Making History

An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline

Peter Lambert, Phillipp Schofield, Peter Lambert, Peter Lambert, Phillipp Schofield, Phillipp Schofield, Peter Lambert, Peter Lambert, Phillipp Schofield, Phillipp Schofield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134546947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Making History offers a fresh perspective on the study of the past. It is an exhaustive exploration of the practice of history, historical traditions and the theories that surround them. Discussing the development and growth of history as a discipline and of the profession of the historian, the book encompasses a huge diversity of influences, organized around the following themes:

• the professionalization of the discipline
• the most significant movements in historical scholarship in the last century, including the Annales School
• the increasing interdisciplinary trends in scholarship
• theory in historical practice including Marxism, post-modernism and gender history
• historical practice outside the academy.

The volume offers a coherent set of chapters to support undergraduates, postgraduates and others interested in the historical processes that have shaped the discipline of history.

Part I

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The professionalisation of history

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The subject of Part I is the development of professional historical research and writing. We focus in particular on Germany from the late eighteenth century to 1933 (Peter Lambert's contribution), the United States of America between the 1870s and the 1930s (discussed by Robert Harrison), and Great Britain from c.1850 to c.1930 (addressed by Aled Jones). If Thomas Kuhn's postulation of the existence of paradigms is applicable at all to historiography, it should be applicable to the early decades of professionalisation. During this formative period, academic historians were in substantial agreement over what constituted their most important subject-matter: political history and the rise of the state. They shared a similarly clear consensus over the methods of source analysis and the attitude of scholarly detachment that together went to make up what they commonly characterised as ‘scientific history’. At the same time, the process of professionalisation created a community of scholars, an ‘invisible college’ whose members considered themselves to be engaged in a common intellectual endeavour, as well as the institutional mechanisms through which its values and priorities could be imposed.

That moment of unity did not last. The paradigm of ‘scientific history’ turned out to be hopelessly flawed. A series of shocks, encountered at different points from the 1880s onward, loosened its foundations. The period from c.1880 to the 1930s, in which the professionalisation of history was completed in Europe and in the USA, but also expanded beyond its ‘western’ points of origin, was crisis-ridden. Intellectual transformations and challenges beyond the discipline of history, but also socio-economic change and the impact of cataclysmic events — the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Terror, the rise of Fascism and Nazism — all influenced academic history. The relationship between these very different kinds of impulse to change, however, is complex. It would be premature to accord primacy of importance in the reshaping of history to events, for example, however cataclysmic, since the ‘fundamental processes at work in the history of ideas and of scholarship, and the corresponding disciplinary and interdisciplinary changes, transcend the limits of the actual historical upheaval’.¹ In Germany, statist history survived successive crises, but in doing so forfeited the primacy of place the discipline itself had come to occupy within the humanities. In the USA, by contrast, a somewhat later experience of crisis cleared the way for what might be termed a ‘paradigm shift’, the end-product of which was the ‘Progressive History’ of the interwar years.

The first aim of Part I, then, is to establish the extent to which history as practised in the era of professionalisation confirms the existence of a paradigm of a named community of scholars engaged in essentially the same problem-solving activities according to agreed assumptions, questions and conventions. Its second aim is to ask why history became a professional activity, and why it acquired a set of highly specific characteristics. What promoted the rise of this foundation paradigm? Why was it first forged in Germany? How far did the German example serve as a model emulated in the USA and Britain? These are questions that are tackled in Chapter 1, which addresses processes of institu-tionalism and examines the ways in which the practice of history came to be organised in these three nations. Associated with issues of organisation in the ways set out here are also issues of chronology and timescale: what accounts for divergencies in the timescales over which the primacy of political history was accomplished, challenged and, depending on the time, place and nature of the challenge, either vindicated or destroyed? While the variance in the establishment of a ‘normal science’ is central to the discussion in the first chapter, and what that ‘normal science’ actually constituted and how it was practised, is central to the discussion of the second, it is the early indications of emergent challenge which inform the last of the three chapters here. One more question remains: did the various chronologies and nationally specific circumstances of professionalisation lead to any measure of historiographical diversity? Even where methodologies were agreed upon, and generically similar problems identified, it does not necessarily follow that there should have been a similar consensus as to the underlying purposes of historical scholarshi

Note

1. See W. Kütder, J. Rüsen and E. Schulin (eds) Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 4: Krisenbewuβtsein, Katastrophenerfahrungen und Innovationen 1880–1945, Frankfurt a.M., Fischer, 1997, ‘Vorwort’, 12.

Chapter I

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The institutionalisation and organisation of history

Robert Harrison, Aled Jones and Peter Lambert

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The establishment of history as a discipline and a profession was predicated on its securing an institutional base and a career structure. History had to distinguish itself from older, neighbouring disciplines: only then could dedicated funding for historical work, and for appropriate training of future generations of historians be secured. In continental Europe, in Britain, and in the USA all this happened at differing points in the course of the nineteenth century, and with varying degrees of completeness and success. The importance of studying the history of the discipline itself — including that of the ways in which it was organised — is something that historians have recognised only relatively recently. Yet, as Theodor Schieder pointed out, all professional historians work within an organised system. University faculties and departments, seminars, institutes and societies, conferences and symposia, libraries and archives may be taken for granted by historians working today, but they are themselves outcomes of historical processes. Their existence was and is essential to the professional historian, but the precise ways in which they developed also helped shape the style and content of the histories produced. Schieder suggested that they impose a measure of uniformity on the practitioner of history: this ‘powerful apparatus’ (which he likened to an imposing building) ‘often has about it something depressing, constraining the spontaneity of every individual’ historian.¹ Such constraints, self-imposed by a founder-generation of professional historians and handed down to their successors, also made for shared experiences, for commonalities which facilitated the construction of a self-aware community.

Germany

To study or to write about the past is one thing. To be recognised — indeed, recognisable — as an historian is another. It requires definition and the formal trappings of recognition. Historians must first both see themselves, and be seen, as a discrete body of people engaged in a distinctive pursuit. If carrying the title of Professor of History or being enrolled at a university as a history student was, in the context of the nineteenth century, not a sufficient condition, it was certainly a necessary one for meeting these criteria. Although there had been practitioners of history at German universities in the eighteenth century, theirs was in general an identity without a name. It was not until 1804 that the first Chair of History was established, and it is in the first decades of the nineteenth century that the story of the professionalisation of history is conventionally begun. By the middle of the century, there were twenty-eight professors of history, distributed among nineteen universities. Sixty years later, there were no fewer than 185 professors of history, and their number continued to rise until the beginning of the 1930s, reaching a peak of 238 in 1931.

This professoriat contained within its ranks an elite of incumbents of full, established chairs, Ordinarien. These were the eminent master-craftsmen of what German historians came to refer to as ‘the guild’ (die Zunft), an imagined community of scholars which gradually developed rules and rituals of admission. The word ‘guild’ is itself suggestive of the past-mindedness of the men who created it. It gave a curiously pre-modern inflection to the highly modern processes of professionalisation and academic specialisation. The guild's apprentices were postgraduate students selected and finally judged by the Ordinarien. Admission to the guild generally required of them that they submit not one but two doctoral theses. The second of these, the Habituation, was in effect the apprentice's masterpiece. If successfully defended, it qualified the student for an academic career. Since only Ordinarien had tenure (in other words, job security), and given that even Germany's greatest historians were generally appointed as Ordinarien between the ages of thirty and forty, the apprenticeships were long. They were also normally periods of financial hardshi For the fortunate few who did gain established chairs, however, the material rewards alone were considerable.² Around 1900, the lowest salary for an Ordinarius stood at four times that of an elementary school teacher. If that denoted comfort, then the fact that the average salary for an Ordinarius was twice, and the very highest salaries were nearly seven times as generous, suggests something closer to luxury. On top of their salaries, professors could add to their incomes very substantially not only through sales of their books, but via the fees they charged students who enrolled in their ‘private’ lectures. Grandee historians thus took their places among the wealthy elites of German society. Elite status was confirmed by the title of ‘secret [state] councillor’ (Geheimrat) awarded to historians whose academic stature was matched by their political trustworthiness, and sometimes by the acquisition of aristocratic titles. A few could pride themselves on proximity to the throne. Others — like the Berlin historian Friedrich Meinecke — presided with their wives over salons.

Why did the professionalisation of history occur in Germany first, why did the profession become so prestigious, and who were its members? What, in other words, caused the construction of the paradigmatic historical profession?

History in Germany in fact gained its identity in two distinct phases, separated by the French Revolution. That there was a first phase at all, one located in the late Enlightenment period and marked out by Enlightenment values, has only recently been recognised.³ The propensity to see in the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke the ‘father of history’ long blinded historians to other, older impulses to the foundation of the discipline. Ranke had been masterly in his self-promotion as the inventor of a wholly new approach to history. For well over a century, his claims were taken at face value. Yet, at the University of Göttingen, founded in 1734, a group of historically minded German scholars (notably Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig Schlözer) had emerged from the middle of the eighteenth century onward. They were profoundly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment. From Scottish thinkers, they adopted not only a belief in natural law and progress, hostility to absolutism and a commitment to building civil society, but a self-conscious determination to underscore this bundle of ideas and ideals historically. Elements of economic, social and cultural history are discernible in the work which resulted. Where the Scottish Enlightenment, however, had failed to leave much of a mark on the organisation and institutionalisation of historical practice in the universities, the job descriptions of some posts at Göttingen made specific reference to the study of history. This early acquisition of the beginnings of an institutional base facilitated the exchange of ideas. The very first historical journals, most notably Gatterer's Allgemeine Historische Bibliothek, provided space for reviews of historical literature. Furthermore, a specifically historical methodology was forged in this setting. Its chief characteristics were, first, rationally conducted research on historical sources and, second, an arrangement of the information gleaned from those sources which accorded with the view that history was a single process. A shared objective was the enlightenment of the reading public. The Göttingen historians confidently assumed that history could and should inform contemporary approaches to politics: history held lessons for life.

The second phase of professionalisation did not simply bring an Enlightenment project to completion, however. It took place in a radicall...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The professionalisation of history
• Part II Challenges to the statist paradigm
• Part III Interdisciplinarity
• Part IV Social movements and theory into history
• Part V Beyond the academy
• Conclusion History and power
• Index