The Historians' Paradox

The Study of History in Our Time

Peter Charles Hoffer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814737439
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

How do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like “then.” It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical knowing. In an age of cable television pundits and anonymous bloggers dueling over history, the value of owning history increases at the same time as our confidence in history as a way of knowing crumbles. Historical knowledge thus presents a paradox — the more it is required, the less reliable it has become. To reconcile this paradox — that history is impossible but necessary — Peter Charles Hoffer proposes a practical, workable philosophy of history for our times, one that is robust and realistic, and that speaks to anyone who reads, writes and teaches history.

Covering a sweeping range of philosophies (from ancient history to game theory), methodological approaches to writing history, and the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies of argument, Hoffer constructs a philosophy of history that is reasonable, free of fallacy, and supported by appropriate evidence that is itself tenable.

1

It Would Be Logical to Assume …

Historians feel safe when dealing with the facts. We talk about “the hard facts” and “the cold facts,” about “not being able to get around the facts,” and about the necessity of basing our narrative on a “sound foundation of fact.” … But the simple fact turns out to be not a simple fact at all [but] … a simple generalization of a thousand and one facts … a statement … an affirmation … an argument.

—Carl Becker (1926)

“Just the facts,” Los Angeles police detective sergeant Joe Friday told witnesses. But witnesses left out key observations, mistook faces, and gave fleeting impressions the weight of truth. The detectives had to sort out the bits and pieces and assemble them into a viable case. Dragnet was fiction, for in it the police always got the right man. Would that historians were as fortunate, for we too are detectives, but our clues have a way of vanishing before our eyes.

For what is a historical fact? As Barbara J. Shapiro reveals in her Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (2003), the notion of “historical fact,” a true statement about the past worthy of belief, is itself a historical development. Only gradually did early modern historical writers denounce romance, myth, antiquarianism, and rhetoric and champion impartiality, the weighing of evidence, and scholarly expertise.

At the close of the nineteenth century, historians could be proud of their discipline and their achievements because they were the master of the irreducible fact. As James Ford Rhodes told the AHA in 1899: “Was there ever so propitious a time for writing history as in the last forty years? There has been a general acquisition of the historic sense. The methods of teaching history have so improved that they may be called scientific. Even as the chemist and physicist, we talk of practice in the laboratory.” Men like Rhodes regarded the facts in their accounts as the irreducible unquestionable truths with which any account of the past began. Documents, letters, diaries, artifacts, newspapers, and other survivals from the past were the source of these facts, and from their assembly historians built their narratives. Rhodes again: “The qualities necessary for an historian are diligence, accuracy, love of truth, impartiality, the thorough digestion of his materials by careful selection and long meditating.” If there were such irrefutable facts, from them historians could construct perfect accounts. They would always get the culprit right. History would be not only possible but easy.

But even as this first generation founded its professional associations, sought funding to preserve documentary collections, and offered graduate instruction and Ph.D.s to a new generation of historians, the very notion of the irreducibility of historical facts was coming under fire. Younger scholars, enamored of the very social sciences that were emerging alongside the discipline of history, were asking: Could a mastery of individual facts fully explain the spirit of an age? Could the historian include enough facts to cover all the variety of actions and actors? They agreed that facts were not bricks or other ready-to-hand building materials, because one could always ask of the sources whether they were honest, truthful, and reliable.

James Harvey Robinson related this progress away from certainty to an audience at the AHA annual meeting in 1929: At the outset of the century, “We had made a very essential discovery, the distinction between the primary and secondary sources of historical knowledge. We inhaled the delicious odor of first hand accounts, of the ‘original document,’ of the ‘official report.’ We had at last got to the bottom of things …. [But] as we look back thirty years we find historians perhaps rather pedantic and defensive. They are humble enough now.” Interpretation instead of narration became the major preoccupation of historians.

History itself played a role in spurring the historians’ growing skepticism about facts. During the First World War, leading American historians joined forces in the Committee on Public Information to bend and shape the past to fit our participation in the war against Germany. The chairman of that committee, newspaperman George Creel recalled in 1920 that its purpose had been to instill “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that would weld the American people into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.” After the war, disgruntled historians wondered if they had been duped by their own government into betraying their higher calling as scholars. Historical methods became even more self-critical. Even canonical documents were subjected to second and third looks. Did the drafters of these documents know what was going on? Did they have a bias that perverted their perception of events or a reason to lie?

The irreducible fact became a little argument built from pieces of evidence the historian selected and arranged. The selection and the arrangement, the emphasis and the argument, were the historian’s, not the document’s. Whether a story, an analysis, or a synthesis, history ceased to be “what actually was” and became what historians thought had happened. The historian’s account became a big argument resting on a multitude of little arguments.

Reason to the Rescue?

Given that we can no longer contend that we are simply intellectual bricklayers, placing fact upon fact and mortaring up the cracks with quotations from primary sources that speak for themselves, can historians respond to the impossibility dilemma by claiming that their reasoning faculties link past to present? Or that history itself has its reasons that the rational historian can discover? Most historical scholars share the faith that rationality in argument is a good thing in itself. A philosophy of history with the reasoning prowess of the historian as its foundation seems eminently reasonable.

This faith in rationality is rooted in Western culture, beginning with Plato. For him, even the elusive mysteries of the soul could be—indeed only could be—revealed by reason. As Socrates tells Glaucon about the soul at the end of Plato’s Republic: “Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity; and then her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all the things which we have described will be manifested more clearly.”

History is not always elevating. The real Socrates was a far less admirable fellow than the protagonist of the dialogues: nasty to his neighbors, indifferent to his domestic obligations, a philanderer, and a warmonger to boot. The more he harangued his fellow Athenians, the angrier they became. When he was tried for treason, he impudently told them that logic dictated they acquit him. Convicted and asked to leave the city, his logic directed suicide instead. Uncompromising ratiocination led to unmerited death.

But as Charles Beard would be the first to remind us, reason is not a universal element of history, like the forms in Plato’s Republic. Instead, reason is a cultural construction, a by-product of human desire and literacy. It is not surprising, then, that our love of reason has a history, and that history is as much aspiration as experience. Worse, though not unexpected from the historian’s perspective, the very notion of reason is full of contradictions.

Aristotle wrote the first formal treatise on reasoning, sometime around 350 BCE. Though he is better known as the author of works on politics and poetry, his six books of the Organon proposed a series of terms and laws of logic still used. He is the originator of the terms deduction and induction (another word for inference). His first law is the law of identity: A is always A. No wiggle room there, and no switching terms in the middle of the argument. Aristotle’s second law is the law of contradiction: A is never not A.

This intuitively simple set of laws runs into trouble, however, when A becomes complex and value laden: in other words, when an abstract symbol becomes a living thing in the often contested world of real things. Historians must choose words to describe things. The choice is neither arbitrary nor dictated by any law of logic. When is a patriot a rebel? When is a terrorist a freedom fighter? On the eve of the American Revolution, the rebels (or patriots) called the loyalists Tories and referred to themselves as Whigs. These terms came into use at the end of the seventeenth century in England. A Tory was a defender of the absolute power of kings, according to the Whigs, and a Whig was a rebel, according to the Tories. When historians choose among these terms to describe the opposing sides in 1775, they are joining in the debate rather than standing above it. To repeat, historians know that words in statements they make, just like those in the statements made by people in the past, depend not on the logic of the statement itself for their meaning but on meanings that real people in real time ascribe to the words.

The third of Aristotle’s laws was the law of the excluded middle. A was either true or false; you could not have it both ways. Except in Fiddler on the Roof—in this rich evocation of Jewish life in the shtetls of Russia, Tevye the milkman has occasion to agree with something one of his customers says. A second customer contradicts what the first customer said, and a compliant Tevye agrees with the second man. When a third man tells Tevye that he cannot agree with both of his customers, Tevye agrees with him too. Thus real life in a rural Jewish village circa 1905 confutes the last of Aristotle’s famous laws.

Or does it? A twist inside the puzzle: Tevye, the creation of Shalom Aleichem, was a fictional character set in a fictional place that seemed to American audiences as real and as evocative as any Yiddish folk story could be. But the truth was a little different. Shalom aleichem is Hebrew for “peace be with you,” the pen name of Shalom Rabinowitz, a Russian Jewish scholar and writer. When he published the short story “Tevye and His Daughters” he had already relocated to the United States. Literary conventions rather than folk memory guided his pen. The lesson? Reason is bent by the pull of culture just as light is bent as it passes through water.

Thus it is not surprising to learn that between the age of Aristotle and the modern era, reason and its handmaiden logic had their ups and downs. A history of logic reveals that it was included in the medieval university’s required courses. Aristotle’s writings were not lost in the Dark Ages of European history, unlike other classical authors’ works, and philosophers relied on Aristotle’s ideas to defend the life of the mind and the existence of God. At the same time, scholastic philosophers fruitlessly debated whether logic was artificial or corresponded exactly to reality.

For philosopher-theologians like the Dominican scholar St. Thomas Aquinas, the entire purpose of reason was to prove the existence of God. Aquinas had a simple deductive proof of the existence of God in his Summa Theologica (1273): “Although a perfect knowledge of the cause cannot be had from inadequate effects, yet … from any effect manifest to us it can be shown that a cause does exist, as has been said. And thus from the works of God His existence can be proved, although we cannot in this way know Him perfectly in accordance with His own essence.” Aquinas’s reasoning was that the world around him (and us) must be the effect of certain causes because all effects have causes. If we could trace the line back to the first cause, we would have proof of God, for what else could the first cause be.

Such “final causes,” as they were called at the time, fit history into a very neat, linear pattern: creation, time on earth, final judgment. It was logical, rational, and compelling, though not for Thomas Paine. He concluded his Age of Reason (1795): “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race, have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonourable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist.” This was a summary of history quite different from Aquinas’s and very harsh on Catholicism. But then, Paine believed in the universal rights and the equality of men and women, a concept whose origin lay not in the history of revealed religion but in the much more recent history of the English and American revolutions.

Paine’s depiction aside, later historians retrofit his title to describe the somewhat antiseptic and ethereal praise of reason in the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. Chief among these thinkers was René Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician whose aphorism “I think, therefore I am” has become an anthem of the rational person. Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method in 1637. His three rules for clear thinking seem to speak directly to the historian:

Never to accept anything as true when I did not recognize it clearly to be so, that is to say, to carefully avoid precipitation and prejudice, and to include in my opinions nothing beyond that which should present itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind that I might have no occasion to doubt it …. Divide each of the difficulties which I should examine into as many parts as were possible, and as should be required for its better solution …. Conduct my thoughts in order, by beginning with the simplest objects, and those most easy to know, so as to mount little by little, as if by steps, to the most complex knowledge.

One could look a long time and not find a better introduction to historical argument as practical reasoning, but when Descartes himself applied his rules they paraded themselves in the garb of his time, not ours. In other words, what reads in isolation as sound reasoning for historians becomes in the context of the rest of his writing an apology for conventional religion. For example, the origin of thought had to be God: “When we reflect on the idea of God which we were born with, we see that he is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, the source of all goodness and truth, the creator of all things, and finally, that he possesses within him everything.” Because Descartes has reason, God must exist. A rationalistic notion of mind had led almost directly back to Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately for modern historians wont to employ Descartes, a logic of history that relies upon the innate idea of God seems a little far-fetched.

England’s John Locke was not a historian, but like Descartes he provided what in the abstract appears to be a perfectly serviceable formula for historical reasoning. For him, experience and reason worked together. As he wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

The greatest part of our knowledge depends upon deductions and intermediate ideas: and in those cases where we are fain to substitute assent instead of knowledge, and take propositions for true, without being certain they are so, we have need to find out, examine, and compare the grounds of their probability. In both these cases, the faculty which finds out the means, and rightly applies them, to discover certainty in the one, and probability in the other, is that which we call reason. For, as reason perceives the necessary and indubitable connection of all the ideas or proofs one to another, in each step of any demonstration that produces knowledge; so it likewise perceives the probable connection of all the ideas or proofs one to another.

Locke’s theory of knowing was an interstitial one—we connect one idea to the next. Consistency and fit, measured by our reasoning faculties, reassure us that what we sense in the world around us is a true representation of that world. Historians use the same notion to move from one event or episode to the next in the narrative or one point to the next in an analysis. But nothing in Locke’s assertion of the reasoning faculty in all of us proves that there is such a faculty.

Locke wrote in the first great age of science in western Europe, when England and France founded royal academies to foster scientific inquiry and experiment. A faith in the scientific method was tantamount to a faith in reason, and logical inferences from scientific experiments were to Locke “proofs one to another, in each step of any demonstration.” Lock-ean-inspired historical studies could free themselves from the shackles of religious doctrine and emphasize the human element in events. The way was open for a new age of historical writing in which dispassionate scholars would find in human actions and motives immutable laws of history the same way that Isaac Newton had uncovered immutable laws of gravity and motion. But Locke’s faith in reason was a faith in ghosts. For what was reason, apart from the functions of the human brain? Did it float in some etherlike substance within each mind? Who had ever seen it? Measured it? To tell historians to use their powers of reason in a Lockean fashion is simply to tell them to think about their work, a little vague to be a useful part of a philosophy of history.

Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was the epitome of the rationalist histories. Gibbon shared with Locke the belief that history was governed by reason and that human reason could discern the reasons that events transpired as they did. His explanation of religion in the fall of the Roman Empire is a classic:

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister …. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable.

Gibbon thought this turn of events instructive for his own day. “It is the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory of his native country: but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views,” and “the same reflections will illustrate the fall of that mighty empire, and explain the probable causes of our actual security.” In effect, Gibbon was applying the Lockean notion of the historian’s reasoning powers to find and explain what had happened in the past. Reasonable men understood that history offered lessons open to reasonable inquiry.

But what if the lessons did not apply, or were applied entirely differently by different sets of historians? That is just what happened in 1776, the year Gibbon published his history. England had an empire that Gibbon celebrated, but the lessons Gibbon would carry from the decline of the Roman Empire to England’s far-flung domain failed to avert and never explained American independence. Instead, American revolutionaries like David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren, and John Marshall saw in the history of Anglo-American relations before 1776 another kind of inevitability. As Marshall quoted George Washington, approvingly, “the certain and absolute loss of our liberties” would follow from supine obedience to parliamentary enactments. Only manly resistance, a heroic effort, would save American liberty. And it had. History proved that the new nation was unlike any that had come earlier—a proposition at the same time self-congratulatory and inherently contradictory. If the laws of history were everywhere the same and (according to Locke and Gibbon) open to human inspection, then every nation was subject to them, including the United States. How could it be unique?

At the same time as the American apologists for revolution wrote of the inevitability of independence and the propriety of heroic exertions in its fulfillment, loyalist historians of the American Revolution concluded that the rebellion was the result of a series of blunders on the British side and a conspiracy of unscrupulous rabble-rousers on the American side—hardly a proof that history dictated the victory of the revolutionaries. Peter Oliver, chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature and loyalist refugee in England, wrote his own account, Orig...