John Lewis Gaddis: The Landscape of History

The Landscape of History

The methodology employed by academic historians defies easy characterization. Historians interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future, but to do so without suspending the capacity to assess the particular circumstances in which one might have to act, or the relevance of past actions to them. Our knowledge of the past comes from imperfect data and subjective interpretations. Historians cannot relive, retrieve, or rerun past events, only represent them. Of course, any ambitious historian would seek something more than a literal recounting of dates and events. Abstraction allows us to move beyond a particular time and place, but its an artful exercise that permits the oversimplification of complex realities. Historians can portray movement through time through the use of a narrative.

In short, history is like playing baseball: you learn the rules and have to practice, but every game has different factors that affect different outcomes.

Time and Space

A historian's evidence is always incomplete and his perspective is always limited and imprecision is inherent. Historians are permitted to manipulate time and space in ways they never can as people: they are abstractionists as the literal representation of reality is not their task. There must be some freedom to give greater attention to some things than others to depart from a strict chronology: a historian must possess the license to connect things disconnected. But any abstraction must be rooted in reliable information about how people in the past lived.

Observable phenomena embedded in the structures created by the past provide evidence for patterns in human behavior and historical development. These are continuities, which are not laws or even theories, but phenomena that recur with significant regularity to make themselves apparent to us. Without these patterns, historians would have no basis for generalizing about human experience. Contingencies are phenomena that do not form patterns: the actions of individuals take for reasons known only to themselves. Contingencies encounter continuities and the process of history is made.

History is the linking of pattern recognition as the primary form of human perception and the fact that all history draws on recognizing those patterns to permit varying levels of detail about the information available at any given time about a particular landscape. Like a mapmaker, a historian distills from the experiences of others a reliable account for the purpose of describing reality. Like a mapmaker a historian's final product will necessarily exaggerate some objects to the determent of others, but it does not necessarily follow that just because we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space, that we cannot know anything about what happened within them.

STRUCTURE AND PROCESS

Science, more than any other form of inquiry, has shown itself more capable at eliciting agreement on the validity of results across cultures among dissimilar observers operating in different languages. It provides a consensus of rational opinion over the widest possible field. In human affairs, consciousness can override laws the kinds of laws that govern the behavior of molecules, so the scientific precision of physics will never be attained by historians.

But science is becoming more historical which means historians no longer feel obliged to impose upon every subject of knowledge a uniform intellectual pattern. The key to consensus in science is reproductibility: observations made under equivalent conditions are expected to produce closely corresponding results. Geology, evolution, and astropsychists reach conclusions based on observing the unrepeatable outcomes of past phenomena by engaging in educated thought-experiements. Imagination coupled with logic derives past processes from present structures.

Historians also start with surviving structures, from archives to artifacts to memories. They then deduce the processes that produced them. Many sources do not survive and often are confronted with ambiguous and contradictory evidence. In this sense, historians use imagination and logic to overcome difficulties. Historians, unlike artists and writers, can't just make stuff up: they can alter representations of an object, but not the object itself. History, like evolutionary sciences, practice the remote sensing of phenomena with which they can never directly interact.


THE INTERDEPENDENCY OF VARIABLES

Structures are the residue of past actors. The discovery of structures led to the derivation of processes. Starting with a structure one must deduce the processes that produced it. To do so, one must survey the evidence and find ways to represent it. But in looking at the evidence, one must deduce from the evidence why that evidence is there. Historians have a tendency to subvert generalizations, resist ranking causes, and reject the use of discipline-specific jargon.

Reductionism is the belief that you can best understand reality by dividing it into its various parts. You seek the element whose removal from a casual chain would alter the outcome. Causes must be ranked hierarchically in this regard. Structures, for historians, are considered to be the product of a myriad of interactions that cannot be easily understood without reference to other elements inside the structure.

For social scientists, consciousness and the behavior that results from it are subject to the workings of rules, if not laws, whose existence can be detected and whose effects can be described. Once this is accomplished, it is easier to forecast future events.

1. Rational Choice maintains that people calculate their own best interests objectively and on the basis of accurate information about the circumstances within which these exist.
2. Structural Functionalism argues that institutions are necessary components of the particular social structures in which they are embedded.
3. Modernization theory assumes all nations go through similar stages of economic development.
4. Miles's Law examines the behavior of bureaucracies large and small in terms of an overriding concern with self-preservation.
5. Freudian psychology accounts for the actions of individuals by invoking a set of unconscious impules and inhibitions inherited by all from childhood.
6. Realist and neorealist interpretations of IR which claim all nations in all situations seek to maximize power.

For Gaddis, these assumptions oversimply complex human behavior by inferring that human nature is static across time and cultures, to say nothing of individuals. Though there is a movmement away from reductionism in many branches of the social sciences, many social scientists operate at the same level of freshmen level physics classes, in Gaddis' view, choosing to smooth out the dangerous details of the theory in order to ensure ideological purity.

For historians, theories are subordinated to explantions. Social scientists tend to embed narratives within generalizations. The distinction between embedded and encompassing theory causes historians to function in manners differently from other social scientists. Historians work with limited, not universal, generalizations. Findings are rarely claimed applicable for times and places other than the specific. Historians will acknowledge tendencies or patterns, but prefer not to understand reality through laws. Historians believe in contingent rather than categorical causation. Distinctive links are stressed much more than routine ones. Causes always have antecedents: history proceeds from multiple causes and their intersections.

Social scientists try to reduce the number of variables with which they have to deal. I find this similar to Condorcet's Paradox: the fewer number of case studies with the fewer number of outcomes means the greater the chance for uniformity.

Although the past is never knowable, its more knowable than the future. Recounting the past requires simulating what happened, but not necessarily modeling it. Models seek to show how a system has worked in the past but also how it works in the future. Historians generalize only from the knowledge of particular outcomes: they derive processes from particular structures. For historians, generalization doesn't follow with forecasting.

CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY

Historians, by virtue of their reactionary stand against the social scientists, stand at the cutting edge of science. Simple causation is easily understood: change in one variable produce corresponding changes in others. Yet many other factors multiply the number of interdependent variables to an often incomprehensible number. To get around this, we assume particular generalizations about the past. A generalized theory about traffic jams does little to tell us how long we'd have to sit in the one we're in.

Some things are predictable and somethings are not: regularities coexist with apparent randomness: simplicity and complexity characterize the world in which we live. Chaos and complexity theory show us that the predictable can become unpredictable, patterns can exist when there seems to be none, and that patterns can emerge spontaneously.

The "butterfly flaps its wings in China" explanation of the impossibility of isolating an independent variable in meteorological forecasting has an effect on views of history. How does one know such an event when one sees it? One can only know in retrospect.

Systems with fewer numbers of variables are easier to model: complex systems need simulations, which means tracing history. Path dependency allows for more accurate representations of social phenomena.

CAUSATION, CONTINGENCY, AND COUNTERFACTUALS

If there really are no dependent variables in history, then how do historians establish and confirm casual relations among them? If everything really depends on everything else, can we ever know the cause of anything?

Three distinctions need to be made in connecting causes with consequences: the difference between the immediate, the intermediate and the distant; the exceptional and the general; and the factual and the counterfactual.

Historians tend to begin with a large or small pheomena and trace its antecedents backward. Proximal events assume a greater importance. A principle of diminishing relevance exists in history: the greater the time that separates a cause from a consequence, the less relevant the cause seems to be. Exceptional and general causes come to play as well.

Causes always have contexts, but how do we know a moment of exceptional causation when we encounter it? Historians seek punctuated equilibriums: the periods between long phases of continuity where a new phase emerges: the so-called point of no return. Tracing processes means searching for when they take a distincitve, abnormal, or unforeseen course: an exceptional event that reflected general conditions, but could not have been predicted by them.

If history is not predetermined, then there must surely be some parts that could have occured in some other fashion. Counterfactuals are the historical equivelents of laboratory experiments: controling for other events, you change one variable at a time. Historians cannot know the causes of any past event. The source record is lacking and the memories of participants are unreliable. Historians evaluate their findings by asking how closely the representations fit the realities they are meant to explain. Narratives simulate what transpired in the past. They are reconstructions assembled in the virtual laboratories of the mind of the processes that produced whatever structure they seek to explain.

These are some basic rules Gaddis tacked on to the end of this chapter:

Historians must be careful to make sure the number of causes they identify is keenly tailored to a set of circumscribed consequences. Historians incorporate generalizations into narratives rather than the other way around. There is a distinction between timeless and time-bound logic. Historians are obliged to tie narratives as closely as possible to the surviving evidence, but have no way of knowing until after the narrative is in mind on how much of it is going to be relevant. A replicable narrative must command a consensus among those who use it.

MOLECULES WITH MINDS OF THEIR OWN

People, unlike any subject observed by natural sciences, have an awareness of self and possess the capacity to think of their own situations, determine distinctive responses, and communicate with others. The capacity for self-reflection opens up the prospect of responding to similar circumstances in very dissimilar ways.

The mind of another person, however, is as inaccesible as the landscape of the past. Biographers must do more than chroncile what a person did, but why he or she did it which requires retrieving a set of mental processes of which even the subject might have been unaware.

Yet the people we encounter survive by reputation, the surviving structure that causes us to assign some special significance to the processes that produced it. It is more than mere chance, in Gaddis' view, that some people emerge when others do not. In every instance in which historians have singled out one individual from the masses of others, its because there's been a moment of sensitivity: some point at which small shifts at the beginning of a process produced large consequences at the end of it. More imprecisely, many people succeed where others fail by being in the right place at the right time and taking advantage of a window of opportunity.

Moral judgements are inescapable in history. You cannot escape thinking about history in moral terms. No society operates absent a sense of right or wrong. Purging human behavior of its moral element denies what distinguishes it. Just because our findings inescapably reflect who we are does not mean no one of them is any more valuable then the other.

The mind of your subject cannot change: it has its rocks and shoals no matter who is sailing toward it. Empathy, your capacity to be open to impression in experience, is necessary in order to represent reality.

SEEING LIKE A HISTORIAN:

A historian sees the world with a simultaneous sense of significance and insignificance, of detachment and engagement, of mastery and humility, of adventure as well as danger.

A state's search for legibility in its imposition of general uniformity diminishes local diversity. We benefit from the grid modernity imposes on our lives, even as the quiet logic of antiquity continues to surprise and impress us. We oppress the past even as we free it.

History is a pitiful approximation of reality that, even with the greatest skill on the part of the historian, would seem very strange to anyone who lived through it.

Deepak Lal: In Defense of Empires

The World Needs a Pax Americana:

Empires provide the most basic of public goods: order. Order means securing life against violence which leads to death or bodily harm; provides assurances that promises once made are kept, and a stability to the degree that challenges are not constant and without limit.

Empires are multiethnic conglomerates held together by transnational organization and cultural ties. In the past, empires extended to "natural limits" imposed by geography. Rather than changing the hearts and minds of the people subjected under them, the homogenizing empires set out to create a national identity out of the multifarious groups inside a territory.

Order has also been associated with the prosperity brought by globalization. Political hegemony lowered transaction costs and led to gains in trade as well as increased specialization.

Were empires beneficial for the metropolis? As foreign trade and investment were mutually advantageous, some nineteenth century liberals argued no empire was needed to obtain gains from trade. All that was needed was laissez-faire. Others, like Cobbden and Angrell, developed Kant's theory of perpetual peace further: the interdependence that emerged between trading states would inevitably lead to peace because no state would wish to impose excessive fiscal burdens on itself for the illusionary benefits of indemnities and territory gained by martial adventurism.

The linking of the whole world through self-interest, however, did require the use of compelling force in some areas. Empire was needed where the condition of a territory was such that social and economic cooperation with other nations was impossible. Where Wilsonianism trumpeted the importance of illegality of aggression enforced by collective security for the maintenance of a world order premised around liberal values, the British system eschewed economic sanctions as a remedy for punishing reclariant actors and instead relied upon the direct and indirect application of its imperial resources.

A global network of law protecting foreign capital allowed the worldwide expansion of trade in the nineteenth century that permitted the first world's first comprehensive development program. The British offered an international order bound together by mutual interest in commmerical progress and underpinned by a respect for property, credit, and responsibile givernment. This allowed many parts of the world to experience intensive growth for a sustained period.

With its vast economic and miltiary resources, the United States was the natural hier to Pax Britannica following World War II, but its anticolonial political ideology marked a departure from the British world order. The United States' moral aversion to imperialism, at least as practiced by European nations, permitted nationalist actors to supersede international legal codes and property rights, raising the risk, and hence the the cost, of foreign investment. Governments trumpeting national social utiltiyencountered little resistance from the hegemon when they destroyed individual property rights. American attempts to foster free trade, sound currency, and free capitial mobility relied on transnational institutions. The U.S. failed to spread free trade because its legislature prefers signing reciprocitiy and bilateral agreements with other nations. The World Bank became an international foreign aid agency rather than a relaible financial mediator and labored during the Cold War to provide incentives for nonaligned nations to ally with the United States: aid would be conditionally tied to a state fulfilling certain developmental requirements.

More wars are sparked by ethnic struggles for self-determination than all other causes. The most fragmented states and the most homogeneuous are the least likely to erupt in civil war because multi-ethnic states traditionally have an excellent framework for dealing with strife. In the world today, ethnic troubles in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are only mediated by the presence of a transnational actor that imposes the conditions of order explained earlier.

Can the U.S. assume this burden? There is, according to Lal, a budding cosmopolitian and global political and economic elite emerging in the United States capable of running a new worldwide empire. If the United States employs its power into a concert dedicated to maintaining peace and order, it will provoke emulation as well as fear and loathing. Preventing the latter from spilling into global disorder has been one of the essential tasks of imperial statesmanship. The United States is reluctant to employ its power because its domestic body politic refuses to embrace these responsibilities.

Absent direct imperialism, we should keep markets for African goods and capital flows to Africa open, and leave Africans to sort out their own problems. According to Lal, the Muslim world must embrace modernization, which means the United States must stop propping up backwards regimes that inhibit its pread. The U.S. must try to find a way to co-opt Islam with a more democratic and mericratic political and economic system. Given the interests for everyone invovled for a new order in the Middle East, the U.S. need not have to act alone.

Group Choice and Majority Rule

Cyclical Majorities

Condorcet's Paradox: An individual's preferences in a group, though consistent and transitive, need not be true of the group's preferences. A majority will prefer A to B, or B to C, but another majority will prefer C to A, rendering the arrangement nontransitory. What a group ends up doing will be cyclical, but it is of great importance as legislatures from town halls to Congresses operate under this assumption.

In a group of three, an individual has 13 ways of ranking his preferences. Rankings one through six, i.e., he can go ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA, are known as strong preferences. He can put two preferences together, i.e. A, BC; B, AC; C, AB; AB, C; AC, B; BC, A; and create a series of weak preferences. The final ordering represents complete and total indifference. 2197 possible preferences between three people might be made. For the sake of simplicy, the textbook focuses on 6*6*6.

Out of 216 possible outcomes, how many are affected by Condorcet's Paradox, i.e. how many possible scenarios will develop where no majority can be met? In most situations, the odds are high that majority rule will run smoothly, meaning majority rule works most of the time.

But life isn't as simple as a Condorcet Paradox. The number of alternatives and people increase in society. We should try to derive a probablity that given the number of alternatives and the number of individuals in a group, a majority outcome can be reached, in other words, the ratio between the preferences of the group, and the alternatives.

Probablity of intransitivity (Number of preferences*number of people) = the number of problem configurations/the number of potential solutions)

As the number of group members increases, the chances of intransivity and preference cycles increases to the limit. As the number of preferences increases, the chances for intransivity also increase. In politics, we must tolerate either group incoherence, a highly compressed franchise, or a highly restricted agenda.

It is not always the case, however, that one set of strong preferences is just as likely as another to characterize the preferences of an individual. Society is interdependent and not likely to create problem scenarios as often as these equilibrium scenarios would like. However, as long as the number of preferences remains large in any sized society, the chances of majority cycling remain dangerous.

Cyclical Majorities and "Divide the Dollars"

Political fights often revolve around how to share revenue. How do we divide the deficit is also difficult: from where does one raise revenue/cut funding?

Suppose a board of three men representing different districts of the town must divide a windfall of $1,000. In each case, the more money a politican lands, the better his chances for re-election. In all instances, each politican will recieve a share of at least 0 and no more than 1000. Each politician prefers any outcome where his share is larger than the other two. The so-called "fair distribution" of each side getting 333.33 will get beat by a majority because more prefer a 500, 500, 0 to 333, 333, 333. But to prevent two from ganging up on one, X prefers 700, 0, 300 to any combination of 500, 500, 0. The final outcome of this match will be decided on other institutional features of group decision-making.

Only anti-majoritarian restrictions that allow someone to exercise agenda power, procedural rules etc., would allow anything to get done.

Tax Politics

Various social groups that want to avoid paying taxes will form unstable coalitions which leads to preference cycles.

In the Civil War, one group favored taxing wealth, another land, another no tax at all. In the ensuing fight, someone decided to tax "income," an ambiguous and undefined term that in no way guaranteed that any specific group would be damaged. Congressmen preferred a lottery to no tax at all or a specific tax on land or wealth.

One way to prevent preference cycles is to impose limits on anyone to amend legislation, therefore allowing only the status quo or the proposal. In the event of a tie, the status quo usually wins. Preference cycles emerged in the 1930s when legislators were allowed to constantly amend bills, increasing the number of preferences possible and thereby making it more likely for preference cycle gridlock. Usually limits are imposed beforehand on any legislation.

A bill designed to do-away with tax breaks for special interests was supposed to attract a strong opposition from special interests and their supporters in Congress. In other words, a bill protecting the special interests would defeat the reform bill, but as Congressmen preferred no act at all to be seen as endorsing special interests, no bill was passed. But as each of the special interest groups preferred protecting their own special interests to collective action beneficial to the whole, they could not cooperate and the reform bill passed.

Arrow's Theorem

The problem of group incoherence is a peculiarity of round-robin tournmanets or features of majority rule, but not of voting generally. If one structured the institutional arrangements of group choice differenlty, we could arrive at a system with less incoherence.

In addition to assuming a rational actor capable of defining his preference (or indifference) and staying logical about it, any group acts four different ways:

1. Universal Admissibility: Anyone in the group may adopt any strong or weak and transitive ordering over the alternatives
2. Unanimty: If every member of the group prefers j to k yet we end up with a scheme that has k ahead of j then the group preference must represent that wish.
3. Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives: If j is ranked ahead of k, in the final decision, the later elevation of l does not change j ranking ahead of k.
4. Nondictatorship: If only one person prefers k to j, then the group's decision cannot be k.

There exists no mechanism for translating the preferences of rational individuals into a coherant group preference that simultaneously satisfies all four conditions. Any scheme that satisfies all four criteria is either dictatorial or possesses intransitive solutions. Thus, there is a tradeoff between social rationality and the concentration of power. Social organizations that concentrate power provide for the prospect of social coherence. Majority rule can settle things most of the time, but not always.

Legislative Intent

Liberals prefer interpreting a silence on a particular issue as not restricting the court's or government's power. Conservatives prefer deference to the intent of the legislature. Arrow's therom states that because a group may not have a transitive set of preferences, trying to discover the intent of a legislature is a fool's errand.

Arrow's Theorem and Majority Rule

Majority rule is defined as for any pair of alternatives, if j is preferred to k by more people than it wins.

Reasonable Conditions on Preference Aggregation Methods:

Anonymity: Social preferences not influenced by who has what preference.

Neutratlity: Interchaning the ranks of alternatives in each member's preferencing has the effect of interchaning the group's preference ordering. No matter what we label them, they remain the same.

Monotonicity: The method of group choice cannot respond to changes in individual preferences. If j is strictly preferred at first, and someone changes their preferences to make J higher, J is still strictly preferred. If people are indifferent to j and k at first, but then one person prefers j to k, then j is preferred.

May's Theorem: If a group uses a handcount to satisfy deciding between any pair of alternatives, then it necessarly satisfies Universal Domain, Anonymity, Neutrality, and Monotonicity. Not all preferences are of this nature, of course, and nor should they be.


Black's Single-Peakedness Theorem and Sen's Value Restriction Theorem :

Arrow's and May's conditions are mild and innocuous conditions of fairness. Condition unanimous domain is different. The more it is applied, the greater the chance for a trade off fairness for consistency. Is it possible to restrict domain and obtain both fairness and consistency?

If in every set of alternatives, there is some alternative that is not the worst alternative, then majority rule deems it transitive. In other words, majority rule can work pretty well so long as a minimal degree of consensus exists on some alternative.

Perspectives in Social Sciences

Why the Chicago School is different, and why that is good:

Social science is the attempt to develop systematic secular knowledge about social reality that is one way or another validated empirically.

Unlike many universities which have seen increased specialization and intellectual isolation in their social science departments, the University of Chicago believes that perspectives of analysis are more valuable distinctions that govern the worldviews of academics and seeks to deconstruct disciplinary boundaries.

The course argues that the Western social science tradition has produced nine distinct ways of analytically examining intellectual objects. These are: historical narrative, rational choice, Marxism, structural functionalism, modernization, psychoanalysis, linguistic structuralism, symbolic interactionism, and cultural hermeneutics.

Each has a distinctive genesis and intellectual model that usually rivals an exisiting one; central concepts and master arguments with different databases and sources to support it; methodological preferences in analyzing that data that are rooted in preexisting ways of viewing the world; each has been institutionalized inside and outside of academia and has provoked perennial criticism.

All and all, the disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences do not make much sense. The perspectives system provides the best orientation for examining the differences.

Otto Hintze: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze

Otto Hintze's response to Karl Lamprecht's Was Ist Kulturgeschichte?:

Hintze's essay tackes the old debate over historical laws: are events of such a nature that they can be generally arranged in some form of order or unique in their appearance. Psychological investigation, rather than the quarrel over teleology and materialism, altered the fight over why typical patterns emerge in historical development.

Social psychology has its roots in the idealistic spirit that provoked many German philosophers to believe a mass psychology of a nation impacts, if not determines, the destiny of a people.

Historians know of no driving forces other than those carried out by men, not as individuals, but in connection with their time and place. A man shaped by the assumptions of his era give life to all institutions.

For Lamprecht, the mind of the individual and the mind of the society are two separate entitites. All in a group are ruled by the emotions and ideas common to the group. In other words, members of every group, though they vary in minor ways at an individual level, are nonetheless ruled by the emotions, ideas, and desires common to the group.

Ideas have their ultimate origin in thepsychology of the minds of individuals and are therefore subjected to individual impulses. More advanced societies have more options for breaking in conformity. Individual are essential for change and a society progresses as the variance between traditional norms and new ones.

Assuming that individuals are the catalysts for the creation of "history," how does one determine how and why certain people at certain times emerge? Why is it some people are more successful than others in altering their environments?

For Hintze, this task is too arduous for the historian:

"Historians deal with people whose consciousnesses are already fully formed. We can understand them only on an act of artistic insight, founded on careful research."

The life of an individual and the life of a society can be described and analyzed, but the connection between the individual and the group cannot be made given the limits of source material available. In this manner, the distinction between cultural and political history is meaningless for Hintze because the individual and the group evolve and react against one another.

Using a metaphor, Hintze writes:

"We want to know not just the summits and peaks of the range, but also the base of the mountain."

In this respect, he advocates employing social psychological tools to illuminate the trajectory of world history. Rather than dividing the various chronologies of events into national stories, Hintze wants to examine the "universal cultural forces" that shape the behavior of nations which are reactions to world events.

Leopold Van Ranke: A History of England, Principally in the 17th Century

Leopold Van Ranke, A History of England, The Prince of Orange and the Protestant Episcopalian Party in England:

A rather dull tract recounting in tedious detail the downfall of James II. Mostly using available correspondence, Von Ranke paints a picture of politcal manuevering in the Hague and London in the 1680s. He tersely lists events with little transition and the only instance of the author's voice come in broad statements that clarify or minimize the importance of each event he lists in the narrative, i.e.:

"Personal quarrels of this kind never fail to have some consequences,"

I gather the reason this reading was assigned was to provide a sample of the limits of a strict political and diplomatic history that employs only documentation without a unifying theme. Von Ranke stresses the unique situation of William of Orange as a catalyst for driving French foreign policy and English domestic policy:

"The effect which a man can produce on the world often depends not so much on the power he possesses, as on the attiutude which he assumes towards those forces."

Policy considerations are only considered for their impact on the ruler's power and the status of his nation's power vis-a-vis the rest of Europe. Religious differences are considered political impediments. Nowhere do we learn how or why certain people think the way they do, save a passing reference to William's upbringing. For Van Ranke, only documented evidence can be placed in the book.

Leopold Van Ranke: History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations

Leopold Van Ranke: History of the Latin and Teutonic Races: Introduction

Van Ranke begins his introduction by limiting his scope for the sake of narrative clarity. The historian acknowledges forces outside Western Europe impacted its development, but chooses to omit them for the sake of clarity.

In perhaps the most famous line of his many works, Van Ranke dismisses the historian's attempt to "teach the past to instruct the present and so they may profit from the future." For Van Ranke, this school of thought makes historical research completely subjective on the chance morality of the evaluator.

One can teach history "as it happened" because an informed observer can read the memoirs, diaries, letters diplomatic dispatches and first hand accounts of eye-witnesses to construct a picture of political and diplomatic history. For Van Ranke, every specialist from every year looking at every event would reach the same conclusion. Unlike laboratory scientists, we cannot run and rerun simulations on past events to isolate exactly how something happened and why. What we can do, for Van Ranke, is locate through rigorous research and documentation a reliable record of the past. He uses the term "highest law" to describe "a strict representation of the facts, however narrowly circumscribed or ugly they may be."

Rather than focusing on imparting the moral lessons from the past or teleology, Van Ranke believes "The lofty ideal of historical presentation is to present events themselves to the limit of human comprehension." He doubts his own capacity to meet this standard, but believes it is attainable.