Doesn’t this sound like a lead-in to some postmodern theory, a cool riff on the non-availability of historical truth? Actually, it’s the foreword of Volney’s Lectures on History delivered in 1795 at the École Normale in Paris and published in 1826 (Volney 1989a: 504–505).
1. ‘THE DOGMA OF THE EUROPEAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM’
History is the ultimate form of mental coercion. That it always does impose itself as dogma, that it always does incarcerate us in its comprehensive designs, testifies to its persuasiveness. After all, if what happens can’t be explained historically, how can it be explained? If history doesn’t represent the accumulated reality of humanity, what does? If the past is abandoned, what stops it fatefully, fatally recurring? Just posing these questions exposes a limitation in thinking,—like standing on the brink of consciousness, peering into the void of absurdity. History apparently functions in relation to acting, as language to thinking. Just as thinking activity ceases if it resists the ‘coercive force of language’ [dem sprachlichen Zwange] (to take Nietzsche’s line), so the reality created by human behaviour collapses unless captured by historical categorical coordinators (e.g. origins, precedents, contexts, trajectories, traditions, heritages, legacies, identities, catalysts, causes, products, etc.), that constitute the ‘poetics’ of the discipline, that bestow on what it produces a ‘regime of truth’ (cf. Rancière 1992: 180).1 In both cases meaning and explanation depend on ‘a scheme we cannot dispense with’ (Nietzsche 1996: 358, §522).
1.1. The “lessons” of history
Two centuries on, Volney’s attack is as sharp as ever. But then history suffuses all aspects of reality more than ever. And if one were to think historically, as one naturally might in this historicized reality now, one could regard Volney’s Leçons d’Histoire as having “set a precedent” for Historics, or as being in a “long tradition” of scepticism towards history that would include Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Theodor Lessing, Paul Valéry, Gaston Bachelard, as well as such thought-styles as structuralism and deconstructionism. Further, thinking historically in a historicized world makes each incident interchangeable and reversible: so one might also regard Historics as “going back” to Volney’s 1795 treatise, and Volney himself as “going back” to Lucian’s treatise ‘How to Write History’ (c.162–165AD; cf. Volney 1989a: 573ff.). In fact, just think historically and, historically, Volney will say nothing new. In history, there never is anything new: as this example shows, it’s all the same. Just think historically: that most effectively blocks his attack, any attack.
Volney, though, offers something else, quite different. The title is already suggestive. Leçons d’Histoire could also mean ‘history lessons’, i.e. ‘lessons about history’ or ‘lessons from history’. The difference is: history isn’t the teacher. The Classical precept, Cicero’s historia magistra vitae, is inverted. What happened in the past (history [rg]), has no lessons to teach.2 History’s lessons Volney infers for himself from immediate observation (the ruins of ancient cities, globalized religious conflict, the violent convulsions of the French Revolution) and the available historical knowledge (history [crg]). They are inferences drawn from actuality, from evidence incriminating history. They derive from the immediate sense of things [aesthesis] as antagonistic to entrenched habits of thought, to the received categories of historical consciousness [illusio]. Volney’s work, in other words, represents the classical dilemma of the reflective sceptic in a totally historicized world. It shows history imposing itself, being totally coercive because of its cognitive redundancy. It realizes the past can’t have any lessons to teach, because knowledge based on it can’t help being baseless. In a totally historicized world historical knowledge descends inevitably to the ‘inactive commonplace’ (cf. Whitehead 1968: 174). Volney’s work ultimately evinces an innate, essential tropism of the human mind. The eidetic capacity of human consciousness has an inherent sense of reservation: its own vital interests galvanize dissent. Sooner or later it needs to stand back from the forms it has created, to distanciate itself. As an organic entity, human life finds it cannot dispense with ‘novelty of functioning’ or, conversely, ‘the entertainment of the alternative’: these expressions alone are essential for creating ‘varieties of importance’, the moral and aesthetic values that sustain human life (Whitehead 1968: 26, 28). As Volney shows paradigmatically, once history becomes the dominant form, the mind can’t help turning against it, resisting the historicizing trend, pursuing an alternative: the contrary, self-opposing (i.e. de-historicizing) principle historicization through its very presence establishes. And still, despite this scepticism, history dominates. As Volney argues, it’s an effective, addictive anaesthetic: it offers pacifying certainties, it numbs the mind’s and body’s vital demands with narcotic rêveries.
Volney is aware that his conception of history is novel. He focuses not on what history is, but what it does: that makes his work a prototype Historics. His world is already historicized: history comes into all aspects of social activity. He, therefore, wants to know whether or not historical narratives inspire confidence, what importance can be placed on historical facts, how studying history can be socially or practically useful, how history should best be studied, and, finally, ‘what influence historians have over the judgement of posterity, the workings of governments, and peoples’ fate’ (Volney 1989a: 510–511).
Leçons d’Histoire takes a cool, rational view of history like Voltaire’s in the essays Remarques sur l’histoire [Remarks on History] (1742) or Nouvelles considérations sur l’histoire [New Reflections on History] (1744) or, despite the difference in scale, an anthropological, scientific line like Montesquieu’s in De l’Esprit des Lois [The Spirit of Laws] (1748) or Buffon’s in his Histoire universelle [Universal History] (1749–1789). Its view of history dissents from the general historical, historicizing trend. Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History (1681), Vico’s New Science (1725), Mably’s On the Study of History (1775) and his On the Manner of Writing History (1783), Kant’s ‘Ideas for a World History with a Cosmopolitan Intention’ (1784), Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784–1791), Schiller’s ‘What is Universal History and to what End is it Studied?’ (1789), Condorcet’s Outline of a Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793), or, subsequently, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1822–1831), Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) and Droysen’s Historik (1857–1882) (e.g.): these all variously endow historical truth with positive moral value or propose meta-historical schemes enclosing all human beings and assigning them as individuals, nations, or cultures their proper place in the grand, historical design. That includes, above all, assigning the present its place in the total historical agenda they envisage.
In contrast, Volney, like Marx, inverts the priorities. Starting with the real existence of a global, historicized human society, he defines what history signifies for it. From this inverted standpoint he regards it as ‘a series of involuntary experiments to which the human race subjects itself’ (Volney 1989a: 511). Further, this experiment figure graphically vindicates the most important lesson about history Volney’s lectures on history would teach: to repudiate credulity and certainty as the effects of ignorance, indolence, and pride; to reject the imposition of beliefs by authorities; and, instead, to advocate scepticism, both the precept to ‘believe with difficulty’ and ‘the exterminating power of doubt’, since history shows that ‘certainty is the doctrine of error or mendacity, and the unflinching weapon of tyranny’ (Volney 1989a: 507, 539). Experiments do come up with results, with ever-accumulating data or experiences,—in history’s case, with all kinds of moral and political precepts drawn from predicaments posterity can learn from. At the same time, they involve trial-and-error, they test strategies: they can and do go wrong or produce unexpected results. This figure of thought, therefore, brings out the coincidence between historical truth and human error, human reality and historical illusion (Volney 1989a: 519–521).
1.2. Volney: on history as illusio
From this standpoint Volney explores the scope of history as an illusion, its illusory scope [illusio]:
(a) History is illusory because it promises a total human knowledge potential it can never fulfil. Volney evokes the possible political and ethical benefits of what he calls his novel ‘analytical or philosophical method’ of constructing history that would have a moral, scientific, and political utility (Volney 1989a: 544). It involves, beyond anything Montesquieu or Buffon envisaged, a comprehensive, social-anthropological, synchronic, and diachronic inventory of all the nations. Such a vast compendium would become the ‘unequivocal subject of the most useful reflections and combinations for the profound art of governing and passing laws’. Backed up by philology, by historical linguistics, by historical dictionaries and grammars, themselves manifestations of a people’s history, it would bring out the ‘genealogical fraternity’ of mankind. However, here Volney’s ambivalence comes in: such comprehensive knowledge, if it were achievable, would inevitably be late knowledge. Volney confirms a central tenet of Historics: historical knowledge is, by definition, late knowledge,—the belated insight, the deferred response, the always postponed resolution. From surveying ruins, monuments, inscriptions, coins, ancient scripts, the past’s débris, the characteristics of a world already historicized, he concedes that only those peoples already existing would be capable of gathering this data since its accumulated, historical significance would become apparent only to modern times,—the latest times (Volney 1989a: 584–585, 590, 592, 598).
Volney’s conception of history is technological. In his work as in Historics, history does stand unmasked as a social management technology. Taken in its universality, evincing in all their heterogeneous forms ‘the springs and mechanisms of human nature’, it constitutes a vast, complex social machine. The study of history would, therefore, perfect this historical mechanism and so produce ‘moral machines’ capable of establishing ‘fixed and determined principles for legislation, political economy, and government’. But this possibility too remains hypothetical [illusio]. It founders on the problematic criteria for evaluating evidence, for ascertaining beyond the major causes the relevance of a host of ancillary, but no less decisive factors. Failure to reckon with them, adhering uncritically to the given facts and erecting hypotheses on them instead, would inevitably produce calamitous errors of public administration. So, if the ‘moral machine’ of history were to materialize, the complexity of its engineering would require from historian-technicians knowledge of what Volney calls ‘probability calculus’, the ‘higher mathematics of history’,—possibly something like the current application of Bayesian logic to analyze information transfer between past and present or to assess in the present the likely, future occurrence of cataclysmic change (Volney 1989a: 542, 554–555; cf. Tucker 2004: 95ff.; Leslie 1998: 198ff., 216ff., 258ff.). Here, Volney confirms a further issue central to Historics: the history ‘mega-machine’ demands a technology so comprehensively complex that it’s too complex for its users’ comprehension,—that its complexity is an insuperable impediment to learning anything from it.
(b) History is also illusory, therefore, because this discrepancy between potential and performance makes it deceptive. To begin with, the historian has no ‘first-degree certainty’ about his facts. They reach him only through intermediaries: so that, like a judge, he has to question these intermediary witnesses to discover the truth, ‘the existence of the fact as it actually was’.3 Underlying this forensic interrogation is an assessment of verisimilitude (likeness) and probability, themselves sources of deception. Designating something as a fact of itself invokes the constancy of nature and, through its factual essence sustained by the ‘system of the universe’, establishes similarity with other facts. Factual narratives thus generate a priori both their own plausibility and, in the historian, a predisposition to be accepted as probable. In any case, to add to the deceptiveness, assessments of verisimilitude (or—in the terminology of the argument here—“likeness”) can vary widely according to the historian’s own knowledge and experience (Volney 1989a: 516–517). Here Volney further confirms Historics. Because historical knowledge operates in terms of probability and verisimilitude, even to the point of 99.99% likeness, it ipso facto operates on identitary thinking, establishing identical structures (things as they actually were), producing identical cases (nations, societies, cultures, communities), and defining identities (abstracted personality structures to identify oneself with). History’s identitary thinking is, therefore, inherently illusory [illusio]. Because there can be no verification, independent of any of the available witness testimonies, of the degree of likeness achieved by the historical account, its illusoriness can never be dispelled. Hence, Volney’s scepticism towards history and identity-forming procedures: one should not assent to anything one has not conceived for oneself (Volney 1989a: 518).
Because history requires identitary procedures to produce its likenesses, it must be illusory. Its illusoriness is both constitutive and compromising. It sets it apart from subjects of immediate apprehension such as art, mathematics, geometry, physics, medicine, or geography. It renders it in every respect irrelevant to the practical conduct of life. History is nothing other than a ‘fantastic tableau of facts that have vanished leaving only their shadows behind’: ‘why [Volney asks] is there any need to know about these fugitive forms that have perished and will never again return?’ To the labourer, the craftsman, the merchant, or the businessman, it is quite inconsequential to know that (e.g.) Alexander or Attila, an Ancient Roman or Spartan republic, or Socrates or Con...
