as much as one about American railroads, and it became the
archetype of cliometrics because of its powerful argumentative form and
its startling, compelling conclusion. Knowledge in history or economics
is a social event, often a new style of conversation, a new way of
speaking; Fogel managed to create that new way of speaking.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LELAN MCLEMORE, Max Weber's Defense of Historical Inquiry, History and Theory 23 (October 1984), 277-295
Weber locates the differentiation between the social and
natural sciences within a fundamental division between the sciences:
those seeking knowledge of concrete events and those directed towards
the development of causal law. The validity of a causal explanation of a
concrete event depends upon the evidence available rather than upon the
capacity to subsume that event under a law. The impossibility of
explanation by subsumption, the role of value-relevance in
conceptualizing the object domain, the use of categories of adequate
causation and objective possibility in imputing causes, and the
unlikelihood of dernonstrating causal necessity are characteristic of
any effort to gain knowledge of concrete phenomena. Weber adds a
distinction between natural and sociocultural sciences based on the
subject matter of the sciences. The task of the sociocultural sciences,
unlike that of the natural sciences, is that of "interpreting the
meaning which men give to their actions and so understanding the actions
themselves." Sociocultural explanations can and must demonstrate
meaning adequacy as well as causal adequacy by making the dynamic bond
between cause and effect intelligible.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
RICHARD A. MCNEAL, Protagoras the Historian, History and Theory 25 (October 1986), 299-318
Protagoras, a contemporary of Herodotus, deserves some
credit for developing Greek historical consciousness. Protagoras' theory
of a two-stage development of mankind does postulate a sequence of
events in a linear progression from simple to more complex, higher. That
Protagoras engaged in myth indicates that he hadn't the foggiest notion
of how to go about an historical answer to questions of human origins;
the methods of historical inquiry were so new in his time that there was
no body of existing research upon which to base an answer. Protagoras
shows us how the historical habit of mind struggled, not altogether
successfully, to free itself from the antihistorical thought which was
far more congenial to the Greeks.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, From Mommsen to Max Weber, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 16-32
In 1856, Mommsen responded to the increased interest in
primitive German communism sparked by Marx and Engels by showing that
the early Romans did not lag behind the early Germans in their
collective attitudes. Fustel managed to have the property structure of
the Roman gens as the archetype of primitive private property; whereas Mommsen, Maine, and Bonfante identified the gens with the primitive communist village. This was possible because we know little about the nature and function of the early Roman gens. Compared
to these writers, Weber was much more interested in historical times
than in the origins of private ownership in Rome. Where Mommsen saw the
origins of Roman civilization in the fight of sturdy peasants to keep
their own fields, Weber depicted these same Rornans at a
later stage where they had degenerated into greedy landowners and were
prepared to separate themselves from the cities they had created.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Georges Dumézil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization, History and Theory 23 (October 1984), 312-330
Dumézil's idea of a trifunctional mentality and maybe even
partition of all Indo-European societies between priests, warriors, and
producers has not been particularly fruitful. His mature work on Roman
Religion confirms that he has not been able to overcome two basic
difficulties in his system: the vagueness of what is the Indo-European
heritage in Rome and the lack of relation between the Indo-European
element and the mass of beliefs, ceremonies, and institutions which have
nothing to do with castes and three functions. There is little evidence
in Rome that priests, warriors, and peasants were three different
social classes and even less that they were three different mental
categories. There is no region of the IndoEuropean-speaking world where a
common mentality -trifunctional or otherwise - is visible.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Hermann Usener, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 33-48
Usener's use of philology and more specifically of
comparative philology for the transformation of the study of religion
during the late nineteenth century resulted from a slow realization of
certain potentialities of philology which he and others had not grasped
before. When Usener aimed at a definite and systematic examination of
pagan elements in Christianity, with the ultimate purpose of preparing
their elimination from modern Christianity, he made the decisive move
from what we would call the humanistic tradition of the textual critic
and interpreter to the task of the philological - and by implication
antitheological - interpreter of religion. An interpretation of Usener
in terms of a modified Kantian problematic about the relation between
phenomenon and noumenon would show that Usener struggled to find in
human language the channel toward the Noumenon.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Niebuhr and the Agrarian Problems of Rome, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 3-15
The sharp distinction between right of private ownership
and right of occupation as formulated by Barthold Niebuhr in 1810-1811
has ever since been the center of discussion, interpretation, and doubt
in any comparison between Roman property law and other legal systems.
Fearful of the establishment of a modern agrarian law by contemporary
radicals, he tried to prove that the Romans had never used agrarian laws
to undermine the private ownership of land. Niebuhr hoped to separate
what he considered the just claims of agrarian reforms from the unjust
attacks against private property. Niebuhr's acquaintance with the Indian
agrarian situation enabled him to understand the real nature of the
ager publicus Jin Rome. A conservative, Niebuhr hoped to save the
aristocracy from itself; an outsider in aristocratic society by virtue
of his peasant ancestry, he was sympathetic to the peasantry as well.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Religious History without Frontiers: J. Wellhausen, U. Wilamowitz, and E. Schwartz, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 49- 64
Wellhausen, Usener, Wilamowitz, and Schwartz found common
presuppositions in a philological method which relied on the instrument
of text analysis and avoided any theological or dogmatic interference.
Wellhausen became a hero to Wilamowitz and Schwartz because he showed
them that the same method was legitimate both in sacred and profane
texts. He also confirmed them in what they had already learned from
Usener: that repudiation of theological presuppositions did not mean
absence of religious emotions. But Wellhausen, Wilamowitz, and Schwartz
had in common political emotions which were alien to the contemplative
Usener.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
MURRAY G. MURPHEY, Explanation, Causes, and Covering Laws, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 43-57
The real issues in the debate over whether historical
explanations conform to the covering-law model concern not only history
but human nature, human action, and human freedom. Modifications of the
coveringlaw model are possible which may remove some of the objections
to it. Human behavior is rule-governed. Rules are made by human agents
and learned by human actors. Cultural rules alone do not explain
behavior and cannot be used as "covering" generalizations. But when they
are combined with appropriate deviance data to yield conformity
statements, these statements can be used as explanatory generalizations -
with a certain amount of leeway and the understanding that such rules
can be changed or eliminated. These generalizations, such as those found
in anthropology, perform the function of general laws in history.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
FREDERICK A. OLAFSON, Hermeneutics: "Analytical" and "Dialectical", History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 28-42
A new hermeneutical theory is needed that will avoid both
the "analytical" fixation on the epistemic functions of the historian
and the "dialectical" tendency to "ontologize" interpretation to the
point where questions of truth in the sense of fidelity to the past
become increasingly marginal. The prospects for such a theory are not
particularly good. We do not have what would be required to reconcile
these ways of thinking about interpretation. That would be a new and
more powerful way of conceiving the unity of theoretical and practical
reason based on a much deeper understanding of what it is to be hurnan.
But the antihumanistic temper of much contemporary thought makes a revival of constructive philosophical inin that question unlikely.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
CHRISTOPHER PARKER, English Historians and the Opposition to Positivism, History and Theory 22 (May 1983), 120-145
Virtually all important figures in the development of
historiography and of history as an academic subject from the 1850s to
the end of the Victorian era were explicitly hostile to positivism and
to its chief practitioners, Comte and Buckle. The positivists were
looking for a system to implement their revolutionary political, social,
economic, religious, and ethical intentions. The generally conservative
antipositivists defended free will, individualism, and divine will
against the high degree of determinism of positivism, and they were
skeptical of man's ability or desire to know himself or his future.
Their strength lay in their sociopolitical and religious role in the
English universities. Nineteenth-century positivism has been confused
with individualism, whereas it was individualism which defeated
positivism.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ANDRUS PORK, Assessing Relative Causal Importance in History, History and Theory 24 (February 1985), 62-69
As Raymond Martin noted, historians can make objective
judgments about relative causal importance. He constructs a
philosophical statement showing that counterfactuals enable us to assess
relative causal importance. To justify the counterfactual statement
itself, historians usually intuitively try to find for a comparison some
other real situation which is in some important respect similar to the
possible situation reflected in the counterfactual claim. The question
then becomes, "How do we know that the actual historical situation, the
counterfactual situations, and the real comparison situations are
similar in relevant aspects?" As Martin did, we must look at real cases
of historical thinking to make a philosophical statement, which in turn
leads to a new set of questions and so on. At some stage a statement
that gives substantial support to the Marxist claim that history is a
scientifically analyzable, law-governed process will be reached.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
FRIEDRICH
RAPP, Structural Models in Historical Writing: The Determinants of
Technological Development during the Industrial Revolution, History and Theory 21 (October 1982), 327-346
The gap between the metatheoretical inquiries of the
analytical philosophy of history, formulated in terms of general
principle, and the actual research practices of the historical
discipline needs to be bridged. This investigation of the determinants
-preconditions, causes, factors, forces - of technological development
during the Industrial Revolution makes explicit the range of theoretical
instruments used in such studies. The methodologically
unavoidable plurality of aspects and perspectives for each concrete
inquiry precludes any generally binding model for technological
development. Discussion of epistemological presuppositions, by comparing
various approaches, can serve to make fully conscious these
presuppositions and make them accessible to analysis and criticism.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
PETER H. REILL, Narration and Structure in Late Eighteenth-Century Historical Thought, History and Theory 25 (October 1986), 286-298
A new scientific mentality of the late eighteenth century,
dissatisfied with mechanistic and mathematical models of reasoning and
demonstration, replaced static concepts with dynamic ones and defined
reality in terms of complex interconnections. These thinkers believed
there were basic regulative patterns common to all living entities which
could be grasped only by analogical reasoning and comparison. But they
also believed that the specific content, such as laws, languages, and
nations, existed within a specific historic context. Historical
understanding was seen as combining a sense for the formal pattern of
development with an acute awareness of the specific force field of
historical and environmental determinants existing at a given moment.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
MICHAEL ROTH, A Problem of Recognition: Alexandre Kojève and the End of History, History and Theory 24 (October 1985), 293-306
Given the evolution of his thought, Alexandre Kojève can be
read as either the source of "engagement" and "existential Marxism" or
as an early exponent of the postmodern rejection of the attempt to make
meaning out of historical directionality in favor of an analysis of how
history or discourse is constructed. Through the mid-1940s, Kojève was
willing to accept that historical time is in the process of stopping,
making it possible to grasp retrospectively, even anachronistically, the
meaning and direction of history. By the late 1940s, Kojève had come to
believe that history is definitively over, and there is no substance
left to fight about. Whereas the end of history had been a goal worth
struggling for, it is now simply a description of reality in which there
is nothing else to do, except perhaps to remind others that there is
nothing left to do.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
JÖRN RÜSEN, Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of Post-Modernism, History and Theory 24 (October 1985), 235-246
Revolution and industrialization meant for the patrician
Burckhardt the end of Western civilization and the dehumanization of men
and women. He upholds the idea of the historical unity of European
culture as the core of historical consciousness while characterizing his
own time as the breakdown of historical continuity in Western
civilization by "anth ropo logi zing,"" structuralizing, "and
"aestheticizing "history. He surpasses the age of revolution by having
recourse to the suprahistorical nature of the human mind, using his
historical topics as paradigms of transhistoric potentialities of human
life. The historian sits in untimelv contemplation of the creative
forces of the human mind in history, recalling the importance of culture
in a time of increasing loss of culture. In evaluating Burckhardt's
postmodernist, apolitical attitude, we should not forget the historical
experience which Europe and especially Germany have had with antimodern
thought.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
KENNETH S. SACKS, The Meaning of Eunapius' History, History and Theory 25 (February 1986), 52-67
Eunapius, pagan historian of the fourth century, wrote a
history of the contemporary Roman Empire. Scholars have understood
Eunapius'animosity toward Christianity as coloring his judgment and
supplying him with a purpose for writing. Though his history did reflect
contemporary religious tension, it is primarily shaped by traditional
approaches to historiography. Eunapius attempts to analogize and explain
human behavior in terms of the natural laws which pervade the history.
His message is founded on classical values independent of current
concerns; Eunapius inculpates an apparently innocent pagan to prove one
point. He was not only participant in the sectarian struggle which
divided the Empire; he was also part of a thousand-year-old culture that
served to unify it.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ULYSSES SANTAMARIA and ANNE M. BAILEY, A Note on Braudel's Structure as Duration, History and Theory 23 (February 1984), 78-83
Fernand Braudel's three time scales - the long term, the
conjunctural, and that of events -do not fit together easily. Whereas
the theoretical underpinnings of duration are clear, Braudel neither
seeks nor finds Justification in the social sciences for the short term
or event. Braudel's lack of theorization of the short term as a present
moment and the relegation of its explanation to structures or
conjunctures accounts for a number of failings or lacunae attributed to Annales over
the past twenty years. What is absent in Braudel's historiography is
the inquiry into the effects of action on the creation of structures. In
his search for the structures that envelop the products of short
durations, Braudel neither seeks contradictions within either the
long-term structures or the outcomes of shorter durations, nor finds
contradictions within the three temporalities which he superimposes on
any present moment.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ZACHARY SAYRE SCHIFFMAN, Renaissance Historicism Reconsidered, History and Theory 24 (May 1985), 170-182
A revisionist view incorrectly identifies a growing
awareness of historical and cultural relativity by scholars of Roman law
in sixteenth-century France with a modern historical consciousness.
Friedrich Meinecke more correctly identified historicism as the juncture
of the ideas of individuality and development. The perception by these
Renaissance scholars of successive changes in language and law only
constitutes an awareness of individuality, not of an idea of
development. They conceived of an entity as unfolding from a germ or
essence, an essential quality which defined it as an individuality. They
could not conceive of an entity as developing in relation to its
circumstances.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
WARREN SCHMAUS, A Reappraisal of Comte's Three-State Law, History and Theory 21 (May 1982), 248-266
Comte's three-state law concerns the historical development
(through the theological, metaphysical, and positive states) of our
methods of cognitive inquiry. Comte believes he can defend his
three-state law either by :,rational proofs" based upon our knowledge of
the human mind or upon 'historical verifications." Comte then uses the
three-state law of scientific progress to argue for the existence of
industrial and multistate political laws of progress. Here Comte strays
from his positivism. He attributes a kind of causal efficacy to
scientific progress which leads him to look for laws of social dynamics
describing the social progress which result from the scientific. Here
Comte is guilty of Popper's "poverty of historicism" charge. Comte's
three-state law of scientific development is more easily defended than
his concept of historical method.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
GARY SHAPIRO, Nietzsche contra Renan, History and Theory 21 (May 1982), 193-222
Nietzsche's later view of history is a critique and parody of Renan's History of the Origins of Christianity. Nietzschean
genealogy places into question both the person of the historian (and
his or her readers) and the apparently innocent aestheticism of the
contemplation of the past. History proceeds through the categories of
shock, rupture, and scandal, not by Renan's sentimental continuity and
evolution. Beneath every asserted continuity is the workings of
priestly-philosophical power structures. Nietzsche hopes to free man
from individual guilt through the myth of eternal recurrence, according
to which events are so intertwined that none may be uniquely designated
as cause (sinner) or effect (punishment). The issue here is between
Renan's narrative view of reality and Nietzsche's nonnarrative view.
Nietzsche's nonnarrative "life of Jesus" is really an attack on the
narrative principle itself.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
WILLIAM H. SHAW, Marx and Morgan, History and Theory 23 (May 1984), 215-228
Marx (and Engels) found in the American anthropologist
Lewis Henry Morgan's work a confirmation of and expansion upon his own
materialist approach. Similarities he found included Morgan's division
of mankind's early development into distinct stages, each the necessary
forerunner of its successor; a theory of historical development; the
importance of "productive forces"; and an awareness of the social
contradictions of private property. Marx knew Morgan did not share his
political sympathies, but he and Engels did not see or ignored evidence
that Morgan was not an historical materialist. Marx and Engels through
their enthusiasm for Morgan brought their materialist conception of
history into contact with the important question of the nature of
kinship bonds, even if they did not resolve it themselves.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
DENIS SHEMILT, The Devil's Locomotive, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 1-18
That history has its characteristic logic, methods, and
perspectives follows from its being what Paul Hirst calls a "form of
knowledge." The British Schools Council Project "History 13-16" was
founded on the assumption that history should be taught to adolescents
as such a form. An analysis of "History 13-16" suggests that adolescents
can address highly abstract questions when they are appropriately
presented. There are four general, selective, simplified, and idealized
models of adolescent construction of historical narrative. At Level I
historical narrative is seen as lacking inner logic; logic enters the
story as the simple linkage of events contiguous in time. At Level 11
historical narrative is seen to embody a Calvinistic logic in which
everything is connected and continuous. At Level III adolescents are
impressed by the complexity and density of the story. At Level IV
adolescents develop an inkling of period as something more than a
chronological connection. There is a firm understanding that events
cannot be dissociated from their specific contexts. "History 13-16"
students show a more sophisticated grasp of history than do children
following conventional content-based courses, although only a minority
construe at Level IV. If the levels of construal can be interpreted as
developmental stages, as seems reasonable, it should be possible to
"spiral" a history curriculum around basic structural concepts. The aim
of teaching history should be the liberal one of enabling children to
make sense of and to see the value of history, not the vocational one of
training historians.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LARRY SHINER, Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power-Knowledge, History and Theory 21 (October 1982), 382-398
Foucault's writing is best understood in terms of its
political purpose and of the political question it puts to philosophy,
history, and the human sciences. Foucault is not looking for a "method"
which will be superior to other methods in objectivity but is forging
tools of analysis which take their starting point in the
political-intellectual conflicts of the present. His method is really an
antimethod, "genealogy," which seeks to free us from the illusion that
an apolitical method is possible. A genealogy of the human sciences
examines the intimate connection of the knowledge they represent with
the relations of power which produced them. Such a genealogy shows how
the human sciences emerged from the tactics or microtechnologies of
power by which various groups and individuals attempted to give
structure to the field of behavior of others, seeking to increase the
economic utility of the body while decreasing its political danger.
Genealogy attempts to restore the "subjugated" knowledge of the patient,
the prisoner, the worker.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
LARRY SHINER, Writing and Political Carnival in Tocqueville's Recollections, History and Theory 25 (February 1986), 17-32
Unlike Tocqueville's other writing, Recollections, which
was never intended for publication, contained the internally contrary,
multiple viewpoints characteristic of carnivalesque discourse. Its
greater spontaneity may allow'us more easily to see some of the ways in
which writing can undermine the intentions of the writer. In following
the Recollections' treatment of the February revolution, the
writing soberly sets out to embody the story of a deadly struggle
between the bourgeoisie and the people over the issue of property but
steadily veers off in the direction first of irony, then satire, and
finally carnival. Tocqueville's rhetorical ending shows him trying to
turn his unruly text back into a cautionary tale of the moralistically
ironic type. But the text keeps getting out of hand and dissolves
moralism in a bath of satire and burlesque.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
GABRIELLE M. SPIEGEL, Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative, History and Theory 22 (February 1983), 43-53
Beneath the apparent narrative disarray, the paratactic
disjunction of episodic units, and the seeming logical incoherence which
scholars have assumed to be the necessary by-product of narrative
parataxis in medieval historiography, lay a metaphor of procreative time
and social affiliation which brought together into a connected
historical matrix the core of the chronicler's material. Genealogy, as a
complex of metaphoric structure, narrative "grid," and social context,
represents one of many possible cases of the sensitivity of medieval
historical narratives to social realities and indicates how medieval
chroniclers responded to these realities as well as to the aesthetic
conventions of literary tradition.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives, History and Theory 24 (October 1985), 247-272
A "reading" of archival material on the Rani of Sirmur
shows the soldiers and administrators of the East India Company
constructing the object of representations that becomes the reality of
India. The Rani emerges only when she is needed in the space of imperial
production. Caught between the patriarchy of her husband, the Raja of
Sirmur, and the imperialism of the British who deposed him, she is in an
almost allegorical position. Both patriarchal subj ect- formation and
imperialist object-constitution efface the dubious place of the free
will of the sexed subject as female. In the cracks between the
production of the archives and indigenous patriarchy, today distanced by
the waves of hegemonic "feminism," there is no "real Rani" to be found.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
DAVID STOCKLEY, Empathetic Reconstruction in History and History Teaching, History and Theory 22 (December 1983), Bei. 22, 50-65
As Collingwood notes, every historian has not only a
personal perspective but also the constraint of operating within a
public tradition of truth and acceptability. This background of
knowledge, experience, emotions, and so forth may necessarily be more
truncated for an adolescent than for a mature historian. Empathetic
reconstruction is both an imaginative and analytic act. The process of
bringing about empathetic reconstruc - tion in the history classroom
will take a long time, will need to be structured and systematic, and so
will require constant striving on the part of the teacher. The
essential point is that children must be encouraged to grasp the
world-view and frame of reference of the historical agents and to
overcome their own prejudices and misconceptions. This is best achieved
through such devices as the structured dilemma.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ROBERT J. TRISTRAM, Explanation in the New Science: On Vico's Contribution to Scientific Sociohistorical Thought, History and Theory 22 (May 1983), 146-177
The principles Vico offers for his science indicate that
his conception of his science is flawed and inconsistent. But this does
not mean his conception of explanation is inadequate and inconsistent.
Vico's method of science contains three different perspectives which can
be called the providential, institutional,
and ideational perspectives. Vico does distinguish between description
and explanation and the providential perspective involves the former.
Explanations of the world of nations are made by looking at institutions
and ideas. The institutional perspective aims at knowledge of what is
true of things while the ideational perspective studies human thoughts.
They are associated with the disciplines of philosophy and philology.
These disciplines do complement each other; they are both concerned with
ideas and institutions. The complementary workings of these
perspectives in producing explanations can be understood in terms of a
Vichian explanatory circle.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
RICHARD T. VANN, The Youth of Centuries of Childhood [A Review of Reviews], History and Theory 21 (May 1982), 279-297
Ariès's Centuries of Childhood initially was largely
ignored by scholars and scholarly journals who could not locate the
book within traditional disciplines. But the influence of the book grew
steadily, and it has played a formative role in the history of the
family and the histoire des mentalités. Ariès had three theses:
that childhood was invented in the seventeenth century; that the
invention of childhood arose from the dual impulses of parents to coddle
their children and, along with schoolmasters, to
pay greater attention to forming the children's characters through
education; and that the concept of childhood led to an intense and
pri~,atized mode of parent-child relations. The first thesis is the most
dubious, but in the light of new research
none of them seems likely to endure. A new interpretative framework will
be required. Nonetheless, Ariès's work will endure in the history of
historiography because he established the history of childhood as a
field.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
W. PAUL VOGT, Identifying Scholarly and Intellectual Communities: A Note on French Philosophy, 1900-1939, History and Theory 21 (May 1982), 267-278
By investigating the major scholarly and intellectual
journals of a field, it is possible to discern the leading members of
scholarly and intellectual communities. A quantitative examination of
the two most important philosophy journals in the French Third Republic,
Revue philosophique and Revue de métaphysique et de morale, confirms
the long-suspected existence of a philosophical gerontocracy but shows
that the philosophical establishment was preparing for a sharp turn in
French philosophy and social thought. It also reveals that the
establishment was overwhelmingly male but open to foreign influence.
Quantitative studies cannot replace more qualitative work but they do
help identify authors whose works ought to be read, and they do so
historically and systematically.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
WOLFGANG VON LEYDEN, Categories of Historical Understanding, History and Theory 23 (February 1984), 53-77
The first category of historical understanding represents
the thesis of historical realism - the existence and temporal priority
of the actual past. The second constitutes the doctrine of
constructionism -the logical priority of historical knowledge. The third
stipulates that the difference between the real past and the historical
construction of the past is one of a kind and in its turn logical. The
fourth states that any given piece or whole body of historical evidence
contains many potential meanings and functions. The fifth stipulates
that an historian's standpoint is of utmost significance for the
character and outcome of his work. The sixth category refers to the
multilevel structure of the study of history - statements about the past
in historical narratives occupy a level always beyond that of earlier
generations and contemporaries of past events. The most significant
implication of the advance of historical writing and the historian's
higher-order status is that his work is circumscribed by his own
time-bound perspective.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
GEOFFREY WAITE, Lenin in Las Meninas: An Essay in Historical -Materialist Vision, History and Theory 25 (October 1986), 248-285
The bourgeois visual consensus has denied any substantial
links between the concrete history of alienated, exploited labor and the
realm of culture, for example in Velázquez's painting "Las Meninas."
Literary and artistic historians hail Spain in the 1600s for its
achievements while political, social, and economic historians speak of
its decline. Imagine Lenin staring at "Las
Meninas." He sees that it reflects both personal disintegration,
decadence, and impotence and social, economic, and political rape. Put
Lenin inside the actual picture, and he sees what everyone else has
looked at but no one has seen: the abyss between culture and material
conditions. Historical materialists need to bridge the gap between
infra- and superstructure by developing dialectical images and a vision
which puts the vanguard into the servants (las meninas) and the servants into the vanguard: Lenin in "Las Meninas."
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
HAYDEN WHITE, The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory, History and Theory 23 (February 1984), 1-33
A discipline that produces narrative accounts of its
subject matter as an end in itself seems methodologically unsound. The
historians of the Annales group criticized narrative history for
the nonscientific character of its emphasis on political history and
human agents rather than upon longterm impersonal processes.
Structuralists and post-structuralists view narratives as an invented
product of a culture, serving that culture's purposes and desires,
rather than as a representation of a found reality. This criticism is
consistent with the objections raised by the Annales group. Both
view narrative as ideological in character. Most defenders of narrative
as a legitimate mode of historical representation conceive of a
narrative as a message about the past containing facts and explanation.
But a historical narrative cannot simply be a chronicle transmitting
information. It imposes a discursive form on events by means that are
poetic in nature. A historical narrative is properly assessed in terms
of the truth-value of its factual statements and their logical
conjunction, and the allegorical content provided by its narrative form.
Most analytical philosophers ignore this literary aspect in their
discussions of historical narrative. Paul Ricoeur argues that narrative
is essential to the representation of historical events because this
literary aspect is essential to historical understanding, which is
something more than explanation. The ambiguity of 11 narrative" as both a
mode of discourse and the product of that mode is what leads to much of
the dispute about narrative in historiographical thought.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
KERRY H. WHITESIDE, Perspectivism and Historical Objectivity: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Covert Debate with Raymond Aron, History and Theory 25 (May 1986), 132-151
Raymond Aron's perspectivism stressed the inherent
subjectivity and historicity of any interpretation of the past or
present. Merleau-Ponty develops a theory of objectivity consistent with
perspectivism. Historical objectivity consists in the demonstration of
thematic continuities in the superficially heterogeneous activities,
beliefs, and events of an era. A society's ideologies, politics,
religions, and economics all express "the same structure of being."
Instead of talking about one structure or unity, Merleau-Ponty should
have stuck with thoughts that phenomena be unified in relation to their
meanings; that these meanings be constituted in part by the participant;
that the historian has insight into the intentions of the people.
Aron's perspectivism denied the possibility for objectivity and hence
for responsible radical political action; it is not necessary to look
for one grand unity to refute Aron.
JSTOR || top || Return to Volumes 21-25 Contents listing
ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL, What Thucydides Saw, History and Theory 25 (February 1986), 1-16
Three basic assumptions distinguish Thucvdides' historical
perspective from the perspective of the debate speeches in his history:
he did not assume that events are continuous or repeatable, that human
nature in unchangeable, and that the ultimate causes of human affairs
are within human ken. In Thucydides' history, statesmen and citizens are
judged by their capacities to do as Thucydides himself tried to do
-judge novelty and greatness clearly. Lastingly effective good judgment
unifies people because it stems from and appeals to respect for the
imponderables of human affairs, the unpredictability of the future and
the fragility of human nature. Those who can appreciate novelties know
that the future will not be lacking in them, as those who can appreciate
greatness know that its causes are ultimately beyond analysis. Like
Thucydides himself, such people are storytellers rather than moralists.