The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory

SAGE Publications

Nancy Partner, Sarah Foot, Nancy Partner, Sarah Foot, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781412931144
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory introduces the foundations of modern historical theory and the applications of theory to a full range of sub-fields of historical research, bringing the reader as up to date as possible with continuing debates and current developments.

The book is divided into three key parts, covering:

- Part I. Foundations: The Theoretical Grounds for Knowledge of the Past

- Part II. Applications: Theory-Intensive Areas in History

- Part III. Coda. Post-Postmodernism: Directions and Interrogations.

This important handbook brings together, in one volume, discussions of modernity, empiricism, deconstruction, narrative and postmodernity in the continuing evolution of the historical discipline into our post-postmodern era. Chapters are written by leading academics from around the world and cover a wide array of specialized areas of the discipline, including social history, intellectual history, gender, memory, psychoanalysis and cultural history. The influence of major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Hayden White is fully examined.

This handbook is an essential resource for practising historians, and students of history, and will appeal to scholars in related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities who seek a closer understanding of the theoretical foundations of history.

PART I

Foundations: Theoretical Frameworks for Knowledge of the Past

Nancy Partner

INTRODUCTION

Historical theory is a coherent yet flexible framework which supports the analysis of historical knowledge, and assists our understanding of what kind of knowledge we can have of the past, and precisely how that knowledge is constructed, assembled, and presented. In this sense of a framework of conceptual instruments for examining our knowledge of the past, theory is metahistorical: it does its work as an adjunct operation opening out the reach of critical self-awareness we bring to our assumptions and practices as historians. Theory is metahistorical also in that in its strongest versions it applies to the entire discipline of history, all time periods, and specialized topics. The focus and coverage of historical theory differentiate it from methodology and techniques, and from traditional philosophy of history, and situate it closer to hermeneutics. In the very longue durée of the history of history, by the conventional measure beginning with Herodotus, theory in this self-scrutinizing sense is quite new, chiefly a product of the later twentieth century; the development of historical theory marks a clear stage in the modern maturity of history as an intellectual and cultural practice.

The terminology we have available for these metahistorical frameworks for examining historical knowledge tends to merge the edges of philosophy and theory, especially when questions of epistemology are involved, but there are substantial differences between older approaches to big historical concerns and the contemporary project of understanding what exactly ‘history’ is. Philosophy of history, in its many formulations, attempted to discern the shape and direction of very large scale changes in human collective life over long stretches of time. Well-known variants range from cyclical repetitions attributed to Thucydides and other Greeks of antiquity, medieval Christian millennial ideas, to Marxist and Hegelian dialectical history. Everything potentially enters into these sort of ambitious enterprises to encompass and intellectually control the enormous variety of human activity (culture, politics, war, economics, social organization, religion) collected under the rubric of ‘history’ with the exception of ‘history’ itself – that is, exactly what we mean by ‘history’ as a form of knowledge and how this knowledge is formulated and conveyed in any stable form. Philosophy of history in its several variants can be speculative or analytical but, at its core, the ontological entity ‘history’ is assumed, not interrogated. The history whose movements are explained in these large scale guises is some cumulative, accepted version of what historians have offered, especially in longform histories of nations, empires, the rise and fall of dynastic powers, and economic and cultural hegemonies.

The assembly and presentation of this information in written form (the histories that make up ‘History’) is taken for granted as offering trustworthy material of past reality which awaits organization by philosophers of history into cycles, spirals, dialectic encounters, or revolutionary upheavals. Historical theory, in contrast, homes in on the ‘history’ itself, asking: Exactly what sort of representations are offered as true information about past reality? How does the category-language of description work? What operations produce the intelligible linguistic structures of events-in-time which are, in the end, what we really mean by ‘history’? It is this difference of focus and object of interrogation which marks the distinction between philosophy of history and theory.

Why should history, a discipline committed to verifiable factuality, need theory? What is intrinsic to history, to what we really mean by history, that invites and even requires an extra theoretical discussion? The short answer is ‘writing.’ Historical theory is summoned by the tension set up between the concentration on factuality (locating the sources of accurate information of the past, the technical handling of documents and other artifacts, establishing the web of verification around historical information, and articulating and securing consistent standards for historical work) and the larger structures of language that alone can convey the complex meanings historians see ‘in’ well-established facts. A tension of incommensurate standards arises between facts and linguistic forms. Events become facts (or ‘facts’ in our self-conscious usage) when they are subject to descriptions or predications, and the factuality of small-scale historical knowledge is subject to verification. Verification, in the modern discipline, is a set of procedures for measuring statements against the evidence supporting them. The methods and standards involved in adjudicating the truth-value status of specific assertions about past actuality (this happened, this way, at this time and place) is modern in its scientific aspirations and rational framework. But the forms of language that hold together assemblages of factual information in relations and sequences that are comprehensible and meaningful are, in their base elements, literally ancient and ‘literary’ in genre.

History is narrative in form, virtually by definition, because narrative is what brings the seriatim stream of time under control for intelligible, meaningful comprehension; but the narrative constructions necessary to historical knowledge are not themselves susceptible to verification as discreet facts are. The linguistic form for statements about single events is totally different in scale, complexity, and argumentation from long-form narrative. The epistemological force of our procedures of verification applies with maximal effect on small-scale facts, but verification attenuates as history expands beyond statement level, and the complex relationships that express the meaning of events over controlled stretches of time are not really susceptible to verification at all in the same way. That is where historical theory intersects with historical work: at the level of interpretation, narrative emplotment, the complex configuration of events in time, in writing. These incommensurate yet interlinked forms (statement vs. narrative) invite scrutiny, and this scrutiny opens the way to historical theory.

Historical theory does not mean ‘a theory of history,’ some unified system explaining or predicting the course of world events in the manner of older styles of philosophy of history; theory does not gesture at world historical movements pictured as ascents and declines, or cycles, or dialectical antitheses, and it emphatically does not aim at disciplinary parameters that would govern or restrict the possibilities of interpretation of the past. History, the word, is part of our common vocabulary, so we continue to use ‘history’ to cover an overlapping array of other ideas ranging from the entirety of past actuality to something more like a story (‘they have a history …’), but only those writings adhering to contemporary protocols for historicity can be subjected to analysis as history in a systematic way. Thus, the history that generates historical theory as its metadiscourse takes written form, works describing and interpreting the past which are offered as serious contributions to knowledge – works of history rather than ‘history’ as an abstract gesture towards the real past. The purpose of theory directed to written history is the deep analysis of this historical knowledge, for the sake of intellectual transparency and disciplinary self-reflection, and if theory is the category term collecting together the instruments of analysis, it requires a stable defined object on which to work. A theoretical scrutiny addresses the procedures and operations involved in the making of written history above the level of its constituent statement-facts and trains an intense light on the construction of chronology, causal trajectories, selection and emphasis, value-laden language, and interpretation in the fullest sense.

Historical theory, then, provides a framework that supports the investigations of what we mean by historical knowledge, the interpretive operations that turn traces of the past into ‘evidence of’ some larger set of meanings that emerge over time. Even if not a system, historical theory does have to be sufficiently systematic in the sense that its operative concepts work together coherently, and it does point to a certain level of abstraction because its object is history, the whole domain of written history. This breadth of application is what earns historical theory its title to being ‘theory’: it addresses foundational elements of historical knowledge of all times and places; thus it is co-extensive with history in its entirety. The test of a strong concept in historical theory is whether it applies usefully and aptly across fields and specialities, and times and places. Because knowledge of the past is produced as cultural artifacts made of language – alias: histories in the plural – theoretical analysis applies to the histories of all chronological periods, and all societies available for historical research. The complex formulations of language historians construct to turn observation, memory, evidentiary traces of the past, documents, and material artifacts into histories – truth-claim texts – require this level of self-reflexive scrutiny if history is to be a fully matured discipline. The need for rigorous self-reflection is where theory is summoned up, to do this self-critical work. Theory, in this sense, confronts history in its most concrete and lucid form, what historians actually do, the written work that formulates their research and interpretation.

MODERNITY AND HISTORY: THE PROFESSIONAL DISCIPLINE

History’s modernity began with its entry into the university as a teaching and research subject in the nineteenth century; the university-based historian was, for the first time, a trained professional who had mastered the difficult techniques of archival research. The enthusiasm and respect generated by contemporary scientific advance exerted a compelling attraction and drew the first generations of research historians to define their work also as a ‘science,’ and try to claim a place, albeit a marginal one, for history within the boundaries of scientific endeavor.

The professionalization of history in the nineteenth century directed attention to research, method, rigor, and the relationship between archival collections and the historian’s restatement of information grounded in primary sources. The new methodology, rigorous and critical, was its own self-explanation: the in-text/out-of-text structure of verification displayed this method visibly in every history book with footnotes. The footnoted page was the distinctive expression of the archival research that provided its foundation. Professionalized history felt scientific to most of its credentialed practitioners; as Michael Bentley notes, ‘History, that is to say, had become a form of culturally-acceptable historical science; it had become “technical”; it had learned to require “training”; it celebrated its professors who were now “experts”.’

During the formative stages of professionalization when so much effort had to be directed at developing exacting techniques for research, and the concomitant necessity for a demanding course of training for historians, the discipline as a whole was absorbed by the core task of producing reliable factual information about the past. Empiricist assumptions – that empirical methods correctly reflected an empirical world – did not seem to invite questions. The new ‘scientific’ emphasis on factuality as a standard, and the defining element of history, tended to concentrate attention on having procedures and tests for separating out facts as those assertions about the past that could sustain a critical inspection by other credentialed professionals, a testing process only possible with some common protocols for verification shared and accepted by all historians. Archives, especially collections of administrative, financial, diplomatic, and other non-narrative records, were the arena for ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Part I Foundations: Theoretical Frameworks for Knowledge of the Past
• Part II Applications: Theory-Intensive Areas of History
• Part III Coda. Post-Postmodernism: Directions and Interrogations
• Index