Key Issues in Historical Theory

Herman Paul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317519454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Key Issues in Historical Theory is a fresh, clear and well-grounded introduction to this vibrant field of inquiry, incorporating many examples from novels, paintings, music, and political debates. The book expertly engages the reader in discussions of what history is, how people relate to the past and how they are formed by the past.

Over 11 thematically-based chapters, Herman Paul discusses subjects such as:

• history, memory and trauma
• historical experience and narrative
• moral and political dimensions of history
• historical reasoning and explanation
• truth, plausibility and objectivity.

Key Issues in Historical Theory convincingly shows that historical theory is not limited to reflection on professional historical studies, but offers valuable tools for understanding autobiographical writing, cultural heritage and political controversies about the past.

With textboxes providing additional focus on a range of key topics, this is an attractive, accessible and up-to-date guide to the field of historical theory.

1 What is historical theory?

1.1 Joseph Knecht

Was there ever a happier person than Joseph Knecht? His life seemed almost free from trouble. The only moments when sadness overcame him were when he had to say goodbye to friends who failed at their elite school, whereas he, Joseph, the protagonist in Hermann Hesse’s (1877–1962) novel The Glass Bead Game (1943), advanced year after year. As he completed his studies effortlessly and embarked on a meteoric career, life seemed to smile on him. Yet Joseph could not help asking himself difficult questions. Was he predestined to hold a leading intellectual position? Or did his vocation lie outside the republic of letters? What would be the meaning of a life devoted to ideas? If scholarly reflection matters, shouldn’t scholars try to serve society by addressing pressing societal problems, rather than withdraw in scholarly institutions with their own agendas? Sometimes Joseph made it even more difficult for himself. He then pondered not only the meaning of his life, but also the categories in which he tried to capture it. Is life an exercise in freedom? Can people choose a way of life? Or is this misleading, naïvely optimistic talk? Can people do little more than conform to what fate has in store for them?

Few people will have the patience to think through these questions as deeply as Joseph Knecht did. Many are likely to experience The Glass Bead Game, the novel that earned Hesse the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, as a rather complicated and pretentious book. But sooner or later, everyone, in his or her own way, recognizes Joseph’s questions. What is my life actually about? What kind of career should I pursue? Should I seek the best for myself or rather try to serve others? And when I look back on my life when I am old, what will it all mean then? Joseph’s second question then appears to be relevant too: How do I speak about my life? When I am an old man, to what extent will I be able say anything reliable about what happened to me thirty, forty years ago? If I tell my life story to my daughter, isn’t this story a pious illusion, a varnished narrative, which perhaps says more about my need to find meaning and coherence in my life than about my true experiences? And if I say ‘I built my life with my own hands’ or, conversely, ‘everything fell into my lap’, from what kind of perspective am I viewing my past?

In Hesse’s monumental novel, Joseph asks these questions not only about his own life, but also about history in general. When he is introduced to the craft of historical study by a Benedictine monk named Father Jacobus – a historian modelled after Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) – he becomes quite confused about the nature of history. At his elite school he had learned that history is a matter of blood and testosterone, of the power-mad and despotic who bring misery and calamity on humankind. He had imagined that everything of true value – the laws of Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), for example – transcends this brutal history, as it belongs to a realm where truth, beauty and goodness exist in timeless harmony. But Father Jacobus resolutely dismisses this notion of timelessness. He teaches Joseph that the good, the true and the beautiful are born in history, under the yoke of a tyrant, in the shadow of a plague epidemic or simply in the unpretentious tedium of a life in civil service. The meaning of history does not lie outside itself, in some ethereal space, but within everyday reality. And this has consequences for the second question, about the study of the past. Historians do not possess infallible methods or techniques by which they can uncover the essence of the past. As Father Jacobus admonishes his pupil: ‘I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our minds and our methods to order reality, but first and foremost he must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of events.’¹

Welcome to the wonderful world of historical theory, Father Jacobus might have smilingly added. For Joseph’s two questions touch on the two main themes that historical theorists or philosophers of history (two categories that are not easy to distinguish) have been addressing since at least the nineteenth century. Although we shall see that the term ‘philosophy of history’ in The Glass Bead Game has rather negative connotations – Father Jacobus is said to have a ‘profound mistrust of all philosophies of history’² – there is perhaps no other novel that explains so clearly what philosophy of history is and why it will sooner or later cross everyone’s path. Also, Hesse’s book illustrates something already touched upon in the preface: that historical theory is not only confined to reflection on the study of history at large, but also relates to the life story of an old man in the café, to the confused perspective of immigrants who wonder how the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in their identity are connected, and, more generally, to everybody who feels attracted, deceived, marked or rejected by the past.

An attentive reader may ask: Is ‘historical theory’ indeed related to or even synonymous with ‘philosophy of history’? Hasn’t the term ‘historical theory’ come into circulation precisely because many scholars have come to share Father Jacobus’s ‘mistrust of all philosophies of history’ and therefore distinguish as strongly as possible between ‘historical theory’ (which they consider a respectable field) and ‘philosophy of history’ (which they look at with suspicion)? Let’s start, therefore, with some terminological clarification – a task to which this entire first chapter will be devoted. We will proceed historically, by examining how philosophy of history has been defined at various moments in its development. This procedure will allow us to conceive of historical theory, not as a static enterprise, but as a tradition that changes, evolves and grows over time. Historical theory, this chapter will argue, is a rich and vibrant tradition of reflection on how human beings relate to the past.

1.2 Philosophies of history

Clearly a long-term historical perspective is needed for understanding why Father Jacobus, in Hesse’s novel, harbours such a ‘profound mistrust of all philosophies of history’ – and why a similar mistrust still causes some contemporary scholars to prefer the designation ‘historical theory’ over ‘philosophy of history’. Originating in late eighteenth-century France, the term ‘philosophy of history’ had hardly established itself when historians and philosophers, most notably in nineteenth-century Germany, began to feel a need to distinguish between two types of reflection on the study of the past. This distinction hinged on the double meaning of the word history (historia in Latin). On the one hand, there was the historia res gestae, or the course of events; on the other, the historia rerum gestarum, or the stories that people tell about the course of events. While in the first case the word history refers to historical reality, in the second it denotes the study of the past or, more generally, what people assert about the past. Someone like Father Jacobus, interested in the history of the Benedictine order, uses the word history in the first sense, as referring to historical reality. But someone who says ‘And then she told me her whole life history’ or confesses at a party that he is irresistibly drawn to the subject of history uses the word in its second sense. So every time we hear the phrase ‘philosophy of history’, we need to ask: Is this a philosophy of the historia res gestae or a philosophy of the historia rerum gestarum? Is it, in classic, nineteenth-century terms, a ‘material’ or a ‘formal’ philosophy of history?³

Examples of these different types are not difficult to give. In Hesse’s novel, Joseph encounters the first variant – a ‘material’ philosophy of historical reality – when discovering the German Romantics and spending hours reading the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). This German philosopher passionately believed in the progress of history, and thought he had found the key to this progress in what he called the ever-growing self-knowledge of reason. According to Hegel, reason presents itself in two forms. Order and regularity in nature point to a reason which is at work in reality itself (Hegel called this the ‘objective spirit’). Additionally, there is human reason, which critically scrutinizes reality (‘subjective spirit’). The crux of Hegel’s philosophy is that these ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ spirits are two sides of the same coin, or manifestations of one and the same reason. This, however, is not clear in advance: only in the course of history, through painful discoveries, does humankind acquire knowledge of reality and thus insight into itself. For Hegel, therefore, history is an evolutionary process in which the separation between subject (humankind) and object (world) is gradually annulled. The ultimate goal of history is perfect self-knowledge or complete identification of the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ spirit – an idea that may sound abstract to contemporary ears, but profoundly influenced many nineteenth-century thinkers in their reflections on the nature and goal of the historical process (see the text box HISTORICAL PROCESS).

Historical process

Expressions like ‘the goal of the historical process’ suppose that historical reality is a process: an organic, evolutionary movement that in some way incorporates every human being and every event. But who says that history (the res historiae gestae) displays such meaningful coherence and is not just, as somebody once disdainfully said, ‘one damn thing after another’? To talk about a historical process, as many historical theorists in the modern era have done, is to interpret reality from a point of view plainly dating from the nineteenth century. This perspective is related to that of Charles Darwin (1809–82), the evolutionary biologist, and indebted to so-called historicism, which consistently interpreted the world in terms of development (see the text box HISTORICISM in Chapter 2). Although twentieth-century philosophers such as Walter Benjamin have been highly critical of this equation of ‘historical reality’ and ‘historical process’, its influence is still so commanding that many, academics and non-academics alike, find it difficult to imagine that historical reality can be seen as anything other than a process.

Another, older and more austere example of the ‘material’ philosophy of history was put forward by Augustine (354–430), the North African church father. Unlike Hegel, Augustine did not really conceive of history as a process. He did distinguish six phases in it, corresponding to the six days of creation in the Bible book of Genesis, but emphasized that the sixth phase, in which humanity has been living since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is devoid of important events. Of course people are born and buried. Of course they laugh and cry, work and fight, build and demolish. But what people do and don’t do carried little weight with Augustine. For him, history was above all an arena of divine action. Things would only really change when Jesus returned from heaven and established his kingdom on earth. Then the sixth day would be over and a seventh day of eternal rest would begin. Augustine therefore interpreted human history from a biblical perspective and thus laid the foundation for a Christian philosophy of history which would influence European thought for more than a thousand years.

At the same time, Augustine also asked other questions, most notably in The City of God (413–26). This book is one long defence against the accusation that Christians were to blame for the fall of Rome. Nobody phrased this charge more eloquently than the British historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94). But the accusation was already heard in Augustine’s day, right after the sack of the eternal city by the Visigoths in 410. The Bishop of Hippo therefore treated his readers on a series of counter-examples. Like a historian falsifying a hypothesis, Augustine argued that the Christianization of Rome could not possibly be the cause of its fall. In passing, this led him to tackle such philosophical questions as: What is a cause? What kinds of causes are there? What is the relation between causality and necessity?⁴

This brings us to the second type of philosophy of history: ‘formal’ reflection on the nature of historical thought (historia rerum gestarum). When Augustine asked what a cause is and Joseph Knecht wondered whether historians can discern laws in the past, they came quite close to what philosophers of history of the second sort do when subjecting ‘inferences’, ‘causes’ and ‘explanations’ to critical scrutiny. Philosophers of history in this second variant are engaged in conceptual analysis of historical thought. They try to clarify such key concepts as ‘facts’, ‘stories’ and ‘interpretations’, not by telling historians how to use them – how to identify a fact or how to tell a story – but by analysing the logical structure of historical narratives and examining what historians have to do in order to explain, let’s say, the sack of Rome in 410. Despite the fact that they do not offer methodological advice, they contribute to self-reflection among historians by helping them reflect on the nature of their discipline and on the meaning of such key concepts as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ (see the text box HISTORICAL METHODOLOGY).

Historical methodology

What is the difference between historical theory and historical methodology? Historical methods offer dos and don’ts. They are practical rules of thumb that specify, for example, how historians can subject a source to internal and external criticism. Methods explain what specialized skills (codicology, palaeography, epigraphy) such criticism requires and how these skills can be adequately put into practice. The kind of knowledge these methods convey is therefore best characterized as knowledge how – knowledge of how to do solid historical research. Historical theory, by contrast, supplies knowledge that. It shows, for instance, that historical thought exists by virtue of different relations to the past (Chapter 3), that it often assumes a narrative form (Chapter 5) and that it usually engages in attempts at ...