Marxism Notes

Marxism is a holistic theory of society that challenges the models of Hegel, narrative history, and political economy as defined by Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. Marx satirizes Von Ranke's grand history as lacking a coherent theory and labels it the product of the dominant ideology. For Marx there are patterns of historical motion that are visable through objective analysis. Like rational choice, Marxism presupposes the existence of a division of labor, the commodization of labor, and the inevitablity of monopoly in a capitalist society, but Marxists want to explain how that development occured and how individual responses to it are conditioned to the larger superstructure of socialization that the dominant mode of production imposes on society.

For Marx, society is a mode of production which includes structure, forces, matieral relations, culture, values, in total, a way of life, that proceeds any individual and encompasses him. It is an absolute rejection of that society which is deemed the sum of its parts. One is born into a structure which necessarily dominantes but does not necessarily determine behavior inspite of powerful conditioning.

A mode of production = a mean of production. For capitalism, the mode of production is the creation of commodities. This is directly related to the social relations of production which include the market itself, forms of private property, the state, ideas, culture, and a class structure. Revolution occurs when the mode of production alters, as in the case of factory. History, therefore, is a linear sequence of modes of production in which each is distinguished by a unique set of class relations. Class is very specifically defined as having the same relationship to ownership over the means of production: for capitalists, it is the capacity to call labor into being.

Revolution is occasioned by the internal contradictions between the means of production and social relations becames totals and inescapable. Changes in ther means of production lead to older ideologies contradicted by new ones. If your real class position is x, but you think of yourself as y, there must be a social revolution from the subjective classes to alter the situation.

Base and superstructure: there is an intimate relationship with the productive nature of society and the state, culture, and ideas of it. Ideology is a false consciousness, which is still a force of production. Individualism and religion, for instance, are ideologies which force people to act in certain ways, the former of the two marking the triumph of capitalism. Ideologies are te ruling ideas of every age and represent the dominant interests of the ruling class because they control the means of production. The state exists as the executive arm of the ruling class.

Man is alienated from the fruit of his labor. People do not own their labor power, or the product of it. No one likes work, instead we work to eat. In this sense we are alienated from nature and alienated from our selves, and competition alienates us from others. The degree to which human beings are alienated varies with the modes of production. In general, the greater the productivity, the more alienation. The capitalist system finds all society falling into 2 and only 2 classes.

Major criticisms: If you disagree, it is because you are alienated. Marxism remains too philosophical for social scientist methodologies. Like rational choice, historical materials are only exemplifications of the logic of structure. There is no agency, no attention to structure, no laws of motion exist in real contingent histories. Sociologists and political scientists find it crude. Cultural scientists doubt ideas, ideologies, and identities can be so easily reduced.

An Economic Theory of Democracy: The Process of Becoming Informed

by Anthony Downs

Reaction against economic theory: Information is attainable only at a cost. Ratioanl decison-makers acquire only a limited amount of information before making choices and all reporting is biased because the reporter must select only some of extant facts to pass on to his audience, therefore, a rational citizen keeps properly well-informed by exposinh himself to a particular set of information sources has chosen for the purpose.

The Role of Information in Decision-Making:

To be rational, a man must know what his goals are, the alternative ways of reaching them, and the probable consequences of choosing each alternative. Rationally deciding how to vote goes as follows: gather all relevant information to each issue for which political decisions have been made, select information that will be used in voting, for each issue, analyze the facts selected to arrive at specific factual conclusions about possible alternative policies, appraising the consequences of every likely policy in light of relevant goals, coordinating these appraisals of each issue into a net evaluation of each party in the election, making a voting decision based on comparing the evaluation, actually voting. Voters delegate these steps to someone other than the voter: time is a scarce resource to be used for assimilating data. The fewer costs the voter performs himself, the fewer costs he bears directly and it allows him to make use of economies of scale and the expert knowledge of specialists.

The Process of Becoming Informed:

From among many sources of information, he must select only a few to tap. The object of his choice is creation of a system of information acquisition which provides him with data that are both chosen by means of selection principles in accord with his own and comprehensive enough to enable him to make the decisions he faces. A rational person makes selections that provide versions of events that closely approximate the versions they would formulate themselves were they expert. A man's selection principles are rational if application of them provides him with information that is useful for making decisions which will bring about the state he most prefers: no one suits all men. Necessarily hypothetical and subject to great error.

The Quantity of Information It Is Rational To Acquire:

Some people acquire information as an end itself. An information seeker invests resources into procuring data until the margin return from information equals its marginal cost. At that point, he makes a decision. The disparity between real behavior and the procedures in the model to appear striking since few people behave in the manner described, but assumes these are implicit assumptions even if casual observation fails to confirm it.

The Need For Focusing Attention:

Any differences between the way one party would run the government and the differences between the way the other would is relevant, including trivial ones in administering obscure agencies. It is not possible to know which ones are revelant with knowing what all of them are. The cost of discovering the latter is prohibitive to the average voter. Voters need a device to know how to avoid the staggering difficulty of comprehending everything the government does and everything its opponents would have done differently. Areas of decision where opposition parties contest the policies of the incumbents; areas of decision in which the presently governing party changed the government's method of reacting to or handling a situation; areas of decision in which the situations to which the government must react are markedly different from those extant under preceding governments. If voters focus on these three areas, they will be rational.

Characterisitcs of a Rational Information System:

Every rational citizen constructs for his political usage a system of information acquisition that consists of a limited number of information sources, a part of whose data output he selects to use in political decision-making. He must rely on a rather crude process of trial and error to construct this system. The data reporters are identifiable with his own yet also broad enough to report anything of significance in differential areas. It provides him with enough information about each issue for his decisions, given his desire to invest in information. It possesses sufficient internal plurality so that its parts can be used as checks upon each other's accuracy and deviation. Creating this system absorbs scarce resources, the cost of which must be balanced against the returns from the information obtained.

Summary:

Decision-making is a process which consumes time and other scare resources; hence economy must be practiced in determining how many resources shall be employed in it. The prinicples of selection they employ depend upon the end for which information is a means, but some principles are inherant inevery report; so all information is biased. Information used by one citizen is gathered, transmitted, and analyzed by others: if the user is to know what his information really means in terms of decision-making, he must be sure others have the same principles of selection. Each citizen decides how much information to acquire by utilizing the basic marginal cost-return principle of economics: marginal return from information is computed by weighing the importance of making a right instead of a wrong decision, to his value is applied the probablility that the bit of information being considered will be useful in making this decision. Much of this is a transferable cost, but the time for assimilation is a nontransferable one. The decision-maker continues to acquire information until the marginal return equals the marginal cost.

An Economic Theory of Democracy

by Anthony Downs

The concept of Rationality in Economic Theory:

Simplification of complex behavior necessary for fielding predicitons because decisions made at random fail to fall into patterns. Assumes conscious rationality prevails in human thought. If a theorist knows what a man or starw wishes in the end, he can calculate the most reasonable way for a decision-maker to reach his goals and assumes the rational decision-maker will follow this path. Economists assume a single goal so that one efficient way to attain it may be found: firms maximize profits, individuals maximize utility.

Rational men always make decisions when confronted with alternatives by ranking all in front of him in a transitive manner and picks the same highest result every time. Avoid the conclusion that every man's behavior is rationanl because it is aimed at some end and the returns must have outweighted the costs. Psychological considerations of why men pick what they do is irrelveant to economics. The whole personality of the individual is neflected. Models cannot reflect real-world behavior. To avoid becoming primary-group sociology, economists assume men orient their behavior chiefly toward the outer world.

Irrationality and the Basic Function of Political Rationality:

People tend to behave in ways they think is rational. How can a political scientist distinguish between one who makes mistakes and one who is irrational? Weakened argumment as these cannot be proven experimentally. Tie the aim of behavior to a goal: if a man intends to gain politcal power, is he acting rationally? The cost of information leads some to make errors. Bracket off what it can and cannot do. Rational behavior needs a predictable social order.

The Structure of the Model:

Downs assumes that every government seeks to maximize political support. Constraints exist not as socially constructed expressions of public will but as politically expedient rules both parties possess an interest in following. Predictive model illuminates how an efficient government would behave.

MAPSS Lecture Notes: Rational Choice

What Rational Choice Isn't:

There are four major criticisms, or at least frequent ones, levied at the rational choice perspective by other social science disciplines: It is empirically implausible, that is it is not a thinly accurate prediction of how people behave. Rational choice cannot avoid charges of being so simplistic as it is little more than psychological reductivism. Some of the loudest proponents of rational choice happen to be free market champions, drawing suspicion in some quarters. And, finally, the same old crowd looking for ethnocentrism everywhere finds another witch to burn here.

The Roots of Rational Choice:

Rational choice took up the Enlightenment's challenge to try and understand the world around us. The social behaviors, structures, and phenomena existing around us arose from reasons comprehensible to human thought. Agentic understanding of the world where individual decisions of individual men and women create the world we inhabit. If the historical narrative is to shows a mirror to the past and representd the complexity of what we see, then rational choice uses a magnifying glass to see past myths and macronarratives to illuminate the altering microdynamics among men and women and how they order their incentives. Inspired by Newtonian motion, rational choicers erected a positivist model of social behavior that sought laws explaining behaviors that provided observers a form of predictive control. People are individually complex, but an informed observer can gauge their actions because institutions shape the choices available for their behavior. The goal of rational choice is to describe facts to allow a greater deal of individual freedom.

Rational choice is not laissez-faire, but many of its proponents can convincingly argue that men are smart enough to beat any regulatory regime. If one can incentivize properly and provide the right kind of information, then one can create a framework to aid people in making descisons.

A Rational View of Society:

Rational agents employ instrumental reasoning to select the best means for attaining their ends. Individual behavior, then, is purposeful or goal-oriented. It does not necessarily follow that people will pursue rational ends, only that the processes they follow for attaining them will be rational. Means are determined by a rational cost/benefit calculus. Agents always possess limited information and imperfect rationality. Rationalisty applied to the means to an end means an agent to is living in such a way, to the best of his knowledge, that is using the least possible input of his scarce resources per unit of valued output. We are not the mindless automatons of caricacature nor omniscient beings. Rational choice focuses on men and women forced to act with limited information and imperfect ratioanlity and an imperfect capacity to see the consequences of their actions.

Individuals are rational in that they are constrained utility seekers and logical and self-correcting in the means they employ are sensitive to changing incentives and constraints or improved information. To measure behavior, rational choicers have to exaggerate certain elements that provide traction as empircally numbered or accurate descriptions. In this sense, it is a generalizing, abstract, and stipulating perspective. Alterations in individual behavior are understood as reactions to evolving incentives and constraints, improved information and millions of other decisions.

Methodological Assumptions:

Rational choicers assign individuals agency in decision-making. The choices available exist only in contexts and any examination of the past requires serious historical work. Supra-individualism, that is groups, are combinational bodies or fictious entities reificated by privileged individuals to compel others to limit the choices available for action. Units of analysis, of course, can be larger than the individual and usually are for any ambitious scholar. One can gain predictive control by treating supra-individual actors as is if they were individual agents giving purposeful action to aims.

Postivie Implications:

There exists a methodology to allow one to create a world to maximize opportunities for rational cooperation through the use of intelligently-designed institutional schemes where private vices lead to public benefits and the aggregate welfare is improved as if by an invisible hand. It follows that thinkers can identify and remove any political, social, or economic impediments that make utility-promoting behaviors more difficult to pursue.

Negative Implications:

We are better positions to recognize where rationality breaks down and point out schemes where even the best designed institutional schemes will not lead to the best outcomes. Rational choice helps overcome issues like freerinding on public goods by devising rational institutions to secure the best outcome for all. It also helps understand the nature of collective action better, that is, why groups do not spontaneously appear.

Inventives and Constraints:

We can think of social problems through inventives and constraints, for instance, we can use the Leviathan model of a new sovereign authority to implement institutions. Or we can leave a small footprint through bottom up methodsm such as enhancing private liabilities so as to remedy destructive social behavior. You can create a new institutional scheme to solve political disputes or create new laws or tax breaks to easier secure justice. Informal sanctioning and norms can also be better understood as the product of rational action.

Methodological Preferences:

Emperical as well as formal, that is the use of mathematics to test abstract models. Its databases include quantifiable data .

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.

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.