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.
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.
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