Philosophies
of History (JR136)
History is the
study of the past in all its forms. Philosophy of history examines the
theoretical foundations of the practice, application, and social consequences
of history and historiography. It is similar to other area studies – such as
philosophy of science or philosophy of religion – in two respects. First,
philosophy of history utilizes the best theories in the core areas of
philosophy like metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to address questions
about the nature of the past and how we come to know it: whether the past
proceeds in a random way or is guided by some principle of order, how best to
explain or describe the events and objects of the past, how historical events
can be considered causally efficacious on one another, and how to adjudicate
testimony and evidence. Second, as is the case with the other area-studies,
philosophy of history investigates problems that are unique to its subject
matter. History examines not what things are so much as how they came to be. History
focuses on the unique rather than the general. Its movers are most often people
who act for a variety of inner motives rather than purely physical forces. Its
objects are no longer observable directly, but must be mediated by evidence.
These problems and many more that are specific to the past have been studied
and debated for as long as philosophy itself has existed. Philosophy of history should not be confused with the history of philosophy, which is the study of the development of philosophical
ideas in their historical context.
Pre-modern
history
In
his Poetics,
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) maintained the superiority of poetry over
history because poetry speaks of what must or should be true rather than merely what is true. Herodotus, a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Socrates, broke from the Homeric tradition of passing narrative from generation to generation in his work
"Investigations" , also known
as Histories. Herodotus, regarded by some as the first
systematic historian, and, later, Plutarch (46–120 CE) freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical
subjects with an eye toward morally improving
the reader. History was supposed to teach good examples for one to follow. The
assumption that history "should teach good examples" influenced how
writers produced history. Events of the past are just as likely to show bad
examples that one should not follow, but classical historians would either not
record such examples or would re-interpret them to support their assumption of
history's purpose
Arguably the first scientific philosophy of history was produced,
Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE). . To attain
his comprehensive characterization of the Greek and non-Greek worlds,
Herodotus’ research depended on the often fabulous oral traditions of his
predecessors. But what he sacrifices in confirmable fact he makes up for in the
descriptive vividness of everyday life. All stories, however preposterous, are
recorded without moral judgment since they each reflect the beliefs of a time
and of a people, all of which are worth knowing. While Greece and Rome produced
a number of important historians and chroniclers, none were more comprehensive
or more influential than Thucydides (c.460-c.395 BCE). Like Herodotus,
Thucydides viewed history as a source of lessons about how people tended to
act. And like him, too, Thucydides was concerned with how methodological
considerations shaped our view of the past. However, Thucydides was critical of
Herodotus for having failed to carry out a sufficiently objective account. “To
hear this history told, insofar as it lacks all that is fabulous, shall perhaps
not be entirely pleasing. But whoever desires to investigate the truth of
things done, and which according to the character of mankind may be done again,
or at least approximately, will discover enough to make it worthwhile”
(Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War).
To remedy Herodotus’ uncritical record, first, Thucydides restricted his
inquiry to the main actors of the Peloponnesian War: the generals and governors
who decided what was to be done rather than the everyday people who could only
speculate about it. The lesson to be learned was not the sheer diversity of
cultural behaviors but the typological character of agents and their actions,
which was to serve as a sort of guide to future conduct since they were likely
to repeat themselves. Second, Thucydides treated his evidence with overt
skepticism. He claims to not accept hearsay or conjecture, and to admit only
that which he had personally seen or else had been confirmed by multiple
reliable sources. Thucydides was the first to utilize source criticism in
documentary evidence. The lengthy and eloquent speeches he ascribes to various
parties are preserved only under the promise that they follow as closely as
possible the intention of their alleged speaker.
With the waning of classical antiquity came the decline of the
scientific paradigm of history. The religious practice of sacred-history in the
Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds, though often interpreting the same key
events in very different ways, share common meta-historical principles. The
past is not studied for the sake of disinterested truth, but in the hope of
attaining a glimpse of the bond between the divine plan and a given people’s
course in the world. In that sense, many non-fundamentalist historians of each
faith regard their sacred texts as meaningful documents meant for consideration
in the light of the present and what its authors believe to be our common
future. Under the surface chronicle of events like floods, plagues, good
harvests, or benevolent rulers is seen a moral and spiritual lesson provided by
god to his people, which it is the historian’s task to relate. As the Qur’an
makes clear, “In their history, there is a lesson [‘ibra] for those who possess intelligence” (Qu’ran
12:111).
The most reflective of the early medieval historiographers is
doubtless Augustine (354-430). In opposition to Thucydides’ aim to show the
repeatability of typical elements from the past, Augustine’s emphasized the
linearity of history as a part of the Christian eschatology, the necessary
unfolding of God’s eternal plan within a temporally-ordered course of history.
His City of God (413-26)
characterizes lives and nations as a long redemption from original sin that
culminates in the appearance of Christ. Since then, history has been a record
of the engaged struggle between the chosen elect of the City of God and the
rebellious self-lovers who dwell in the City of Men. Because time is linear,
its key events are unique and inviolable: the Fall of Adam, the Birth and Death
of Jesus, and the Resurrection all move history along to the Final Judgment
with infallible regularity.
Sacred-history thus
tends to provide an overarching narrative about the meaning of human existence,
either as a tragedy or a statement of hope in a redeemed future. Besides its
canonical status throughout much of the medieval world, its influence
manifestly stretches over the hermeneutical tradition as well as the
teleological philosophers of history of the Nineteenth Century.
From
the Classical period to the Renaissance, historians alternated between focusing on subjects
designed to improve mankind and on a devotion to fact. History was composed
mainly of hagiographies of
monarchs or of epic
poetry describing heroic gestures (such as The Song of Roland—about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) during Charlemagne's first campaign to conquer the Iberian
peninsula).
In
the fourteenth century, Ibn
Khaldun, who is considered one of the
fathers of the philosophy of history, discussed his philosophy of history and
society in detail in his Muqaddimah(1377). His work represents a culmination of earlier works
by medieval Islamic sociologists in the spheres of Islamic
ethics, political
science, and historiography, such as those of al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950), Ibn
Miskawayh, al-Dawani, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274)[ Ibn Khaldun often criticized
"idle superstition and
uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced a scientific
method to the philosophy of history (which
Dawood considers something "totally new to his age") and he often
referred to it as his "new science",[which is now
associated with historiography.
His historical method
also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of the state, communication, propaganda,
and systematic bias
in history
By
the eighteenth century historians had turned toward a more positivist approach—focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling
histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coulanges
(1830–1889) and Theodor Mommsen
(1817–1903), historical studies began to move towards a more modern scientific[
form. In the Victorian
era, historiographers debated less
whether history was intended to improve the reader, and more on what causes turned history and how one could
understand historical change.
Cyclical and
linear history
Narrative
history tends to follow an assumption of linear progression: "this
happened, and then that happened; that happened because this happened
first".. Many ancient cultures held mythical concepts
of history and of time that
were not linear. Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating
Dark and Golden Ages. Plato
taught the concept of the Great
Year, and other Greeks spoke of eons. Similar
examples include the ancient doctrine of ,
which existed in Ancient Egypt,
in the Indian religions,
among the Greek Pythagoreans' and in the Stoics' conceptions. In his Works
and Days, Hesiod described five Ages
of Man: the Golden
Age, the Silver
Age, the Bronze
Age, the Heroic
Age, and the Iron
Age, which began with the Dorian
invasion. Some scholars identify
just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the Heroic age as a
description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would match the Vedic or
Hindu ages known as the Kali,
Dwapara,Treta and
Satya yugas.
According to Jainism,
this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns
(utsarpini) and downturns (avasarpini) constantly. Many Greeks believed that
just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as
the healthy régimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as
corrupted régimes common to the lower ages ] In the East, cyclical theories of history developed in China (as a theory of dynastic
cycle) and in the Islamic world in the
work of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406).
The
story of the Fall of Man
from the Garden of Eden,
as recounted and elaborated in Judaism and Christianity, preserves traces of a moral cycle; this would give the
basis for theodicies which
attempt to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the existence of a
God, providing a global explanation of history with belief in a coming Messianic
Age. Some theodicies claimed that
history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, such as the Apocalypse, organized by a superior power. Augustine of Hippo
(354-430), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
and Bossuet (in
his Discourse On Universal
History of 1679) formulated such
theodicies, but Leibniz (1646-1716), who coined the term Théodicée,
developed the most famous philosophical theodicy. Leibniz based his explanation
on the principle of sufficient
reason, which states that anything that
happens does happen for a specific reason. Thus, while man might see certain
events as evil (such as wars, epidemics and natural disasters), such a
judgement in fact only reflected human perception; if one adopted God's view, "evil" events in fact only took place in the
larger divine plan.
In this way theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative element
that forms part of a larger plan of history. Leibniz's principle of sufficient
reason was not, however, a gesture of fatalism. Confronted with the antique problem of future contingents, Leibniz invented the theory of "compossible worlds", distinguishing two
types of necessity, to cope with the problem of determinism.
During
the Renaissance,
cyclical conceptions of history would become common, with proponents
illustrating decay and rebirth by pointing to the decline of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's
Discourses on Livy (1513–1517) provide an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself ascendance and decadence,[ as in Edward
Gibbon's The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) (which the Roman Catholic Church placed on the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum).
Cyclical conceptions continued in the nineteenth and twentieth century’s in the
works of authors such as Oswald
Spengler (1880–1936), Nikolay Danilevsky
(1822–1885), and Paul Kennedy (1945–
), who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls.
Spengler, like Butterfield,
when writing in reaction to the carnage of the First
World War of 1914–1918, believed that a
civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies.[ Spengler thought that the soul of the West was dead and that
Caesarism was about to begin.
The
development of mathematical models of long-term secular sociodemographic cycles
revived interest in cyclical theories of history (see, for example, Historical
Dynamics (2003) by Peter
Turchin, or Introduction to Social
Macrodynamics[ by
Andrey Korotayev
et al ).
Sustainable
history
"Sustainable
History and the Dignity of Man"
is a philosophy of history proposed by Nayef
Al-Rodhan, where history is defined as a
durable progressive trajectory in which the quality of life on this planet or
all other planets is premised on the guarantee of human dignity for all at all
times under all circumstances. This theory views history as a linear
progression propelled by good
governance, which is, in turn, to be achieved
through balancing the emotional, amoral, and egoistic elements of human
nature with the human dignity needs of
reason, security,
human, accountability, transparency,
justice, opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness
Human
dignity lies at the heart of this theory
and is paramount for ensuring the sustainable history of humankind. Among other
things, human dignity means
having a positive sense of self and instilling individuals with respect for the
communities to which they belong. Thus, reconciling humans' predisposition for
emotionally self-interested behavior with the imperatives of human dignity appears
as the one of the most important challenges to global policymakers At national
level, they have to protect their citizens against violence and provide them
with access to food, housing, clothes, health care, and education. Basic
welfare provision and security are fundamental to ensuring human dignity.
Environment and ecological considerations need to be addressed as well.
Finally, cultural diversity, inclusiveness and participation at all levels, of
all communities are key imperatives of human dignity.
In
this respect, the sustainable history philosophy challenges existing concepts
of civilizations,
such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations. Instead, it argues that human civilisation should not be
thought of as consisting of numerous separate and competing civilisations, but
rather it should be thought of collectively as only one human civilization.
Within this civilization are many geo-cultural domains that comprise sub-cultures. Nayef
Al-Rodhan envisions
human civilization as an ocean into which the different geo-cultural domains
flow like rivers,” The Ocean Model of one Human Civilization". At
points where geo-cultural domains first enter the ocean of human civilization,
there is likely to be a concentration or dominance of that culture. However,
over time, all the rivers of geo-cultural domains become one. There is fluidity
at the ocean's centre and cultures have the opportunity to borrow between them.
Under such historical conditions the most advanced forms of human enterprise
can thrive and lead us to a 'civilisational triumph'. Nevertheless,
there are cases where geographical proximity of various cultures can also lead
to friction and conflict.
Nayef
Al-Rodhan concludes that within an
increasingly globalised, interconnected and interdependent world, human dignity
cannot be ensured globally and in a sustainable way through sole national
means. A genuine global effort is required to meet the minimum criteria of
human dignity globally. Areas such as conflict prevention, socio-economic
justice, gender equality, protection of human rights, environmental protection
require a holistic approach and a common action.
The Enlightenment's ideal of progress
In contrast to Vico’s pessimism, the philosophy of history in the
18th century is continuous with the Enlightenment ideals of moral progress and
the power of reason. Voltaire’s (1694-1778) Essay
on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756), wherein the
phrase ‘philosophy of history’ is supposed to have been coined, was the first
attempt since Herodotus to write a comprehensive history of world culture in a
non-Christian and non-teleological framework. Social and cultural history replaced
military and political history with a trans-religious and trans-European tenor
intended to showcase the spiritual and moral progress of humanity. To further
rid Europe of what he considered Christian biases, on display especially in the
modern eschatology of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Voltaire was the
first major modern thinker to stress Arab contributions to world culture. In
keeping with the Enlightenment, he believed that the best remedy for
intolerance and prejudice was simply the truth, something which is best
discovered by the objective historian working with original documents, never by
the ideologue repeating the dicta of authorities. But for his apologies for
non-biased historiography, Voltaire betrays rather clearly the ideals of his age.
Differences between the Christian eschatological worldview and his own age’s
rationalist science are regarded summarily as improvements, whereas the
medieval destruction of the ancient clearly represents decline. The age of
reason is, for Voltaire, the standard by which other eras and peoples are to be
judged, though few could be said to have reached.
Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794) openly embraced
Enlightenment progressivism. Like Voltaire, his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
(published posthumously in 1795) viewed the past as a progress of reason, but
was more optimistic about the inevitable progress of liberal ideals such as
free speech, democratic government, and the equity of suffrage, education, and
wealth. The point of history was not only a description of this progress.
Because the progress is lawful and universal, history is also predictive and,
what is more, articulates a duty for political institutions to work toward the
sort of equalities that the march of history would bring about anyway. The
historian is no mere critic of his time, but also a herald of what is to come.
Widely influential on the French Revolution, Condorcet also made a significant
impression on the systematizing philosophies of history of Saint-Simon, Hegel,
and Marx, as well as laid the first blueprints for systematic study of social
history made popular by Comte, Weber, and Durkheim.
Less revolutionary was Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) Idea of a Universal History
from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). Kant begins from the
Enlightenment view of history as a progressive march of reason and freedom. But
given his epistemology he could not presume, as did Voltaire and Condorcet,
that the teleological progression of history was empirically discernible within
the past. It is not a demonstrable fact, but a necessary condition for the
meaningfulness of the past to posit teleological progress as a regulative idea
that allows us to justify the many apparent evils that have sprung up within history
despite the overall benevolent character of creation. The wars, famines, and
natural disasters that pervade history should be seen as nature’s instruments,
guiding people into the kinds of civil relationships that eventually maximize
freedom and justice. History reveals human culture as the means by which nature
accomplishes its state of perpetual peace in all the spiritual pursuits of
mankind.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was key in the general turn
from Enlightenment historiography to the romantic. His Ideas toward a Philosophy of
History of Humanity (1784-91) echoes Vico’s contention that there
is no single faculty of human reason for all peoples at all times, but
different forms of rationality for various cultures as determined by their particular
time and place in the world. Accepting Vico’s notion of necessary development,
he nevertheless rejects the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality and freedom
as its measures. Herder also discards the Enlightenment tendency to judge the
past by the light of the present, irrespective of how rational we consider
ourselves today. This results from his fundamental conviction that each
national culture is of equal historical value. The same inner vitalism of
nature guides all living things on the regular path from birth to death. Just
as childhood and old age are essential to the development of the person, are
valuable in their own right, and thus should not be judged as somehow inferior
from the standpoint of adulthood, so too a nation’s character is of inviolable
worth and essential to the development of the whole.
Herder not only rejected Kant’s Enlightenment universalism, but
also the epistemological means by which an understanding of ancient people can
be reached. It was clear that there could be no empirical proof or rationalist
demonstration of the organic pattern of the development Herder finds. Nor,
however, should we posit teleological progress as a merely regulative principle
of reason. The sense for past people and cultures is not itself communicated
whole and entire through their documents in such a way that would be open to
historical analysis or source criticism. The historian only apprehends the real
spirit of a people through a sympathetic understanding – what Herder calls Einfühlen— of their
inner life by analogy with her own. The historian ‘feels her way into’ a people
and an age, in order to try to sympathetically apprehend why they made the
choices they did.
Romantic historiographers were strongly guided by Herder’s idea
that the definition of a people lay more in its inner spirit than its legal
borders. The fairy tales of the Grimm brothers (1812), as much as the
nationalistic histories of Macaulay (1800-1859), the Wilhelm Tell (1804)
saga of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), J.W.v. Goethe’s (1749-1832) Goetz von Berlichingen (1773),
the transcription of the Beowulf epic (1818), and the surge of histories
asserting the sanctity of minority Russio-slavic cultures like the Estonian Kalevipoeg (1853)
or the Armenian Sasuntzi
Davit (1873) each sought to revitalize and unify present culture
under the banner of a shared past. The Romantics followed Herder, too, in their
belief that this national character was not discernible solely by meticulous
analysis of documents and archival records. The historian must have an
overarching sense of the course of history of a people, just as the dramaturge
reveals the unity of a character through each individual episode. Hardly a bare
chronicle of disconnected facts, the narratives historians tell about the past
should communicate a sense of spirit rather than objective information. And
only those who ‘breathe the air of a people or an age’ have the proper sort of
sympathetic understanding to interpret it correctly. The potential abuses of
historiography, to which this nationalistic romanticism lends itself, had a
decisive impact on the three main streams of philosophy of history in the 19th
century.
During
the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both
linear and irreversible. Condorcet's interpretations of the various "stages of
humanity" or Auguste Comte's
positivism were one of the most important formulations of such
conceptions of history, which trusted social
progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) treatise on education (or the "art of training
men"), the Aufklärung conceived the human species as perfectible: human
nature could be infinitely developed
through a well-thought \ pedagogy. In What is Enlightenment? (1784), Immanuel
Kant defined the Aufklärung as
the capacity to think by oneself, without referring to an exterior authority,
be it a prince or tradition:
Enlightenment is when a person leaves behind a state of
immaturity and dependence (Unmündigkeit) for which they themselves were
responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for
this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence or
education, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the
direction of another. Sapere
aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.
In
a paradoxical way, Kant supported in the same time enlightened despotism as a way of leading humanity towards its autonomy. He had conceived the process of history in his short
treaty Idea
for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784). On one hand, enlightened despotism was to lead
nations toward their liberation, and progress was thus inscribed in the scheme
of history; on the other hand, liberation could only be acquired by a singular
gesture, Sapere Aude! Thus, autonomy ultimately relied on the
individual's "determination and courage to think without the direction of
another."
The name of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is nearly synonymous with philosophy of history in
two senses, both captured by his phrase, “The only thought which philosophy
brings with it, in regard to history, is the simple thought of Reason—the
thought that Reason rules the world, and that world history has therefore been
rational in its course” (Hegel 1988, 12f). History unfolds itself according to
a rational plan; and we know this precisely because the mind which examines it
unfolds itself from the first inklings of sense-certainty to absolute knowing
in a regular teleological pattern. The same process that governs the movement
of history also governs the character of the philosophical speculation inherent
in that moment of history. And at the present epoch of philosophical
speculation we are capable of understanding the entire movement of history as a
rational process unfolding an ever greater awareness of rational freedom. A true
account of the whole of reality, which is itself the sole endeavor of
philosophy, must consider everything real as real insofar as it can be
comprehended by reason as it unfolds within its necessary historical course.
Reason is, for Hegel, the real. Both are understood as historical.
Hegel’s lecture series on the Introduction
to the Philosophy of History (published posthumously in 1837) is a
sort of secular eschatology, wherein the course of reality is considered a
single epochal evolution toward a providential end. This is cognized by an
increasingly unfolding awareness according to that same plan. As he demotes
religion to a subservient place to absolute knowing in his Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807), so too does Hegel replace the sacred-history conception of grace with
the phenomenological unfolding of reason.
Hegel’s view of the
common structural unveiling of reason and history leads to specific
consequences for his teleological historiography. Reason consists in both the
awareness of contradiction and its sublimation by means of the speculative act
of synthesis which results in an increased self-recognition. Analogously, the
development of history consists in a progressive structure of oppositions and
their necessary synthetic sublimations which leads to an ever increasing
self-awareness of freedom. That necessary movement is illustrated in his
account of three distinct epochs of world history. In the ancient orient, only
the despot is free; his freedom consists only in the arbitrary savagery of his
will. The people are held in bondage by the identity of state and religion. The
opposition of the despot and his subjects is to some degree overcome by the
classical Greek and Roman recognition of citizenship, under which the free
individual understands himself to be bound by honor over and above the laws of
the state. Still, the great many in the classical world are still un-free. It
is only in the intertwining of the Christian recognition of the sanctity of
life and the modern liberal definition of morality as inherently
intersubjective and rational that guarantees freedom for all. “It was first the
Germanic Peoples, through Christianity, who came to the awareness that every
human is free by virtue of being human, and that the freedom of spirit
comprises our most human nature” (Hegel 1988, 21).
The critics of Hegel
have been as passionate as his disciples. Of the former we may count Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881) and the historical school at Basel: J.J. Bachofen
(1815-1887), Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), and a younger Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900). What unites them is a shared belief that historiography should
highlight rather than obscure the achievements of individuals under the banner
of necessary rational progress, a general ridicule of any historical process which
brings about providential ends in the face of overwhelming global suffering, an
anti-statist political stance, and a disavowal of progress as coextensive with
the expansion of social welfare, intellectualism, and utility. Past epochs were
not merely some preparatory ground on the way to the comfortably modern
Hegelian or Marxist state, but stand on their own as inherently superior
cultures and healthier models of culture life. For Bachofen and Nietzsche, this
meant the ancient Greeks, for Burckhardt the aristocrats of the Italian
Renaissance. So too ought the remarkable individuals of these eras be seen as
fully-willed heroes rather than as Hegelian ‘world-historical individuals’ who
appear only when the world process requires a nudge in the direction that
providence had already chosen apart from them.
Of the latter group, we may count his disciples both on the left
and the right, and prominent theorists of history like Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804-1872), David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), Eduard von Hartmann
(1842-1906), Max Stirner (1806-1856), Georg Lukács (1885-1971), Arnold Toynbee
(1889-1975), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), and
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). Most recently the general outline of Hegel’s
philosophy of history has been adopted in Francis Fukuyama's (1952—)
controversial The End of History (1992).
But without question the most important philosophical engagement
with Hegel’s historiography is that of Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose own account
of the past is often considered a sort of ‘upside-down’ version of Hegel’s Weltprozess. Even
while Marx maintains Hegel’s belief in dialectical progress and historical
inevitability, he supplants his speculative method with a historical
materialism that views the transitions of epochs in terms of the relationship
between production and ownership. Marx’s account of the past has obviously had
pervasive political and economic influences; but his philosophy of history has
also won many modern and contemporary adherents among a wide number of
practicing historians, who regard material conditions as opposed to
motivational conditions, as sufficient for historical explanation.
After
Kant, G. W. F. Hegel developed
a complex theodicy in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which based its conception of history on dialectics: the negative (wars, etc.) was conceived by Hegel as the
motor of history. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic
clash, with each thesis encountering
an opposing idea or event antithesis. The clash of both was "superated" in the synthesis, a conjunction that conserved the contradiction between
thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx famously
explained afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI's
monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French
Revolution could be seen as its antithesis.
However, both were sublimed in Napoleon, who reconciled the revolution with the Ancien
Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel
thought that reason accomplished
itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History. Through labour, man transformed nature so he could recognize himself in
it; he made it his "home." Thus, reason spiritualized nature. Roads,
fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the
result of this spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social progress
as the result of the labour of reason in history. However, this dialectical
reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was also
conceived of as constantly conflicting: Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.
According
to Hegel, One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to
be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it...
When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By
philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl
of Minerva spreads its wings only with the
falling of the dusk.
Thus,
philosophy was to explain Geschichte (history) afterward. Philosophy is
always late, it is only an interpretation of what is rational in the real—and,
according to Hegel, and only what is recognized as rational is real. This
idealist understanding of philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged
by Karl
Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
Social evolutionism
Inspired
by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular
conception in the nineteenth century. Auguste
Comte's (1798–1857) positivist conception of history, which he divided into the
theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought
upon by modern science, was one of the most influential doctrines of progress.
The Whig interpretation
of history, as it was later called, associated
with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry
Maine or Thomas
Macaulay, gives an example of such
influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance
toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described the direction of
progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a
child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward
one of mobility and choice.
The
publication of Darwin's
The Origin of Species in 1859 introduced human
evolution. However, it was quickly transposed
from its original biological field to the social field, in "social
Darwinism" theories. Herbert
Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest", or Lewis Henry Morgan
in Ancient Society
(1877) developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works, which
would be later interpreted as social Darwinism. These nineteenth-century unilineal evolution
theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and
gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and technology of
Western civilisation with progress.
Ernst
Haeckel formulated his recapitulation theory in 1867, which stated that "ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny": the
evolution of each individual reproduces the species' evolution, such as in the
development of embryos.
Hence, a child goes through all the steps from primitive society to modern
society. This was later discredited. ]Haeckel did not support
Darwin's theory of natural
selection introduced in The Origin of Species (1859), rather believing in a Lamarckian inheritance of
acquired characteristics.
Progress
was not necessarily, however, positive. Arthur
Gobineau's An
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55) was a decadent description of the evolution of the "Aryan
race" which was disappearing
through miscegenation.
Gobineau's works had a large popularity in the so-called scientific
racism theories that developed during the New
Imperialism period.
After
the first world war,
and even before Herbert Butterfield
(1900–1979) harshly criticized it, the Whig interpretation had gone out of
style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of
linear progress. Paul Valéry famously
said: "We civilizations now know ourselves mortal."
However,
the notion itself didn't completely disappear. Francis
Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of
progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal
democracies as the single accredited political
system and even modality of human consciousness would represent the "End
of History". Fukuyama's work stems from a
Kojevian reading
of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Unlike Maurice
Godelier who interprets history as a process
of transformation, Tim Ingold suggests
that history is a movement of autopoiesis
A
key component to making sense of all of this is to simply recognize that all
these issues in social evolution merely serve to support the suggestion that
how one considers the nature of history will impact the interpretation and
conclusions drawn about history. The critical under-explored question is less
about history as content and more about history as process.
In
2011 Steven Pinker wrote
a history of violence and humanity from an evolutionary perspective in which he
shows that violence has declined statistically over time.
The validity of the "great man theory" in historical studies
After
Hegel, who insisted on the role of "great
men" in history, with his famous
statement about Napoleon,
"I saw the Spirit on his horse", Thomas
Carlyle argued that history was the
biography of a few central individuals, heroes, such as Oliver
Cromwell or Frederick the Great,
writing that "The history of the world is but the biography of great
men." His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or
topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought
to organize change in the advent of greatness. Explicit defenses of Carlyle's
position have been rare in the late twentieth century. Most philosophers of
history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only
with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. A.C. Danto, for
example, wrote of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his
definition to include social individuals, defined as
"individuals we may provisionally characterize as containing individual
human beings amongst their parts. Examples of social individuals might be: social
classes; national groups; religious organizations , large-scale events , large-scale social movements , etc." (Danto, "The Historical
Individual", 266, in Philosophical Analysis and History, edited by
Williman H. Dray, Rainbow-Bridge Book Co., 1966). The Great Man approach to
history was most popular with professional historians in the nineteenth
century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911),
which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great men of history.
For example, to read about (what is known today as) the "Migrations
Period," consult the biography of Attila
the Hun.
After Marx's conception of a materialist history based on the class
struggle, which raised attention for the
first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the
unfolding of history, Herbert
Spencer wrote "You must admit that the
genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which
has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that
race has slowly grown....Before he can remake his society, his society must make
him."
The
Annales School,
founded by Lucien Febvre and
Marc
Bloch, were a major landmark on the shift
from a history centered on individual subjects
to studies concentrating in geography, economics, demography, and other social forces. Fernand
Braudel's studies on the Mediterranean
Sea as "hero" of history, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's history of climate, etc., were inspired by this School.
Is history
predetermined
There is disagreement about the extent to
which history is ultimately deterministic . Some argue
that geography (see geographic determinism), economic systems (see economic determinism), or culture (see cultural determinism) prescribe "the iron laws of history" that decide
what is to happen. Others see history as a long line of acts and accidents, big
and small, each playing out its consequences until that process gets
interrupted by the next.
It
should be noted that even determinists do not rule that, from time to time,
certain cataclysmic events occur to change course of history. Their main point
is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large shocks
like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary effects on the
evolution of the society.
Karl
Marx is, perhaps, the most famous of the
exponents of economic determinism. For him social institutions like political
system, religion and culture were merely by-products of the basic economic
system (see Base and superstructure).
However,
even he did not see history as completely deterministic. His essay The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon contains
the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in
history: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.
Teleological sense of
history
Theodicy claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to
an eschatological end,
given by a superior power. However, this transcendent teleological sense can be
thought as immanent to
human history itself. Hegel probably represents the epitome of teleological
philosophy of history. Hegel's teleology was taken up by Francis
Fukuyama in his The End of History
and the Last Man
Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Michel
Foucault, Althusser, or Deleuze deny
any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by
discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales
School had demonstrated.
Schools
of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they saw,
and see, progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over
time reconciled (see above). History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist, and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking
backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward "civilization", and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the “End of History". In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy,
he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy;
it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a
specific modality.
Historical accounts of writing
history
A
classic example of history being written by the victors—or more precisely, by
the survivors[ —would
be the scarcity of unbiased information that has survived to the present about
the Carthaginians. Roman historians left tales of cruelty and human
sacrifice practiced by their longtime
enemies; however no Carthaginian was left alive to give their side of the
story.
Similarly,
we only have the Christian side
of how Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe. However, we
know very little about other European religions, such as Paganism.[ We
have the European version of the conquest of the
Americas, with an interpretation of the
native version of events only emerging to popular consciousness since the early
1980s. We have Herodotus's
Greek history of the Persian Wars,
but the Persian recall of the events is little known in Western Culture.
In
many respects, the head of state may be guilty of cruelties or even simply a
different way of doing things. In some societies, however, to speak of or write
critically of rulers can amount to conviction of treason and death. As such, in
many ways, what is left as the "official record" of events is oft
influenced by one's desire to avoid exile or execution.
However,
"losers" in certain time periods often have more of an impetus than
the "winners" to write histories that comfort themselves and justify their
own behavior. Examples include the historiography of the American Civil War,
where it can be argued that the losers (Southerners) have written more history
books on the subject than the winners and, until recently, dominated the
national perception of history. Confederate generals such as Lee and Jackson are generally held in higher esteem than their Union
counterparts. Popular films such as Cold Mountain,
Gone with the Wind, and The Birth of a Nation have told the story from the Southern viewpoint. Also,
despite "losing" the Vietnam
War, the United States produces more
scholarship on the war than any other country, including Vietnam. Popular history
abounds with condemnations of the cruelty of African slave traders and colonists,
despite the "winning" status of those people in their heyday.
For example pre-Columbian
populations of America: the
historical record of America being “discovered" by
Europeans is now sometimes presented as a
history of invasion, exploitation and dominance of a people who had been there
before the Europeans. This reinterpretation of the historical record is called historical revisionism, which can take the form of negationism, which is the denial of genocides and crimes against humanity. The revision of previously accepted historical accounts is
a constant process in which "today's winners are tomorrow's losers",
and the rise and fall of present institutions and movements influence the way
historians see the past. In the same sense, the teaching, in French secondary schools, of the Algerian War of Independence and of
colonialism, has been criticized by several
historians, and is the subject of frequent debates. Thus, in contradiction with
the February 23, 2005 law on colonialism, voted by the UMP
conservative party, historian Benjamin Stora notes that:
As Algerians do not appear in their "indigenous"
conditions and their sub-citizens status, as the history of
nationalist movement is never evoqued, as none of the
great figures of the resistance —Messali Hadj,
Ferhat
Abbas emerge nor retain attention, in one word, as
no one explains to students what has been colonization, we make them unable to
understand why the decolonization took place.
Michel Foucault's analysis of
historical and political discourse
The
historico-political discourse analyzed
by Michel Foucault
in Society Must Be Defended (1975–76) considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first
conceptualized under the name of "race
struggle"—however, the meaning of
"race" was different from today's biological notion, being closer to
the sense of "nation" (distinct from nation-states; its signification is here closer to "people"). Boulainvilliers, for example, was an exponent of nobility rights. He
claimed that the French nobility were the racial descendants of the Franks who
invaded France (while the Third Estate was descended from the conquered Gauls),
and had right to power by virtue of right of conquest. He used this approach to
formulate a historical thesis of the course of French political history—a
critique of both the monarchy and the Third Estate. Foucault regarded him as
the founder of the historico-political discourse as political weapon.
In
Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie,
the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle against the monarchy—cf. Edward
Coke or John
Lilburne. In France, Boulainvilliers, Nicolas
Fréret, and then Sieyès, Augustin
Thierry, and Cournot reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at the end
of the nineteenth century, this discourse was incorporated by racialist
biologists and eugenicists,
who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed
this popular discourse into a "state
racism" (Nazism). According to
Foucault, Marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different
direction, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of
"class struggle",
defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian. This
displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of Foucault's thought:
discourse is not tied to the subject,
rather the "subject" is a construction of discourse. Moreover,
discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economical infrastructure, but is a product and the battlefield of multiples
forces—which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies.
Foucault
shows that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical
discourse is its conception of truth: truth is no longer absolute; it is the
product of "race struggle". History itself, which was traditionally
the sovereign's science, the legend of his glorious feats and monument building, the(the
sovereign) built monuments, fought in wars and claims victory on behalf of
himself which ultimately became the discourse of the people (modern
population), a political stake. The subject is not any more a neutral arbitrator, judge, or legislator, as in Solon's
or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, what became the "historical subject"
must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried
blood", the multiple contingencies from which a fragile rationality temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared
to the sophist discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has
nothing to do with Machiavelli's
or Hobbes's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the Sovereign is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or,
at the best, an enemy. It is {the historico-political discourse} a discourse
that beheads the king, anyway that dispenses itself from the sovereign and that
denounces it".
History and education
Since
Plato's Republic, civic education and instruction has had a central role in
politics and the constitution of a common identity. History has thus sometimes
become the target of propaganda,
for example in historical
revisionist attempts. Plato's insistence on the
importance of education was relayed by Rousseau's Emile: Or, On Education (1762), a necessary counterpart of The Social
Contract (also 1762). Public
education has been seen by republican regimes
and the Enlightenment as a prerequisite of the masses' progressive
emancipation, as conceived by Kant in Was Ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?, 1784).
The
creation of modern education systems, instrumental in the construction of nation-states, also passed by the elaboration of a common, national
history. History textbooks
are one of the many ways through which this common history was transmitted. Le Tour de France
par deux enfants, for example, was the Third Republic's
classic textbook for elementary school: it described the story of two French
children who, following the German annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1870, go on a tour de France during which
they become aware of France's diversity and the existence of the various patois.
In
most societies, schools and curricula are controlled by governments. As such,
there is always an opportunity for governments to impose. Granted, often
governments in free societies serve to protect freedoms, check hate
speech, and breaches of constitutional
rights; but the power itself to impose is available to use the education system
to influence thought of malleable minds, positively or negatively, towards
truth or towards a version of truth. A recent example of the fragility of
government involvement with history textbooks was the Japanese history
textbook controversies.
The
rise of right wing parties in India also resulted in attempts to rewrite both
history and pre history. Attempts are being made to disprove the Aryan
migration into the sub continent theory, instead it is claimed that Aryans were
indigenous. Attempts also are being made to disprove the Indus Valley
civilizations uniqueness instead it is claimed that IVC is the pre Vedic Hindu religion.
Narrative and history
A
current popular conception considers the value of narrative in the writing and
experience of history. Important thinkers in this area include Paul
Ricœur, Louis
Mink, W.B.
Gallie, and Hayden
White. Some have doubted this approach because
it draws fictional and historical narrative closer together, and there remains
a perceived "fundamental bifurcation between historical and fictional
narrative" (Ricœur, vol. 1, 52). In spite of this, most modern historians,
such as Barbara Tuchman
or David McCullough,
consider narrative writing important to their approaches. The theory of narrated
history (or historicized narrative) holds that the structure of lived
experience, and such experience narrated in both fictional and non-fictional
works (literature and historiography) have in common the figuration of
"temporal experience." In this way, narrative has a generously
encompassing ability to "'grasp together' and integrate ... into one whole
and complete story" the "composite representations" of
historical experience (Ricœur x, 173). Louis Mink writes that, "the
significance of past occurrences is understandable only as they are locatable
in the ensemble of interrelationships that can be grasped only in the
construction of narrative form" (148). Marxist theorist Fredric
Jameson also analyzes historical
understanding this way, and writes that "history is inaccessible to us
except in textual form ... it can be approached only by way of prior
(re)textualization" (82).
History and causality
Narrative
and causal approaches to history have often been contrasted or, even, opposed
to one another, yet they can also be viewed as complementary. Some
philosophers of history such as Arthur Danto have claimed that
"explanations in history and elsewhere" describe "not simply an
event—something that happens—but a change". Like many practicing historians, they treat causes as
intersecting actions and sets of actions which bring about "larger changes",
in Danto's words: to decide "what are the elements which persist through a
change" is "rather simple" when treating an individual's
"shift in attitude", but "it is considerably more complex and
metaphysically challenging when we are interested in such a change as, say, the
break-up of feudalism or the emergence of nationalism".
Much
of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between
communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and
between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and
wider sets of conditions. John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and
general causes (following Marc Bloch) and between "routine" and
"distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for
what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to
the fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to
the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders."[28] He has also pointed to the difference between
immediate, intermediate and distant causes. For his part, Christopher Lloyd
puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history:
the "metaphysical idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of
the universe are products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such
final cause"; "the empiricist (or Humean) regularity concept, which
is based on the idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of
events"; "the functional/teleological/consequential concept",
which is "goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the
"realist, structurist and dispositional approach, which sees relational
structures and internal dispositions as the causes of phenomena".
History as propaganda:
Is history always written by the victors?
In
his "Society must be Defended", Michel
Foucault posited that the victors of a
social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated
adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical
revisionism. Nations
adopting such an approach would likely fashion a "universal" theory
of history, a manifest destiny in
the US, to support their aims, with a teleological and deterministic philosophy
of history used to justify the inevitableness and rightness of their victories.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat took a completely different
view—according to him, defeat is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent
himself, while the victor—confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied
by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back.
The concept evokes Hegel's Master–slave dialectics—the master is dependent of the work of the slave, the slave
has to take his master's and his own interests into account, gets more
knowledge and more insight as the master; and in realising that the world
around him was created by his own hands he may gain self-consciousness and
emancipation. Schivelbusch worked on three basic examples, the South and its Lost
cause after the Civil War, France after
the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, and Germany following World War I. Wolfgang
Schivelbusch view includes complex psychological and cultural responses of
vanquished nations, from every level of society and sees a need and rise of
creativity and various narratives for the defeated
Within
a society Walter Benjamin
believed that Marxist historians must take a radically different view point
from the bourgeois and
idealist points of view, in an attempt to create a sort of history
from below, which would be able to conceive an
alternative conception of history, not based, as in classical historical
studies, on the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty—an approach that would invariably adhere to major states
(the victors') points of view. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur asked instead for a
plurality in history writing. "We carry on several histories
simultaneously, in times whose periods, crises, and pauses do not coincide. We
enchain, abandon, and resume several histories, much as a chess player who
plays several games at once, renewing now this one, now the another" (History
and Truth 186). George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a fictional account of the manipulation of the
historical record for nationalist aims and manipulation of power.
To
some degree, all nations are active in the promotion of such "national
stories", with ethnicity, nationalism, gender, power, heroic figures,
class considerations and important national events and trends all clashing and
competing within the narrative.
With
regard to the history of science,
the introduction of new paradigms is depicted by Thomas
Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Innovation in science or technology is not based on single experiments
or ideas per se, but needs a supportive environment and technical achievements
to allow for a change of perspective. In all sorts of science innovative concepts
are often being made in parallel (compare Zeitgeist), and the "winning" concept or individual
contribution depends not on the idea per se, but other aspects as supportive
circumstances, personal networks, usability or simple wording. The process may
lead to format wars,
which leaves losers and winners behind.
The
Semmelweis reflex
is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new
knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms,
Semmelweis himself being driven into insanity, but his concept prevailing after
his death grew in a strong narrative of the history of medicine.
Judgment of
history
For Hegel, the history of the world is also
the Last Judgment. Hegel adopted the expression "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht" ("world history is a tribunal that
judges the world"; a quote from Friedrich Schiller's poem
"Resignation" (published in 1786) and used to assert the view that
History is what judges men, their actions and their opinions.
Since
the twentieth century, Western historians have disavowed the aspiration to
provide the judgement of history. The goals of historical judgments or interpretations are
separate to those of legal
judgements, that need to be formulated quickly
after the events and be final. The issue of collective
memory is related to the issue of the
"judgement of history".
Related
to the issue of historical judgement are those of the pretension to neutrality
and objectivity.
Analytical and critical philosophers
of history have debated whether historians should express judgements on
historical figures, or if this would infringe on their supposed role. In general, positivists and neopositivists oppose any value-judgement as
unscientific
Contemporary
Characterized by its criticism of the 20th century Anglophone
attempts to epistemologically ground historical explanation, objectivity, and
causation as universal functions of logic, the Postmodern legacy in philosophy
of history has been taken up by three contemporary theorists in particular:
Hayden White (1928-), Frank Ankersmit (1945-), and Keith Jenkins (1943-). Each
maintains that the analysis of these epistemological issues wrongly circumvents
questions about interpretation and meaning, and each considers the search for
once-and-for-all demonstrations an attempt to avoid the relativistic character
of historical truth. Hayden White inaugurated this ‘linguistic turn’ in
historiography with his Meta-History:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1979). By
focusing on the structures and strategies of historical accounts, White came to
see historiography and literature as fundamentally the same endeavor.
Historians, like fiction writers, wrote according to a four-fold logic of
emplotment, according to whether they saw their subject matter as a romance,
tragedy comedy, or satire. This aim stems from their political ideology –
anarchist, radical, conservative, or liberal respectively – and is worked out
by means of a dominant rhetorical trope – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or
irony respectively. Representative philosophers – Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and
Croce – and representative historians – Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke, and
Burckhardt – are themselves tied to these modes of emplotment. While White’s
architectonic has come under criticism as being both overly reductive in its
structure and a warrant for relativism, other theorists have taken up his
banner.
Among these, Frank
Ankersmit endorses the general outline of White’s narrativism, while stressing
the constructivist aspect of our experience of the past. There is no ‘ideal
narratio’ for Ankersmit, because ultimately there is no ontological structure
onto which the single ‘correct’ narration can be correspondentially grafted.
Alongside Gianni Vattimo (1936-), Sande Cohen (1946-), and Alan Munslow
(1947-), Keith Jenkins takes White’s anti-realism in a decidedly
deconstructionist fashion. Jenkins exhorts an end to historiography as
customarily practiced. Since historians can never be wholly objective, and
since historical judgment cannot pretend to a correspondential standard of
truth, all that remains of history are the congealed power structures of a
privileged class. In a statement that summarizes much of contemporary
historical theory, Jenkins concludes the following:
Historiography now
appears as a self-referential, problematic expression of ‘interests’, an
ideologically-interpretive discourse without any ‘real’ access to the past as
such; unable to engage in any dialogue with ‘reality’. In fact, ‘history’ now
appears to be just one more ‘expression’ in a world of postmodern expressions:
which of course is what it is. (Jenkins 1995, 9)
Although 21st century
philosophy of history has widened the gap between practicing historians and
theorists of history, and although it has lost some of the popularity it
enjoyed from the early-19th to mid-20th century, it will remain a vigorous
field of inquiry so long as the past itself continues to serve as a source of
philosophical curiosity.
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