Modern Historiography

An Introduction

Michael Bentley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415202671
• eBook ISBN: 9781134631926
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Modern Historiography is the essential introduction to the history of historical writing. It explains the broad philosophical background to the different historians and historical schools of the modern era, from James Boswell and Thomas Carlyle through to Lucien Febure and Eric Hobsbawm and surveys:

• the Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment
• Romanticism
• the voice of Science and the process of secularization within Western intellectual thought
• the influence of, and broadening contact with, the New World
• the Annales school in France
• Postmodernism.

Modern Historiography provides a clear and concise account of this modern period of historical writing.

1
THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Many of the characteristics attributed promiscuously to eighteenthcentury historiography become more persuasive when directed at a special form of it: that inspired by the renaissance (primarily French) of ideas and cultural ambitions which modernity has come to call the ‘Enlightenment’. This intellectual environment (at its most intense between, say, 1750 and 1790) gave rise to historical enquiry of a marked character and one by no means shared by other countries in other decades. It promoted a singular sense of the present as a moment of exceptional importance and weight in the history of the world. The philosophes of Paris seemed transparently pleased to be living in the eighteenth century and to have transcended the Greek and Roman cultures by which their contemporaries elsewhere still appeared obsessed. ‘European elites had lived since the Renaissance with a culture borrowed from antiquity,’ writes François Furet,

a period whose artists and authors represented unsurpassable models and whose literary genres constituted the authoritative canons of beauty and truth. Now Europe was raising the question of its cultural autonomy: the academic quarrel between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ in France at the end of Louis XIV’s reign ultimately centred on the notion that classical culture was not a past but a present.

(Furet 1984:81)

Because the present had won a new pedigree at the expense of the past, only parts of the past interested the Enlightenment. Its prophets retained a veneration for the classical world; and they displayed a new enthusiasm for quite recent history which would show how their own superior culture evolved. In theory such a sense of evolution might produce a conception of the long-term transitions from ancient to modern times, as one of the Enlightenment’s most suggestive exemplars, Condorcet, implies in the introduction to his best-known historical essay:

All peoples whose history is recorded fall somewhere between our present degree of civilisation and that which we still see among savage tribes; if we survey in a single sweep the universal history of peoples we see them sometimes making fresh progress, sometimes plunging back into ignorance, sometimes surviving somewhere between these extremes or halted at a certain point, sometimes disappearing from the earth under the conqueror’s heel, mixing with the victors or living on in slavery, or sometimes receiving knowledge from some enlightened people in order to transmit it in their turn to other nations, and so welding an uninterrupted chain between the beginning of historical time and the century in which we live.

(Condorcet 1795:8)

But pieties of this kind rarely transcended theory. In practice the Enlightenment amused itself with celebrated figures in modern history such as Charles XII or Louis XIV. One much-recalled text, Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs of 1756, did, it is true, attempt a more ambitious survey of world history in order to frame an answer to Bossuet’s despised work of 1681, though even there the novelty appeared more in the territory covered geographically than in the periods Voltaire treated chronologically. For the most part, however, the Enlightenment omitted from its purview periods of history that it found distasteful and, since the whole of the Middle Ages was found coarse and untutored, this meant that medieval history had little presence in Paris.

Enlightened history discovered grounds for satisfaction in the present and to this extent it harboured philosophical pretensions. Indeed, one notices at once that its spokesmen—for they are mostly men— established reputations as philosophers, mathematicians, statesmen or belle-lettristes before taking to history. Once having taken to it, they displayed an undercurrent of opinion about the past which might be reduced to three central properties. First, they argued a position that shrieked secularism. The easiest prediction to make about any work inspired by the French Enlightenment is that it will attack organized religion and betray that sardonic anticlericalism found in most other statements by the philosophes. Second, they reflected a cynicism about the motivations and moral capacities of individuals while elevating l’esprit humain to new levels of moral authority, thus granting the impersonal force what they denied in its agents. Third and most significant, they constructed texts in which satire does not stop at the clerics but rather forms a crucial part of the tone for the entire enterprise. The story turns out well because it turns out in the present; and the telling of the story can therefore afford a certain buoyancy. Wit consequently does service for thought but often does it brilliantly. The result is the opposite of tragedy. Each author brings to the task a different collection of skills and moods, but the general point requiring stress is one made by Hayden White: that the Enlightenment bequeathes no tragic history just as (and for the same reason that) it leaves no tragic literature. Its satire functions not as a decorative motif in its texts but as a fundamental mode of representation (White 1973:66).

If there seems less satire than elsewhere in Condorcet’s posthumous Esquisse of 1795, then the circumstances of its writing more than explain the peculiarity. He had enjoyed a life in which talent and noble birth coalesced to make him secretary of the Académie des Sciences by the time he was 30. The Revolution proved his undoing. He had collaborated in it at first but opposed the new Jacobin constitution and found himself forced into hiding. After his detection and arrest he was thrown into prison where he died in 1794, possibly by his own hand. His essay reflecting on the history of humanity stems from these last, difficult years; and although the tone lacks the cockiness of Voltaire, the text offers perhaps the most rounded illustration of Enlightenment method and assumptions in their application to history. Montesquieu (1749) had been more profound in his better-known comparative study of law but Condorcet presents a more relevant model to those wishing to form a view of the French Enlightenment’s tendencies in historiography.

Like Vico, Condorcet thinks in threes. Humanity’s history falls into three stages. The first runs from the darkness of an unknowable primitivism up to the development of language; our views of it rest necessarily on conjecture and travellers’ tales. A second phase, hardly more accessible to the present, moves from the coming of language to the introduction of alphabetic writing which Condorcet invests with signal importance. The third phase comprises, simply, everything else. Because he sees the second stage as having been completed by the time of the Greeks, this latter section of history runs from the classical period to the present. From this point forward in the narrative the historian does have access to the truth via the writings of contemporaries and the epoch offers a continuum,

linked by an uninterrupted chain of facts and observations….

Philosophy has nothing more to guess, no more hypothetical surmises to make; it is enough to assemble and order the facts and to show the useful truths that can be derived from their connections and from their totality.

(Condorcet 1795:9)

He then goes on to subdivide his three phases into a further triad of which the last is the most interesting. It begins with the revival of science and the development of printing; it proceeds to show how science later threw off the yoke of ‘authority’; and that leaves the author with the present—a culture about which he can feel optimistic, despite his own misfortunes, because science will point the way to the future. His first book had been a study of integral calculus. In a real sense his last one was, too.

Perhaps the absorption with philosophy and science militated against the production of a great French historian in this generation. The French had to wait until the Revolution became the focus of modern experience and the stuff of a new history that Michelet would make his own fifty years later. The country which ought to have produced an enlightened historiography—America, the child of Parisian ideas—again did not do so in a significant form before 1800. Instead the extension of ‘enlightened’ thought into historical practice occurred elsewhere, most notably in Scotland and England.

That Scotland should have received the teaching of France will surprise no one familiar with the traditional affinity between the two societies. It is especially well reflected in the biography of David Hume (1712–76) whose History of England (1754–62) constitutes a locus classicus for those exploring the Enlightenment’s sense of history. Still known to the British Library Catalogue as ‘David Hume the Historian’, he is better known (and with good reason) as a philosopher. Hume had spent many years alternating between Europe and Britain before accepting a post in 1752 as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh where he had access to the sources that would allow him to write history. He intended from the start that his historical books would make some money to compensate for the abysmal sales of his philosophical works. And since the more recent periods of the English past attracted both him and his likely audience, and ‘being frightened with the notion of continuing a narrative through a period of seventeen hundred years’ (Hume 1754–62:I, xi), he began there and wrote the story backwards, in effect, over the next decade. The ‘first’ volume on the Stuarts caused him constant grief because of allegations that followed relating to its sympathy with Charles I and the Stuart cause; and those insinuations (that he was a Tory historian blind to the virtues of the Whig revolution of 1688) certainly diverted attention from the degree to which Hume reflected the presuppositions of the Enlightenment throughout the work.

Not that his philosophical sophistication interfered with the text: one of its surprises lies in the degree to which Hume forgot his own doctrines, over causation for example, the moment he turned to writing about past events. Indeed, he forgot about so much that it becomes tempting to see neither an enlightened nor an unenlightened historian in Hume so much as a bad one tout court. But the echoes of Parisian salons occur too frequently for that. He shared the loathing of Paris for barbarous epochs such as the Anglo-Saxon period and dismissed them as quickly as possible without any need for research:

We can say little, but that they were in general a rude, uncultivated people, ignorant of letters, unskilled in the mechanical arts, untamed to submission under law and government, addicted to intemperance, riot and disorder. …The conquest put the people in a situation of receiving slowly from abroad the rudiments of science and cultivation, and of correcting their rough and licentious manners.

(ibid. I, 305–6)

Even in the Stuart volume, Hume’s Parisian assumptions shine through the narrative, despite his fondness for romance in the pre-Civil War years, in his treatment of evidence and readiness to use the conjectural method when speaking of matters for which he has no evidence at all. Consider what he cannot possibly ‘know’, for example, in one of his most famous passages—that describing the execution of Charles I in 1649:

It is impossible to describe the grief, indignation, and astonishment, which took place, not only among the spectators, who were overwhelmed with a flood of sorrow, but throughout the whole nation, as soon as the report of this fatal execution was conveyed to them…. On weaker minds, the effect of these complicated passions was prodigious. Women are said to have cast forth the untimely fruit of their womb: others fell into convulsions, or sank into such a melancholy as attended them to their grave: nay, some, unmindful of themselves, as though they could not, or would not, survive their beloved prince, it is reported, suddenly fell down dead. The very pulpits were bedewed with unsuborned tears.¹²

These methods are less grossly exposed in William Robertson of Edinburgh, whose histories of Scotland and America, beside his betterknown study of Charles V, suggest a wider vision and a more historical mind.¹³

England’s relations with the Continent notoriously had a different tone from the Scottish, but Edward Gibbon’s travels had long since overcome any sense of distance. The death of his father in 1770 led him to settle in London; he had lived before then mainly in Lausanne and had travelled considerably. The famous visit to Rome had occurred in 1764 and intention became reality from 1768 when he began the narrative of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), which by the end of the nineteenth century attained the status of Boswell on Johnson as a work of literature and which today remains the one historical study that most educated people would identify as an example of eighteenth-century historical writing. That he had a grasp greater than either Boswell or Johnson of the issues raised by a largescale historical project had apparently eluded both of them in a threeway conversation of 1775 to which Boswell gives us an allusion:

JOHNSON. ‘We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.’

BOSWELL. ‘Then, Sir, you would reduce all history to no better than an almanack, a mere chronological series of remarkable events.’ Mr. Gibbon, who must at that time have been employed upon his history of which he produced the first volume in the following year, was present; but did not step forth in defence of that species of writing. He probably did not like to trust himself with JOHNSON!

(Boswell 1791:II, 365–6)

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Gibbon believed he could recreate a past entire by paying attention to the known sources and discovering new ones in artefacts and the eighteenth-century mania for inscriptions. This determination, his talent for evocation and a prose of unsurpassed pointedness almost displaced him, indeed, from the model of representation that we are characterizing as an Enlightenment approach.

What kept him there was his irony: a Tacitean manner as dix-huitième as a tricorn hat.¹⁴ The account works, as Gay points out, on at least two levels simultaneously. The public level of intention offered by his actors has one tone, the private reality a different one; ‘he compels the reader to become his accomplice and to draw the unpleasant, generally cynical, inference for himself (Gay 1975:47). His sources never matched his creativity. Neither did the criticism that he brought to the ones he had. But he invented a text containing both meaning and explanation. The Romans lost their way by following courses and suffering adversities which would undermine any society and Gibbon’s account of the undermining is conceived as a general explanation, not a particular one. He thinks, in other words, nomothetically; he explains the events by identifying the laws which govern them. There are many of these—the effeminacy generated by a lack of war, the unforeseen effects of economic exploitation, the weakness attending the expansion of empires, and so on. But one of them is critical and forms the subtext of the book as a whole. This lies in the contention that freedom is the guarantor of civic health—‘the happy parent taste and science’ (Gibbon [1776–88] 1909:1, 64)—and its denial the harbinger of social sclerosis. Everything else follows. Not least, this means that government must avoid the pitfalls of crude democracy and remember that

the firm edifice of Roman power was raised and preserved by the wisdom of ages. The obedient provinces of Trajan and the Antonines were united by laws and adorned by arts…[T]e general principle of government was wise, simple and beneficent.’

(ibid. I, 31)

Yet of course Gibbon’s starting-point is itself a derivative from that recent past on which enlightened opinion rested. His book celebrates implicitly the English constitutional settlement of 1689 and the freedom that it bestowed by chastising the Romans for having won the same prize and having lost it.

Through these books and less accomplished instances of an Enlightenment sensibility, the new historical values found expression. The importance for any critical form of enquiry of intellectual selfconfidence and a rejection of metaphysical authority needs little argument; and to that extent the climate generated in Europe after 1750 contributed unquestionably to the development of historical ideas. It is less obvious how much it limited them. In generalizing its perceptions of a particular present and ironing out kinks in the human condition, eighteenth-century thought lost contact with the specific and the particular about which historians ultimately want to know. In reducing the world to law, the Enlightenment’s understanding of history truncated the past as a domain for enquiry. It also became out of date virtually the moment it was announced. For the revolution of 1789 shattered more than French society, just as Napoleon’s armies brought about the destruction of more than life and property. Dislocations across Europe gave rise to questions about the nature of states and the origins of cultural identity, about the differences between histories rather than their commonality. For philosophers as much as for historians, the world after 1789 called for something higher than cynicism, more memorable than the tattle of the salon, more plausible than the publicizing of progress and the hidden hand of l’esprit humain.

2
THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

All the glitter of Paris easily outshone a story of impending change east of the Rhine. Yet although that story lacked the gloss of the Enlightenment, it turned out to have more significance for the writing of history than what had taken place in France and Britain. The confused organism of principalities and potential states that would later coalesce as ‘Germany’ had begun to acquire its own voice by 1800. It was a timid voice at first. German intellectuals stood in awe of French achievement and culture. They copied British historiographical models drawn in particular from Hume, Robertson and Gibbon.¹⁵ They shared a European fascination with Sir Walter Scott.¹⁶ In the last third of the eighteenth century the German-speaking world nevertheless gave rise to the most talented array of intellectuals, artists and poets that has been squeezed into one or two generations in modern times: Goethe, Kant, Herder, Schiller, Hegel, Beethoven, Heine, Schubert. Some of their achievement ran parallel with the Enlightenment and fed on what others had sown. But more was original and, so far as the central characteristics of Enlightenment thought went, counter-thematic. In sharing Sir Isaiah Berlin’s category of a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ we are therefore calling attention to an important distinction rather than a frontal opposition.¹⁷ We shall dwell on it, nevertheless, because no other intellectual initiative has played so great a role in fashioning attitudes to modern historical thinking.

Institutions played a considerable part in establishing a new understanding of history in Germany.¹⁸Two foundations—the University of Göttingen in 1737 and the new University of Berlin in 1810—engage with the relevant events at a number of points. Göttingen became a point of entry for external, and especially British, ideas; and because it established the first historical school in Germany, the way opened for widespread reception of historical models from abroad. It generated, however, distinctive ideas of its own. Law and philology gained a status and collegiality with history which has since become a h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• PRELUDE
• 1: THE ENLIGHTENMENT
• 2: THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT
• 3: ROMANTICISM
• 4: RANKE
• 5: THE VOICE OF SCIENCE
• 6: CULTURE AND KULTUR
• 7: THE ENGLISH ‘WHIGS’
• 8: TOWARDS AN HISTORICAL ‘PROFESSION’
• 9: CRISIS OVER METHOD
• 10: FROM THE NEW WORLD
• 11: ANNALES: THE FRENCH SCHOOL
• 12: REPRESSION AND EXILE
• 13: POST-WAR MOODS
• 14: THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
• POSTSCRIPT
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING IN ENGLISH