Dipesh Chakrabarty
Chakrabary argues Europe still influences and produces the master narratives of its former colonies. Europe and India are "hyperreal" terms whose geographical referent are somewhat indeterminate. Third world historians feel the need to refer to works in European history, their counterparts do not. The dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is reproduced in the third world.
Western social science theories concocted in ignorance of the colonial areas that many writers in those areas today apply incorrectly to their societies. Only Europe, as the most advanced society, can flesh out the intracies of others.
HISTORICISIM AS A TRANSITION NARRATIVE:
Marx, as a critic of liberalism and capitalism, reamins central to any postcolonial or postmodern project of writing history. Most modern third world histories are written with the themes of development, modernization, and capitalism animating throughout, and for the most part, looking at the failures of various classes to succeed in achieving a national purpose.
At first these "transition narratives," were unabashed celebrations of imperialism. Those living through the period were consciously aware of the fact that something was always lacking in the Indian. Citizenship and nationhood represented the end goals of history and the British were necessary to teach it to the Indian. The working class were told by the elite that they were the ones bearing the inadequacies.
At first, to be a modern individual was to be a European. Later nationalists scraped this idea because the central tenent of nationalism because individual rights and abstract equalities were univerals that could find succor anywhere in the world: one could be both Indian and a citizen. As the state and economy modernized, Indians began thinking that the acme of human activity was this state, whose theoretical subject was Europe.
Yet the autobiographies coming out of India were not traditionally bourgeois in that their topics were public rather than private. Bourgeois desire to split the figure into the public and private in contestation, alliance, and miscegenation with other narratives of the self and community. These will never get treatment, according to Chakrabarty because they undermine the modern, that is "European" sense of history.
HISTORY AND DIFFERENCE IN INDIAN MODERNITY:
Struggle against old system of marriage now represented in new one. The voices opposing it are subordinated to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal march of citizenship, of the nation state, and of themes of human emanciation spelled out in the course of the Enlightenment. Citizens speak through these stories. The modern will always be understood as that which already happened elsewhere and is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content. And many nationalist movements have used "nonmodern" reactions to spur their independence. Indians arrogated time and again during the colonial period a subjecthood which was not theirs. Anti-historical constructions played a part in the anti-colonial movement.
On the one hand, there is an Indian elite who seek to modernize the Indian peasant for the sake of creating an Indian state that emulates the Europe they saw. Socialist or nationalist, both seek to emulate Europe. On the other hand, maneuvers are made within the narrative to represent the distinctnes of Indian history and the difference and origniality of Indian ideas. But these people lack the resources to transmit their narratives on the same volume as the transition narrative writers. Universities prejudice in favor of modernizing narratives. It is because European imperialism and third-world nationalists achievced together: universalizing the nation-state as the most desirable form of government. States possess self-justifying narratives of citzenship and modernity that harken back to European political philosophy.
PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE?
Chakrabarty proposes a project of alliance between subaltern studies and metropolitian histories grounded in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism. He is not calling for a simplistic out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, etc. The struggle to understand history is comprehending how coercion in physical, institutional, and symbolic forms establihes truths and meanings and goes a long way in deciding whose "universal" wins. This is not about cultural relativism either.
He proposes this:
1. Recognizing that one Europe got a hold of the adjective modern for itself, it animated its global imperialist history 2. and the equating a certain version of Europe with modernity is not the work of Europeans alone as thirdworld nationalisms have been equal partners in the process. History, a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory with grand narratives of rights, citizenships, and nation-states, as well as public and private spheres, one can't see India as having a problem while dismantling Europe. The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalence, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it. Modernization cannot occur without repression and violence. Chartabarky wants the politics of despair written into the narrative and why this is unescapable.
Showing posts with label Historicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Historicism. Show all posts
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Narrative History
In historical narrative there are no explicit theories. It is a reaction against the poetic tradition of writing history as well as the Hegelian concept of God moving through events.
There is no basic theory of society underlying the narrative historical view. A researcher is tasked with uncovering "history as it happened," that is the processes that drive events are to be understood within context to other events.
The primary source of data for this vantage point is the records participants leave behind. Critically analysis is possible through uncovering the accuracy of the documents through a specialized knowledge of language and time of the works left behind in archives. One achieves this through comparing sources and correspondence with each other to permit contextualization. To communicate, one must possess empathy and see the world as those in the past saw it.
The medium to this is through the historical narrative: the telling of a story through a coherent form and permitting the history to speak for it. For historians, the issue of causation is a unique phenomena that is the constellation of events for some unforetold reason.
Ranke believed the careful use of sources permitted distance from events so that an informed consensus on the past might emerge where dissimilar observers from all kinds of backgrounds could make uniform judgments. Some question whether this process is anything more than a fancy humanity.
History has its roots in philology where specialists scoured the distant texts of past languages and attempted to find the context of those texts in others. Ranke moved from great books to ordinary documents. He wanted to separate himself from the moralizing and instructive works of past writers and tell a tale of ugly facts.
Ranke trained his disciples in historical seminars at the university level where most of his specialists made careers. Not much of a market exists for the dry and dull texts of the academic historian, though the archive industry thrives as a result of their interest.
Modern schooling is an instruction of civic nationalism, or at least it used to be, and more often than not, teachers follow the narrative style in constructing text books and lesson plans.
Critiques of the historical narrative are almost endless. Its harshest critics call it mindless empiricism and little more than artisitc humanism. Some say its too conservative in the worldview of its practioners as well as its use of "elite" sources. Van Ranke has been criticized for venerating the state and his model on international politics has been rigourously challenged.
The old synchronic versus diochronic approach of the past also emerges as historians who dwell too much on a peculiar document will often lose sight of larger patterns in development. Historians would rebut that logic cannot be imposed on events afterthefact.
There is no basic theory of society underlying the narrative historical view. A researcher is tasked with uncovering "history as it happened," that is the processes that drive events are to be understood within context to other events.
The primary source of data for this vantage point is the records participants leave behind. Critically analysis is possible through uncovering the accuracy of the documents through a specialized knowledge of language and time of the works left behind in archives. One achieves this through comparing sources and correspondence with each other to permit contextualization. To communicate, one must possess empathy and see the world as those in the past saw it.
The medium to this is through the historical narrative: the telling of a story through a coherent form and permitting the history to speak for it. For historians, the issue of causation is a unique phenomena that is the constellation of events for some unforetold reason.
Ranke believed the careful use of sources permitted distance from events so that an informed consensus on the past might emerge where dissimilar observers from all kinds of backgrounds could make uniform judgments. Some question whether this process is anything more than a fancy humanity.
History has its roots in philology where specialists scoured the distant texts of past languages and attempted to find the context of those texts in others. Ranke moved from great books to ordinary documents. He wanted to separate himself from the moralizing and instructive works of past writers and tell a tale of ugly facts.
Ranke trained his disciples in historical seminars at the university level where most of his specialists made careers. Not much of a market exists for the dry and dull texts of the academic historian, though the archive industry thrives as a result of their interest.
Modern schooling is an instruction of civic nationalism, or at least it used to be, and more often than not, teachers follow the narrative style in constructing text books and lesson plans.
Critiques of the historical narrative are almost endless. Its harshest critics call it mindless empiricism and little more than artisitc humanism. Some say its too conservative in the worldview of its practioners as well as its use of "elite" sources. Van Ranke has been criticized for venerating the state and his model on international politics has been rigourously challenged.
The old synchronic versus diochronic approach of the past also emerges as historians who dwell too much on a peculiar document will often lose sight of larger patterns in development. Historians would rebut that logic cannot be imposed on events afterthefact.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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
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.
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.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Otto Hintze: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze
Otto Hintze's response to Karl Lamprecht's Was Ist Kulturgeschichte?:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
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.
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.
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