Showing papers in "History and Theory in 1979"

In Defense of Presentism

Abstract: L. Pearce Williams was so irate over Joseph Agassi's book on Michael Faraday and the section on Faraday in a book by William Berkson that he was moved to entitle his review "Should Philosophers Be Allowed to Write History?"' Williams answers the question posed in the title of his review with a resounding "NO!" He complains that philosophers are prone to scandalous carelessness in transcribing quotations and to inaccurate descriptions, not to mention some highly questionable interpretations. They are more interested in plausible connections between ideas than in actual connections, in what they would have thought in the circumstances rather than in what the people concerned actually thought. But worst of anl, philosophers tend to use history of science to illustrate their own views on the nature of science, rather than treating it inductively. Popperians such as Agassi and Berkson view histories of science as good places to introduce conjectures to be refuted by later workers. Imre Lakatos has even gone so far as to state that history of science should be written as it should have taken place, given a particular philosophy of science, rather than as it actually did take place: "One way to indicate discrepancies between history and its rational reconstruction is to relate the internal history in the text, and indicate in the footnotes how actual history 'misbehaved' in the light of its rational reconstruction. " 2 Once Lakatos' position is translated out of the controversial idiom which he invariably prefers, it does not sound so radical and ahistorical. Even so, Williams would surely object. "History," according to Williams, "is an inductive science.' ' I happen to agree with most of Williams' historiographical preferences. I too value accurate quotations, citations, and de-

The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory.

Abstract: restructuring of social and political theory What to say and what to do when mostly your friends love reading? Are you the one that don't have such hobby? So, it's important for you to start having that hobby. You know, reading is not the force. We're sure that reading will lead you to join in better concept of life. Reading will be a positive activity to do every time. And do you know our friends become fans of restructuring of social and political theory as the best book to read? Yeah, it's neither an obligation nor order. It is the referred book that will not make you feel disappointed.

The Handmill gives you the Feudal Lord Marx's Technological Determinism

Abstract: Une defense de l'interpretation de la theorie de l'histoire de Marx comme une theorie de determinisme technologique. Les forces productrices de l'homme, le materialisme historique.

The Treatment of an Historical Source

Abstract: Every historian knows the special excitement that is derived form perusing the documents, the primary sources that are the basic, if incomplete and imperfect, evidence from which he seeks to re-create the past. Yet, immersion in the sources can sometimes present the scholar with a dilemma. On the one hand, manuscripts evidently written by persons long dead exude a sacrosanctity which may make the historian reluctant to question the veracity of their contents, let alone the authenticity of the manuscripts themselves. Yet things can inhibit the historian's giving credence to the substance of the documents, notwithstanding their apparent venerability. If other scholars have already plumbed aspects of the historical subject to which the particular documents refer and have arrived at conclusions seemingly at odds with the testimony presented in those documents, the researcher may hesitate to accept the new evidence at face value. Some time past, in the course of my research, I came across a manuscript letter which posed rather precisely the problem of the hallowed document versus the accepted historical conclusion. The letter contained charges against several of its writer's contemporaries, men whom historians have elevated to considerable prominence in the chronicles of American military and naval affairs. Indeed, the charges were so sensational, so directly contradictory to established historical opinion, that my first impulse was to dismiss them out of hand. Perhaps it was a reverence for manuscripts which gave me pause; or perhaps it was a caution I had once read in a classic work by Marc Bloch. The student of the past, Bloch wrote, must forever be on the lookout for evidence which, though it may not correspond to expectation, may still be valid in some respects. Otherwise, historians would never uncover new and surprising facts. One "could make a long list of facts which scholarly routine first denied because they were surprising."'

American Urban History as an Example of Recent Historiography

Abstract: The past two decades have been extraordinarily rich ones in American historiography. Exciting new social-scientific methodologies, generally quantifying, have combined with more traditional methods and questions to produce an outburst of research in every corner of conventional inquiry, and in a wide variety of newer areas; historical investigations long kept separate by topical and dimensional boundaries have tended to converge before the interdisciplinary power of new approaches. This has produced an international convergence as well, for in its spirit and shape American historiography has come to look a great deal more like European work than was the case a decade or two ago and vice versa, since advanced American work has not been without influence in European scholarship. At the same time, historical work in the United States has remained quite distinctly American, different both in its intellectual character and in the particular ways it has merged traditional and social-scientific approaches. These differences arise both from American social and political life generally and special aspects of academic culture. Most American history, through the latter decades of the nineteenth century, was written by amateurs, who stood within an essentially literary tradition. In this they were not unlike British historians of the period, but there were important differences: the Americans were generally far more concerned with addressing, as historians, the society around them; its nature and progress were for them almost a preoccupation. Far more profoundly idealist and romantic in their sense of historical process, they assumed at the same time a far more pragmatic mission: rather than seeking the meaning of a long and complex history, they sought to provide the appropriate history for a new nation defined, in effect, by the presumed meaning of its democratic ideology and its new republican institutions. This ideological orientation, and sense of mission, persisted even as the nature and organization of historical research changed. American historians

Theology in Droysen's Early Political Historiography: Free Will, Necessity, and the Historian

Abstract: Le probleme de l'histoire politique. Libre arbitre et necessite. La consolation de l'histoire. La prophetie et le changement historique. De la prophetie au programme: l'Etat, l'esprit. Participation et liberte.

Truth and Ideology: Reflections on Mannheim's Paradox

Abstract: The very juxtaposition of the terms "truth" and "ideology" may suggest that they are antagonistic and irreconcilable; and, indeed, when they are treated together it is usually by writers who deplore ideology, alleging that it is a misrepresentation of truth or reality. Often, moreover, this attitude is accompanied by claims that ideology is impractical, absolute, dogmatic, totalitarian, or all of these; and usually there is a plea for the end of ideology in politics, or a prediction that ideology will eventually be overcome. ' My interest in the topic, on the contrary, does not arise from a dislike of ideology as such, though I have objections to the substance of particular ideologies and to the uses to which some ideologies have been put. I do not presuppose that ideologies are inherently evil or dangerous, though I acknowledge the existence of ideologies which I consider to be both. And I do not call for an end to ideology in politics, for I assume that ideologies are an inevitable and even necessary part of modem political life. I am concerned, rather, to analyze the assumption that truth and ideology are antithetical that ideology is an inherently distorted and therefore false system of beliefs and I wish to demonstrate why this assumption is neither necessary nor desirable. The view that ideology is inherently distorted and false is given its most forceful and enduringly influential expression in Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. It is with Mannheim's argument, therefore, that I am mainly concerned, and, in the pages to follow, I recapitulate his position, argue that it is deficient, and offer an alternative to it. Finally, I indicate some possible methodological consequences of the alternative positionconsequences which I believe would significantly enhance the study of ideology.

Disorderly Conduct: Braudel's Mediterranean Satire

Abstract: Two things have been clear about Fernand Braudel's La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l'Vepoque de Philippe II since its publication in 1949; first, that it is a remarkable work of historical scholarship and imagination, destined to become a landmark of twentieth-century historiography; and second, that the work is cast in a form that is both instructive and deeply troubling.' Lucien Febvre's review signalled the entry of La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen into the pantheon of historical classics, an entry that was virtually prenatal since the reputation of the work and its author, at least to the readers of the journal Annales, was established two years before publication, at the time of Braudel's defense of his thesis in the Sorbonne. Febvre, to whom the book is dedicated, used Braudel's text repeatedly to promote the work of the Annales school of historians; it is not surprising to read in his review the terms "une revolu-

Natural Growth and Purposive Development: Vico and Herder

Abstract: To say that human development in history and politics is a complex amalgam of conscious purposes and non-conscious processes, of intended and unintended consequences, of reason and passion, is no doubt true, though not profoundly instructive. Similarly, it may well be true that acts that appear consciously willed are frequently habitual or instinctive, the automatic response to external stimuli or pressures, or the expression of a momentary sensation or feeling and as such comparable to, if not indistinguishable from, modes of causation operative in the non-human world; for they closely resemble the character of unmediated natural processes. But to grant this does not dispose of the question whether forms of human behavior that clearly do involve the mediation of ideas, interests, beliefs, or values are rendered intelligible in terms that are properly located in explanations of unmediated processes. The question presupposes, of course, that mediated sequences are by no means untypical of human actions, and that we think of them as purposive whenever particular ends are consciously chosen and actively pursued. How appropriate, then, is "growth," a term borrowed from a non-normative universe of discourse such as biology, as an explanatory or evaluative category in our understanding of occurrences whose distinctive significance for the most part derives from their conceptual and normative content? In order to explore this question, I shall be concerned with three principal distinctions: (i) The distinction between causality and continuity in nature and causality and continuity in history and human affairs generally which, if it is blurred, is liable (I shall suggest) to confuse action with process, function with purpose, and fact with value. (ii) The distinction between purposive continuity in history and purposive continuity of history, and the problem of mediation which the fusion of freedom and necessity attempts to resolve. (iii) The distinction between continuity and change in the sequence of human events, and the problem posed by the notion of development as

Continual Vision and Cosmopolitan Orthodoxy

Abstract: We all know that technique becomes a way to emblazon the patterns of substance. Literary criticism has told us so. So should it be with the techniques picked up by historians. New quantitative methods may do their part to implement a technocratic society. Quantitative methods rest, though, on logical foundations. Because those foundations develop with their own tempo, and their own relation to the underlying culture, the innovating of particular devices within historical practice can lose touch with fundamental change. Such a change has taken place since 1963, toward liberating inquiry from bounds on its scope. The transit of new techniques into history has itself been one item in this underlying culture, yet it has reflected foundational developments in only a fragmentary way. Three distinct levels of discussion work here. (1) After 1930 a new ideal took hold in scientific thought, identifying sophistication with probabilistic assumptions and with the unprovability of total systems. (2) Coincidentally there spread the concept of a Cosmopolitan-Local dimension in politics, cutting across a supposedly less sophisticated distinction between conservative and liberal. And (3) more specifically, quantitative social scientists developed a set of scaling tLel niques that they often used to identify factions or issue dimensions in politics. Starting in simplistic form in the 1930s, these scaling devices heave necessarily had to cope with the multidiniensional oar compakx arrangements that people make. Sophisticated managers of political scenes can create structures of comprehension that are hardly perceived by local interests or by one-idea politicians. If complex, do such structures then require an appropriate logic? All three of these levels should be affected, in some long run, by foundational developments in modern logic, and especially by a new current that has Romwed front set theory since 1960. Logicians have aimed more and more to evaluate the detailed results of models. They have luxuriated less the mere demonstration of uncertainty and uunprovability. The types of thought under discussion have all reflected such innovation, but unevenly. Such interaction as has worked among these three levels raises questions

A Comment on the Possible Worlds of Climo and Howells

Abstract: In a recent article Climo and Howells have proposed that Lewis' analysis of causation should be adapted for use in historical explanation.1 According to this view the meaning of "A causes B" can be expressed as "if not A then not B." In a world where "if A then B" is true, the statements "if not A then B" and "if not A then not B" are about two possible worlds neither of which is the actual world. Faced with a choice between two counterfactual statements "we accept as true the statement that seems to require the least departure from actuality, that is, the one most similar to our known world.' '2 Deciding which of the two possible worlds described by two counterfactual statements is more similar to the actual world determines which of the two statements "if not A then B" or "if not A then not B" is true. This then decides whether A is or is not the cause of B; or as Climo and Howells put it: "Let 'if A then B' be a statement of the actual world, w0, 'if not A then not B' is a statement of a possible world, w,, and 'if not A then B' a statement of world, w2. To determine whether w, or w2 is more similar to w0 is to determine whether 'if not A then not B' or 'if not A then B' follows from 'if A then B'. That is to distinguish between valid and invalid counterfactual inferences.'9" Climo and Howells claim that this approach to causation and historical explanation is superior to other approaches available to historians (regularity analysis or other forms of counterfactual analysis) and that it can overcome difficulties which these other methods find insuperable.

Collingwood’s Unpublished Manuscripts

Abstract: Since March 1978 there have been available for consultation in the Bodleian Library at Oxford about 4,000 pages of Collingwood’s unpublished manuscripts.1 Of the manuscripts that could be consulted at the time of writing, around 2,700 pages deal with a great variety of philosophical subjects, the others mainly with historical and archaeological topics. The former include not only manuscripts on the philosophy of history, but also on epistemology, metaphysics, economics, politics, and art.2 The manuscripts on philosophy of history are important for two reasons. In the first place, they throw new light on the development of Collingwood’s ideas. It is especially fortunate that we now have ample evidence with regard to the development of his philosophy of history in his lectures of 1926 and 1928 (the latter being the ‘Die manuscript’ referred to by Collingwood in An Autobiography (Aut, 107)), and in subsequent notes. Also of great interest are his manuscripts on metaphysics of 1934, 1935 and 1938. In the latter manuscript, which unfortunately is incomplete, he deals with his now much discussed theory of metaphysics as the study of ‘absolute presuppositions’.