Meaning and Representation in History: v. 7 (Making Sense of History)

Philosophy of history

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Instead, human history, at virtually every scale, appears to embody a large degree of contingency and multiple pathways of development. For example, Michael Mann's sociology of early agrarian civilizations , De Vries and Goudsblom's efforts at global environmental history , and Jared Diamond's treatment of disease and warfare offer examples of scholars who attempt to explain some large features of human history on the basis of a few common human circumstances: The challenge for macro-history is to preserve the discipline of empirical evaluation for the large hypotheses that are put forward.

Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or direction in history a, b, Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom. Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or successors. And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history.

Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical O'Brien For example, Napoleon's conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history's work by establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state.

Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history's work is finished: It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not the indefensible exercise of speculative philosophical reasoning that analytic philosophers sometimes paint it. His philosophical approach is not based solely on foundational apriori reasoning, and many of his interpretations of concrete historical developments are quite insightful. His prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the rational within the real—not to impose the rational upon the real.

His approach is neither purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to discover within the best historical knowledge of his time, an underlying rational principle that can be philosophically articulated Avineri Another important strand of continental philosophy of history proposes to apply hermeneutics to problems of historical interpretation. This approach focuses on the meaning of the actions and intentions of historical individuals rather than historical wholes. This tradition derives from the tradition of scholarly Biblical interpretation.

Hermeneutic scholars emphasized the linguistic and symbolic core of human interactions and maintained that the techniques that had been developed for the purpose of interpreting texts could also be employed to interpret symbolic human actions and products. Wilhelm Dilthey maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal explanation of non-intensional events , , Human life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and symbolic expressions.

Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of hermeneutics—the interpretation of meaningful texts—are suited to the interpretation of human action and history. The method of verstehen understanding makes a methodology of this approach; it invites the thinker to engage in an active construction of the meanings and intentions of the actors from their point of view Outhwaite This line of interpretation of human history found expression in the twentieth-century philosophical writings of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault.

This tradition approaches the philosophy of history from the perspective of meaning and language. It argues that historical knowledge depends upon interpretation of meaningful human actions and practices. Historians should probe historical events and actions in order to discover the interconnections of meaning and symbolic interaction that human actions have created Sherratt The hermeneutic tradition took an important new turn in the mid-twentieth century, as philosophers attempted to make sense of modern historical developments including war, ethnic and national hatred, and holocaust.

Narratives of progress were no longer compelling, following the terrible events of the first half of the twentieth century. Paul Ricoeur draws out the parallels between personal memory, cultural memory, and history Dominick LaCapra brings the tools of interpretation theory and critical theory to bear on his treatment of the representation of the trauma of the Holocaust , This is a theme that has been taken up by contemporary historians, for example, by Michael Kammen in his treatment of public remembrance of the American Civil War Memory and the representation of the past play a key role in the formation of racial and national identities; numerous twentieth-century philosophers have noted the degree of subjectivity and construction that are inherent in the national memories represented in a group's telling of its history.

Although not himself falling within the continental lineage, R. Collingwood's philosophy of history falls within the general framework of hermeneutic philosophy of history Collingwood focuses on the question of how to specify the content of history. He argues that history is constituted by human actions. He presents the idea of re-enactment as a solution to the problem of knowledge of the past from the point of view of the present. The past is accessible to historians in the present, because it is open to them to re-enact important historical moments through imaginative reconstruction of the actors' states of mind and intentions.

He describes this activity of re-enactment in the context of the historical problem of understanding Plato's meanings as a philosopher or Caesar's intentions as a ruler:. The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important contributions to the philosophy of history that are largely independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of history mentioned here.

His major compendium, with Brunner and Conze, of the history of concepts of history in the German-speaking world is one of the major expressions of this work Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck Koselleck believes there are three key tasks for the metahistorian or philosopher: Koselleck represents these conceptual oppositions as representing conditions of possibility of any representation of history Bouton In order to represent history it is necessary to make use of a vocabulary that distinguishes the things we need to talk about; and historical concepts permit these identifications.

This in turn requires both conceptual and historical treatment: Further, Bouton argues that Koselleck also brings a critical perspective to the concepts that he discusses: To what extent do these particular concepts work well to characterize history? What this amounts to is the idea that history is the result of conceptualization of the past on the part of the people who tell it—professional historians, politicians, partisans, and ordinary citizens. It is therefore an important, even crucial, task to investigate the historical concepts that have been used to characterize the past.

This approach might seem to fall within the larger field of intellectual history; but Koselleck and other exponents believe that the historical concepts in use actually play a role as well in the concrete historical developments that occur within a period. Koselleck is concerned to uncover the logic and semantics of the concepts that have been used to describe historical events and processes; and he is interested in the historical evolution of some of those concepts over time.

In this latter interest his definition of the question parallels that of the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and J. Whatmore and Young provide extensive and useful accounts of each of the positions mentioned here. Rather, he looks at historical concepts on a spectrum of abstraction, from relatively close to events the French Revolution to more abstract revolutionary change.

Moreover, he makes rigorous attempts to discover the meanings and uses of these concepts in their historical contexts. It has to do with meanings in history, but it is neither teleological nor hermeneutic. It takes seriously the obligation of the historian excavate the historical facts with scrupulous rigor, but it is not empiricist or reductionist. Koselleck provides an innovative and constructive way of formulating the problem of historical knowledge. The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American philosophy have also devoted occasional attention to history.

Philosophers in this tradition have avoided the questions of speculative philosophy of history and have instead raised questions about the logic and epistemology of historical knowledge. David Hume's empiricism cast a dominant key for almost all subsequent Anglo-American philosophy, and this influence extends to the interpretation of human behavior and the human sciences.

Hume wrote a widely read history of England — His interpretation of history was based on the assumption of ordinary actions, motives, and causes, with no sympathy for theological interpretations of the past. His philosophical view of history was premised on the idea that explanations of the past can be based on the assumption of a fixed human nature. This approach involves the application of the methods and tools of analytic philosophy to the special problems that arise in the pursuit of historical explanations and historical knowledge Gardiner Here the interest is in the characteristics of historical knowledge: Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical and scientific status of historical knowledge, and attempted to understand this claim along the lines of the scientific standing of the natural sciences Nagel Philosophers in the analytic tradition are deeply skeptical about the power of non-empirical reason to arrive at substantive conclusions about the structure of the world—including human history.

So analytic philosophers of history have had little interest in the large questions about the meaning and structure of history considered above. The practitioners of speculative philosophy of history, on the other hand, are convinced of the power of philosophical thought to reason through to a foundational understanding of history, and would be impatient with a call for a purely empirical and conceptual approach to the subject. The book attempts to treat both major questions driving much of the philosophy of history: An Oxford philosopher trained in modern philosophy, Walsh was strongly influenced by Collingwood and was well aware of the European idealist tradition of philosophical thinking about history, including Rickert, Dilthey, and Croce, and he treats this tradition in a serious way.

He advances the view that the historian is presented with a number of events, actions, and developments during a period. How do they hang together? Walsh fundamentally accepts Collingwood's most basic premise: So the key intellectual task for the historian, on this approach, is to reconstruct the reasons or motives that actors had at various points in history and perhaps the conditions that led them to have these reasons and motives.

This means that the tools of interpretation of meanings and reasons are crucial for the historian—much as the hermeneutic philosophers in the German tradition had argued. Walsh suggests that the philosophical content of the philosophy of history falls naturally into two different sorts of inquiry, parallel to the distinction between philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. The first has to do with metaphysical questions about the reality of history as a whole; the latter has to do with the epistemic issues that arise in the pursuit and formulation of knowledge of history.

And he attempts to formulate a view of what the key questions are for each approach. Speculative philosophy of history asks about the meaning and purpose of the historical process. Hempel's general theory of scientific explanation held that all scientific explanations require subsumption under general laws. Hempel considered historical explanation as an apparent exception to the covering-law model and attempted to show the suitability of the covering-law model even to this special case. He argued that valid historical explanations too must invoke general laws.

The covering-law approach to historical explanation was supported by other analytical philosophers of science, including Ernest Nagel Hempel's essay provoked a prolonged controversy between supporters who cited generalizations about human behavior as the relevant general laws, and critics who argued that historical explanations are more akin to explanations of individual behavior, based on interpretation that makes the outcome comprehensible. Donagan and others pointed out the difficulty that many social explanations depend on probabilistic regularities rather than universal laws.

The most fundamental objections, however, are these: These include the processes of reasoning through which we understand individual actions—analogous to the methods of verstehen and the interpretation of rational behavior mentioned above Dray A careful re-reading of these debates over the covering-law model in history suggests that the debate took place largely because of the erroneous assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of the regulative logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning to a few clear examples of explanation in a few natural sciences.

This approach was a deeply impoverished one, and handicapped from the start in its ability to pose genuinely important questions about the nature of history and historical knowledge. Explanation of human actions and outcomes should not be understood along the lines of an explanation of why radiators burst when the temperature falls below zero degrees centigrade. The insistence on naturalistic models for social and historical research leads easily to a presumption in favor of the covering-law model of explanation, but this presumption is misleading. Or are forms of bias, omission, selection, and interpretation such as to make all historical representations dependent on the perspective of the individual historian?

Does the fact that human actions are value-laden make it impossible for the historian to provide a non-value-laden account of those actions? This topic divides into several different problems, as noted by John Passmore The most studied of these within the analytic tradition is that of the value-ladenness of social action. Second is the possibility that the historian's interpretations are themselves value-laden—raising the question of the capacity for objectivity or neutrality of the historian herself.

Does the intellectual have the ability to investigate the world without regard to the biases that are built into her political or ethical beliefs, her ideology, or her commitments to a class or a social group? And third is the question of the objectivity of the historical circumstances themselves. Is there a fixed historical reality, independent from later representations of the facts?

There are solutions to each of these problems that are highly consonant with the philosophical assumptions of the analytic tradition. There is no fundamental difficulty in reconciling the idea of a researcher with one set of religious values, who nonetheless carefully traces out the religious values of a historical actor possessing radically different values. This research can be done badly, of course; but there is no inherent epistemic barrier that makes it impossible for the researcher to examine the body of statements, behaviors, and contemporary cultural institutions corresponding to the other, and to come to a justified representation of the other.

One need not share the values or worldview of a sans-culotte , in order to arrive at a justified appraisal of those values and worldview. This leads us to a resolution of the second issue as well—the possibility of neutrality on the part of the researcher. The set of epistemic values that we impart to scientists and historians include the value of intellectual discipline and a willingness to subject their hypotheses to the test of uncomfortable facts. Once again, review of the history of science and historical writing makes it apparent that this intellectual value has effect.

There are plentiful examples of scientists and historians whose conclusions are guided by their interrogation of the evidence rather than their ideological presuppositions. Objectivity in pursuit of truth is itself a value, and one that can be followed. Finally, on the question of the objectivity of the past: Is there a basis for saying that events or circumstances in the past have objective, fixed characteristics that are independent from our representation of those events?

Is there a representation-independent reality underlying the large historical structures to which historians commonly refer the Roman Empire, the Great Wall of China, the imperial administration of the Qianlong Emperor? We can work our way carefully through this issue, by recognizing a distinction between the objectivity of past events, actions and circumstances, the objectivity of the contemporary facts that resulted from these past events, and the objectivity and fixity of large historical entities.

The past occurred in precisely the way that it did—agents acted, droughts occurred, armies were defeated, new technologies were invented. These occurrences left traces of varying degrees of information richness; and these traces give us a rational basis for arriving at beliefs about the occurrences of the past. In each of these instances the noun's referent is an interpretive construction by historical actors and historians, and one that may be undone by future historians.

The underlying facts of behavior, and their historical traces, remain; but the knitting-together of these facts into a large historical event does not constitute an objective historical entity. A third important set of issues that received attention from analytic philosophers concerned the role of causal ascriptions in historical explanations. Is causation established by discovering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Can we identify causal connections among historical events by tracing a series of causal mechanisms linking one to the next? This topic raises the related problem of determinism in history: Was the fall of the Roman Empire inevitable, given the configuration of military and material circumstances prior to the crucial events?

Analytic philosophers of history most commonly approached these issues on the basis of a theory of causation drawn from positivist philosophy of science. This theory is ultimately grounded in Humean assumptions about causation: So analytic philosophers were drawn to the covering-law model of explanation, because it appeared to provide a basis for asserting historical causation.

As noted above, this approach to causal explanation is fatally flawed in the social sciences, because universal causal regularities among social phenomena are unavailable. So it is necessary either to arrive at other interpretations of causality or to abandon the language of causality. And it is evident that there are causal circumstances in which no single factor is necessary for the occurrence of the effect; the outcome may be overdetermined by multiple independent factors. The convergence of reasons and causes in historical processes is helpful in this context, because historical causes are frequently the effect of deliberate human action Davidson So specifying the reason for the action is simultaneously identifying a part of the cause of the consequences of the action.

It is often justifiable to identify a concrete action as the cause of a particular event a circumstance that was sufficient in the existing circumstances to bring about the outcome , and it is feasible to provide a convincing interpretation of the reasons that led the actor to carry out the action. What analytic philosophers of the s did not come to, but what is crucial for current understanding of historical causality, is the feasibility of tracing causal mechanisms through a complex series of events causal realism.

Historical narratives often take the form of an account of a series of events, each of which was a causal condition or trigger for later events. English-speaking philosophy of history shifted significantly in the s, beginning with the publication of Hayden White's Metahistory and Louis Mink's writings of the same period ; Mink et al. Whereas analytic philosophy of history had emphasized scientific analogies for historical knowledge and advanced the goals of verifiability and generalizability in historical knowledge, English-speaking philosophers in the s and s were increasingly influenced by hermeneutic philosophy, post-modernism, and French literary theory Rorty Affinities with literature and anthropology came to eclipse examples from the natural sciences as guides for representing historical knowledge and historical understanding.

Philosophy of history - Wikipedia

The richness and texture of the historical narrative came in for greater attention than the attempt to provide causal explanations of historical outcomes. Frank Ankersmit captured many of these themes in his treatment of historical narrative ; Ankersmit and Kellner ; see also Berkhofer It emphasizes historical narrative rather than historical causation. It is intellectually closer to the hermeneutic tradition than to the positivism that underlay the analytic philosophy of history of the s.

It highlights features of subjectivity and multiple interpretation over those of objectivity, truth, and correspondence to the facts. Another important strand in this approach to the philosophy of history is a clear theoretical preference for the historicist rather than the universalist position on the status of human nature—Herder rather than Vico. The prevalent perspective holds that human consciousness is itself a historical product, and that it is an important part of the historian's work to piece together the mentality and assumptions of actors in the past Pompa Significantly, contemporary historians such as Robert Darnton have turned to the tools of ethnography to permit this sort of discovery Another important strand of thinking within analytic philosophy has focused attention on historical ontology Hacking , Little The topic of historical ontology is important, both for philosophers and for practicing historians.

Ontology has to do with the question, what kinds of things do we need to postulate in a given realm? Historical ontology poses this question with regard to the realities of the past. Or should we treat these ideas in a purely nominalistic way, treating them as convenient ways of aggregating complex patterns of social action and knowledge by large numbers of social actors in a time and place? Are there social kinds that recur in history, or is each historical formation unique in important ways?

These are all questions of ontology, and the answers we give to them will have important consequences for how we conceptualize and explain the past.

The Engaged Historian

We should begin by asking the basic question: In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices. So one task we always have in considering an expert activity is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing. Several handbooks contain a wealth of recent writings on various aspects of historiography; Tucker , Bentley , Breisach Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those claims based on the reasoning they present.

So a major aspect of the study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by standards of scientific rationality. Simon Schama challenges some of these ideas in Dead Certainties Schama The historiographer has a related task: There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch.

Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian's work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or school. What models of explanation?

What paradigm of presentation? What standards of style and rhetoric? Historiography becomes itself historical when we recognize that these frameworks of assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself an interesting subject. How did historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and presentation of history? Under this rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German romanticism.

Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient historians fall in this category Momigliano In a nutshell, Momigliano is looking at the several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set of normative practices that can be dissected and understood in their specificity and their cultural contexts. A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more present-oriented and methodological. It involves the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians.

How do contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the past? Here we can reflect upon the historiographical challenges that confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy in the s and s Huang , or the historiographical issues raised in Robert Darnton's telling of the Great Cat Massacre Darnton Sometimes these issues have to do with the scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical records for example, the fact that much of what Huang refers to about the village economy of North China was gathered by the research teams of the occupying Japanese army.

Sometimes they have to do with the difficulty of interpreting historical sources for example, the unavoidable necessity Darnton faced of providing meaningful interpretation of a range of documented events that appear fundamentally irrational. This has led to a tendency to look at other countries' development as non-standard or stunted. So global history is, in part, a framework within which the historian avoids privileging one regional center as primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong makes this point very strongly in China Transformed Wong Second is the related fact that when Western historical thinkers—for example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu—have turned their attention to Asia, they have often engaged in a high degree of stereotyping without much factual historical knowledge.

The ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation, and Chinese stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the intricate and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of thought. This is one of the points of Edward Said's critique of orientalism Said So a historiography that takes global diversity seriously should be expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more open to discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in the experiences of India, China, Indochina, the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Variation and complexity are what we should expect, not stereotyped simplicity. A global history needs to free itself from Eurocentrism. This step away from Eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically interesting. So a global history ought to be global and trans-national in its selection of topics—even while recognizing the fact that all historical research is selective. A globally oriented historian will recognize that the political systems of classical India are as interesting and complex as the organization of the Roman Republic.

An important current underlying much work in global history is the reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and nation building in the s and s. So there was a specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those societies—in order to better govern them and exploit them. And post-colonial states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global historiography in their own universities and knowledge systems, in order to better understand and better critique the forming relations of the past.

A final way in which history needs to become global is to incorporate the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in non-western countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world developments. Indian and Chinese historians have their own intellectual traditions in conducting historical research and explanation; a global history is one that pays attention to the insights and arguments of these traditions.

So global historiography has to do with a broadened definition of the arena of historical change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas; a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of institutions and systems in many parts of the world; a recognition of the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents for at least four centuries; and a recognition of the complexity and distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography.

Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some of these issues Sachsenmaier He wants to take this idea seriously and try to discover some of the implications of different national traditions of academic historiography. As should be clear from these remarks, there is a degree of overlap between historiography and the philosophy of history in the fact that both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are used in various historical traditions.

That said, historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics of research and writing than is the philosophy of history. There is another current of thinking about the philosophy of history that deserves more attention from philosophers than it has so far received. It is the work of philosophically minded historians and historical social scientists treating familiar but badly understood historical concepts: These writings represent a middle-level approach to issues having to do with the logic of historical discourse.

This aspect of current philosophy of history brings the discipline into close relation to the philosophy of the special sciences biology, sociology, archaeology. Philosophically reflective historians ask critical questions about the concepts and assumptions that are often brought into historical thinking, and they attempt to provide more adequate explication of these concepts given their own encounters with the challenges of historical research and historical explanation.

Charles Tilly challenges a common assumption that causal reasoning depends on identifying background causal regularities; he argues instead for an approach to causal reasoning that emphasizes the role of concrete causal mechanisms McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly Simon Schama questions the concept of an objective historical narrative that serves to capture the true state of affairs about even fairly simple historical occurrences Charles Sabel casts doubt on the idea of fixed patterns of historical development, arguing that there were alternative pathways available even within the classic case of economic development in western Europe Sabel and Zeitlin As these examples illustrate, there is ample room for productive exchange between philosophers with an interest in the nature of history and the historians and social scientists who have reflected deeply on the complexities of the concepts and assumptions we use in historical analysis.

It may be useful to close with a sketch of a possible framework for an updated philosophy of history. Any area of philosophy is driven by a few central puzzles. In the area of the philosophy of history, the most fundamental questions remain unresolved: Can we provide a conception of historical and social entities that avoids the error of reification but gives some credible reality to the entities that are postulated? Historical causation is not analogous to natural necessity in the domain of physical causation, because there are no fixed laws that govern historical events.

So we need to provide an account of the nature of the causal powers that historical factors are postulated to have. Is it possible to arrive at justified interpretations of long-dead actors, their mentalities and their actions? How does this phenomenological reality play into the account of historical causation? Or does all historical knowledge remain permanently questionable? A new philosophy of history will shed light on these fundamental issues. It will engage with the hermeneutic and narrativist currents that have been important in the continental tradition and have arisen in recent years in Anglo-American philosophy.

It will incorporate the rigorous epistemic emphasis that is associated with analytic philosophy of history, but will separate itself from the restrictive assumptions of positivism. A new philosophy of history will grapple with issues of social explanation that have been so important for the current generation of social-science historians and will incorporate the best current understandings of the philosophy of social science about social ontology and explanation.

A handful of ontological assumptions can be offered. History consists of human actions within humanly embodied institutions and structures. There is no super-human agency in history. There is no super-human meaning or progress in history; there is only a series of events and processes driven by concrete causal processes and individual actions. Following Davidson and Taylor , there is no inconsistency between reasons and causes, understanding and explanation. Historical explanation depends on both causal-structural reasoning and interpretation of actions and intentions; so it is both causal and hermeneutic.

There are no causal laws or universal generalizations within human affairs. However, there is such a thing as social causation, proceeding through the workings of human agency and the constraints of institutions and structures. A legitimate historiographical goal is to identify causal mechanisms within historical processes, and these mechanisms invariably depend on the actions of historical actors situated within concrete social relations. Likewise, a basic epistemology of historical knowledge can be described.

Historical knowledge depends on ordinary procedures of empirical investigation, and the justification of historical claims depends on providing convincing demonstration of the empirical evidence that exists to support or invalidate the claim. There is such a thing as historical objectivity, in the sense that historians are capable of engaging in good-faith interrogation of the evidence in constructing their theories of the past. But this should not be understood to imply that there is one uniquely true interpretation of historical processes and events.

Rather, there is a perfectly ordinary sense in which historical interpretations are underdetermined by the facts, and there are multiple legitimate historical questions to pose about the same body of evidence. Historical narratives have a substantial interpretive component, and involve substantial construction of the past.

Finally, a new philosophy of history will be sensitive to the variety of forms of presentation of historical knowledge. The discipline of history consists of many threads, including causal explanation, material description, and narrative interpretation of human action. Historical narrative itself has several aspects: But even more importantly, not all historical knowledge is expressed in narratives. Rather, there is a range of cognitive structures through which historical knowledge is expressed, from detailed measurement of historical standards of living, to causal arguments about population change, to comparative historical accounts of similar processes in different historical settings.

A new philosophy of history will take the measure of synchronous historical writing; historical writing that conveys a changing set of economic or structural circumstances; writing that observes the changing characteristics of a set of institutions; writing that records and analyzes a changing set of beliefs and attitudes in a population; and many other varieties as well.

These are important features of the structure of historical knowledge, not simply aspects of the rhetoric of historical writing. History and its representation 1. Continental philosophy of history 2. Anglo-American philosophy of history 3. Historiography and the philosophy of history 5. Topics from the historians 6. History and its representation What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian's work? Continental philosophy of history The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European philosophy.

He describes this activity of re-enactment in the context of the historical problem of understanding Plato's meanings as a philosopher or Caesar's intentions as a ruler: This re-enactment is only accomplished, in the case of Plato and Caesar respectively, so far as the historian brings to bear on the problem all the powers of his own mind and all his knowledge of philosophy and politics. It is not a passive surrender to the spell of another's mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking.

Anglo-American philosophy of history The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American philosophy have also devoted occasional attention to history. So global historiography has to do with a broadened definition of the arena of historical change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas; a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of institutions and systems in many parts of the world; a recognition of the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents for at least four centuries; and a recognition of the complexity and distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some of these issues Sachsenmaier Topics from the historians There is another current of thinking about the philosophy of history that deserves more attention from philosophers than it has so far received.

Rethinking the philosophy of history It may be useful to close with a sketch of a possible framework for an updated philosophy of history. Bibliography Abbott, Andrew Delano, Chicago sociology at one hundred , Chicago, IL: The clash of both was "superated" in the synthesis , a conjunction that conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it.

As Marx famously explained afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI 's monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. Hegel thought that reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History.

Through labour , man transformed nature so he could recognize himself in it; he made it his "home. Roads, fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the result of this spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social progress as the result of the labour of reason in history. However, this dialectical reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was also conceived of as constantly conflicting: Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman. One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be.

Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Thus, philosophy was to explain Geschichte history afterward.

Philosophy is always late, it is only an interpretation of what is rational in the real—and, according to Hegel, only what is recognized as rational is real. This idealist understanding of philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx 's 11th thesis on Feuerbach Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular conception in the nineteenth century.

Auguste Comte 's — positivist conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by modern science, was one of the most influential doctrines of progress. The Whig interpretation of history , as it was later called, associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain , such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay , gives an example of such influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science.

Maine described the direction of progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice. The publication of Darwin 's The Origin of Species in introduced human evolution. However, it was quickly transposed from its original biological field to the social field, in " social Darwinism " theories. Herbert Spencer , who coined the term " survival of the fittest ", or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works, which would be later interpreted as social Darwinism.

These nineteenth-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilisation with progress. Ernst Haeckel formulated his recapitulation theory in , which stated that " ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ": Hence, a child goes through all the steps from primitive society to modern society.

This was later discredited. Progress was not necessarily, however, positive. Arthur Gobineau 's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races —55 was a decadent description of the evolution of the " Aryan race " which was disappearing through miscegenation. Gobineau's works had a large popularity in the so-called scientific racism theories that developed during the New Imperialism period.

After the first world war , and even before Herbert Butterfield — harshly criticized it, the Whig interpretation had gone out of style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of linear progress. However, the notion itself didn't completely disappear. The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal democracies as the single accredited political system and even modality of human consciousness would represent the " End of History ".

Fukuyama's work stems from an Kojevian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Unlike Maurice Godelier who interprets history as a process of transformation, Tim Ingold suggests that history is a movement of autopoiesis [17]. A key component to making sense of all of this is to simply recognize that all these issues in social evolution merely serve to support the suggestion that how one considers the nature of history will impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history.

The critical under-explored question is less about history as content and more about history as process. In Steven Pinker wrote a history of violence and humanity from an evolutionary perspective in which he shows that violence has declined statistically over time. After Hegel, who insisted on the role of " great men " in history, with his famous statement about Napoleon , "I saw the Spirit on his horse", Thomas Carlyle argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, heroes , such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great , writing that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness. Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare in the late twentieth century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. Danto, for example, wrote of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his definition to include social individuals, defined as "individuals we may provisionally characterize as containing individual human beings amongst their parts.

Examples of social individuals might be social classes [ Dray, Rainbow-Bridge Book Co. For example, to read about what is known today as the " Migrations Period ," consult the biography of Attila the Hun. After Marx 's conception of a materialist history based on the class struggle , which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the unfolding of history, Herbert Spencer wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.

The Annales School , founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch , were a major landmark on the shift from a history centered on individual subjects to studies concentrating in geography , economics, demography , and other social forces. There is disagreement about the extent to which history is ultimately deterministic see historical determinism. Some argue that geography see geographic determinism , economic systems see economic determinism , or culture see cultural determinism prescribe "the iron laws of history" that decide what is to happen.

Others see history as a long line of acts and accidents, big and small, each playing out its consequences until that process gets interrupted by the next. It should be noted that even determinists do not rule that, from time to time, certain cataclysmic events occur to change course of history. Their main point is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large shocks like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary effects on the evolution of the society.

Karl Marx is, perhaps, the most famous of the exponents of economic determinism. For him social institutions like political system, religion and culture were merely by-products of the basic economic system see Base and superstructure. However, even he did not see history as completely deterministic. His essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.

Theodicy claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, given by a superior power. However, this transcendent teleological sense can be thought as immanent to human history itself.

Hegel probably represents the epitome of teleological philosophy of history. Thinkers such as Nietzsche , Michel Foucault , Althusser , or Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales School had demonstrated. Schools of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they saw, and see, progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled see above.

History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist , and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward " civilization ", and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the " End of History ".

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In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy , he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality. A classic example of history being written by the victors—or more precisely, by the survivors [21] —would be the scarcity of unbiased information that has survived to the present about the Carthaginians. Roman historians left tales of cruelty and human sacrifice practiced by their longtime enemies; however no Carthaginian was left alive to give their side of the story.

Similarly, we only have the Christian side of how Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe. However, we know very little about other European religions, such as Paganism. In many respects, the head of state may be guilty of cruelties or even simply a different way of doing things. In some societies, however, to speak of or write critically of rulers can amount to conviction of treason and death. As such, in many ways, what is left as the "official record" of events is oft influenced by one's desire to avoid exile or execution.

However, "losers" in certain time periods often have more of an impetus than the "winners" to write histories that comfort themselves and justify their own behavior. Confederate generals such as Lee and Jackson are generally held in higher esteem than their Union counterparts. Also, despite "losing" the Vietnam War , the United States produces more scholarship on the war than any other country, including Vietnam.

As is true of pre-Columbian populations of America , the historical record of America being "discovered" by Europeans is now sometimes presented as a history of invasion, exploitation and dominance of a people who had been there before the Europeans. This reinterpretation of the historical record is called historical revisionism , which can take the form of negationism , which is the denial of genocides and crimes against humanity. The revision of previously accepted historical accounts is a constant process in which "today's winners are tomorrow's losers", and the rise and fall of present institutions and movements influence the way historians see the past.

Thus, in contradiction with the February 23, law on colonialism , voted by the UMP conservative party, historian Benjamin Stora notes that:. As Algerians do not appear in their "indigenous" conditions and their sub-citizens status, as the history of nationalist movement is never evoqued, as none of the great figures of the resistance — Messali Hadj , Ferhat Abbas — emerge nor retain attention, in one word, as no one explains to students what has been colonisation, we make them unable to understand why the decolonisation took place.

The historico-political discourse analyzed by Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended —76 considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized under the name of " race struggle "—however, the meaning of "race" was different from today's biological notion, being closer to the sense of "nation" distinct from nation-states ; its signification is here closer to "people". Boulainvilliers , for example, was an exponent of nobility rights. He claimed that the French nobility were the racial descendants of the Franks who invaded France while the Third Estate was descended from the conquered Gauls , and had right to power by virtue of right of conquest.

He used this approach to formulate a historical thesis of the course of French political history—a critique of both the monarchy and the Third Estate.

Contemplating Historical Consciousness

Foucault regarded him as the founder of the historico-political discourse as political weapon. In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle against the monarchy—cf. Edward Coke or John Lilburne. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, this discourse was incorporated by racialist biologists and eugenicists , who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a " state racism " Nazism.

According to Foucault, Marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of " class struggle ", defined by socially structured position: This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of Foucault's thought: Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economical infrastructure , but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces—which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies.

Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth: History itself, which was traditionally the sovereign's science, the legend of his glorious feats and monument building,he the sovereign built monuments,fought in wars and claims victory on behalf of himself which ultimately became the discourse of the people modern population , a political stake.

The subject is not any more a neutral arbitrator , judge, or legislator , as in Solon 's or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, what became the " historical subject " must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried blood", the multiple contingencies from which a fragile rationality temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared to the sophist discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with Machiavelli 's or Hobbes 's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the Sovereign is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy.

Since Plato 's Republic , civic education and instruction has had a central role in politics and the constitution of a common identity. History has thus sometimes become the target of propaganda , for example in historical revisionist attempts. Plato's insistence on the importance of education was relayed by Rousseau's Emile: The creation of modern education systems, instrumental in the construction of nation-states , also passed by the elaboration of a common, national history.

History textbooks are one of the many ways through which this common history was transmitted. Le Tour de France par deux enfants , for example, was the Third Republic 's classic textbook for elementary school: In most societies, schools and curricula are controlled by governments. As such, there is always an opportunity for governments to impose. Granted, often governments in free societies serve to protect freedoms, check hate speech , and breaches of constitutional rights; but the power itself to impose is available to use the education system to influence thought of malleable minds, positively or negatively, towards truth or towards a version of truth.

A recent example of the fragility of government involvement with history textbooks was the Japanese history textbook controversies. A current popular conception considers the value of narrative in the writing and experience of history. Gallie , and Hayden White. In spite of this, most modern historians, such as Barbara Tuchman or David McCullough , consider narrative writing important to their approaches.

The theory of narrated history or historicized narrative holds that the structure of lived experience, and such experience narrated in both fictional and non-fictional works literature and historiography have in common the figuration of "temporal experience. Louis Mink writes that, "the significance of past occurrences is understandable only as they are locatable in the ensemble of interrelationships that can be grasped only in the construction of narrative form" Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson also analyzes historical understanding this way, and writes that "history is inaccessible to us except in textual form Narrative and causal approaches to history have often been contrasted or, even, opposed to one another, yet they can also be viewed as complementary.

Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions.

For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history: In his "Society must be Defended", Michel Foucault posited that the victors of a social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda , which may go so far as historical revisionism. See Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse above. Nations adopting such an approach would likely fashion a "universal" theory of history, a manifest destiny in the US, to support their aims, with a teleological and deterministic philosophy of history used to justify the inevitableness and rightness of their victories.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch 's Culture of Defeat took a completely different view—according to him, defeat is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor—confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back. The concept evokes Hegel's Master—slave dialectics —the master is dependent of the work of the slave, the slave has to take his master's and his own interests into account, gets more knowledge and more insight as the master; and in realising that the world around him was created by his own hands he may gain self-consciousness and emancipation.

Philosophy of History

Wolfgang Schivelbusch view includes complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations, from every level of society and sees a need and rise of creativity and various narratives for the defeated. Within a society Walter Benjamin believed that Marxist historians must take a radically different view point from the bourgeois and idealist points of view, in an attempt to create a sort of history from below , which would be able to conceive an alternative conception of history, not based, as in classical historical studies, on the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty —an approach that would invariably adhere to major states the victors' points of view.

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur asked instead for a plurality in history writing. We enchain, abandon, and resume several histories, much as a chess player who plays several games at once, renewing now this one, now the another" History and Truth George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a fictional account of the manipulation of the historical record for nationalist aims and manipulation of power.

To some degree, all nations are active in the promotion of such "national stories", with ethnicity, nationalism, gender, power, heroic figures, class considerations and important national events and trends all clashing and competing within the narrative.

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