Showing papers in "History and Theory in 1981"

Penser la Révolution française

Abstract: La Revolution francaise n’est pas un sujet historique comme les autres; c’est un patrimoine politique et moral plus qu’une curiosite intellectuelle. Deux cents ans apres, l’evenement central de notre histoire continue a etre pense dans les termes qu’il a fait naitre. S’il est donc vrai que, de la Revolution francaise, il existe autant d’histoires que de familles politiques depuis qu’elle a paru sur notre theâtre national, il reste que toutes ces histoires, opposees par les opinions qu’elles expriment, ont en commun d’etre des anniversaires de l’origine. C’est pourquoi la ligne de clivage de l’historiographie revolutionnaire, en termes intellectuels, n’est pas celle qui separe les histoires de droite et les histoires de gauche, mais celle qui oppose l’histoire commemorative et l’histoire conceptuelle : Michelet et Tocqueville. A partir de la, Francois Furet cherche a comprendre comment on peut conceptualiser une histoire comme celle de la Revolution francaise, a la fois dans ce qu’elle a de radicalement nouveau, sous l’invocation d’une origine, et dans ce qu’elle assume de continuite, sous l’apparence d’une rupture. Interrogation qui est devenue le sphinx de toute la gauche europeenne, et dont on chercherait en vain la trace dans Marx, pour ne rien dire de ses epigones du XXe siecle. Mais avant que l’experience contemporaine n’en revele la tragique pertinence, les elements s’en trouvent discutes par deux auteurs que les historiens de la Revolution francaise n’ont jamais pratiques systematiquement : Alexis de Tocqueville et Augustin Cochin. Ce livre est ne de leurs pensees complementaires comme un essai pour traverser la fausse clarte des opinions et dechiffrer cette grande enigme du monde contemporain : l’ideologie revolutionnaire. Date de premiere edition : 1978

Foucault's "History of the Present"

Abstract: A pastime of growing popularity in recent years has been that of observing the often furious activity of the French intellectual scene. Fascinated by the apparently revolutionary implications of approaching the unconscious, the text, primitives, superstructure/base, and the past in the latest way, American scholars from Baltimore to Santa Cruz have been avidly following (often just a few steps behind) the many twists and turns of their colleagues across the sea. This following often takes the form of a redefinition of what the French are doing in terms that slide more easily through our own vocabularies than the terms in which the French themselves choose to define their projects. This paper will join the growing tradition in attempting a redefinition of some of the implications of Michel Foucault's historical works. It will attempt to answer the question "What is Foucault really doing?" by examining the relationship between "the past" and "the present" in The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish. I shall try to make sense of what Foucault means by writing a "history of the present" by showing the connections between archaeology and criticism in these three works. Foucault himself tried to tell his readers, in part, what he "had really been doing" in his methodological work, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), and I shall make some use of his explanations in this paper. However, The Archaeology of Knowledge did not answer some major questions about Foucault's work; questions that have been raised generally in the philosophy of history. The relationship between the inquirer's present with the past which he is examining is placed in the foreground by Foucault's archaeological project; I shall attempt to explicate this relationship as well as briefly to distinguish it from other approaches to the writing of history.

The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History

Abstract: A few years ago, French historians began using the expression "history of mentalities" to characterize their work in the field of intellectual history. While awkward in French and infelicitous in English translation, the phrase has survived; for it expresses a need to assign autonomy to a kind of historical inquiry which offers new perspectives on the civilizing process. Briefly stated, the history of mentalities considers the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life. Ideas concerning childhood, sexuality, family, and death, as they have developed in European civilization, are the stuff of this new kind of history. Work in the history of mentalities is closely identified with the long-standing investigations of the Annales school, which portrays the history of mentalities as but one dimension of the "total" history it is their ambition to write.1 But the history of mentalities, even among its Annales practitioners, does have its own specific concerns. While Annales historians are most likely to address the material realities conditioning man through economic processes, social structures, and environmental influences, those historians investigating mentalities prefer to consider the psychological realities underpinning human conceptions of intimate relationships, basic habits of mind, and attitudes toward the elemental passages of life. The history of mentalities, moreover, has obvious affinities with approaches to intellectual history developed before the arrival of the French school. In effect, "mentalities" is a code name for what used to be called culture. It takes up again themes pursued by idealist historians such as Burckhardt in the nineteenth century and Huizinga early in the twentieth. For these historians, problems of culture were essentially problems of world-views and their interpretation. They took pains to evaluate these in their social and political context. But the history of ideas served as their basic frame of reference. Culture in this historiographical tradition meant high culture, and for this reason these historians directed their attention toward the role of valueforming elites. Though they did not treat culture as the exclusive preserve of

An Historicist Critique of "Revisionist" Methods for Studying the History of Ideas

Abstract: What are the correct procedures to adopt in the attempt to arrive at an understanding of a past work of philosophy or political thought? In the last decade or so traditional approaches to the history of ideas have been subjected to severe and fundamental criticism by a handful of scholars who, while not agreeing on all particulars, generally laud one another's work, depict themselves as methodological innovators, and constitute what we might loosely call a "revisionist school" within the field of intellectual history. The nucleus of this school -Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and John Dunn -all complain about the lack of historicity in the treatment of linguistic artifacts from the past. Their bete noire is the prevalent notion that the whole point of studying "great" works of philosophy is to extract the "timeless elements" or "dateless ideas" with universal (and therefore contemporary) application. In striving to appropriate the "classical texts" to the present, the orthodox historians of ideas, it is contended, have generated both mistaken empirical claims and conceptual confusion; they have ignored the uniquely historical question of what the various thinkers intended to say and have, instead, deployed interpretative techniques which are not properly historical. As an alternative, say the revisionists, it is necessary to develop "a truly autonomous method, one which offers a means of treating the phenomena of political thought strictly as historical phenomena and since history is about things happening even as historical events: as things happening in a context which defines the kind of events they were."' In essence the alternative urges

Re-enactment and Reconstruction in Collingwood's Philosophy of History

Abstract: Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine, the doctrine that the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind, has been the center of much controversy and interpretations of it have differed widely. In what follows, I shall try to argue that the re-enactment doctrine is the methodological pillar of Collingwood's constructivism.1 I shall do so by a critical examination of the doctrine's interpretative history, by arguing that at least from 1925 onwards Collingwood was a constructivist, and by an attempted interpretation of the doctrine in that light. The conception of re-enactment occurs in the historiographical sections (Parts I-IV) of The Idea of History, but is treated most fully in Part V, called "Epilegomena," especially in ? 4. The conception also occurs in Epilegomena ?? 1, 5, and 7 (all 1936), but not in the sections of the Epilegomena which are from the otherwise unpublished and now lost "The Principles of History" (1939), that is, Epilegomena ?? 3 and 6.2 It also does not occur in Epilegomena ? 2 (1935).

Moral Judgments in History

Abstract: This paper considers the nature of moral judgments, the criteria on which they are based, and their function. It discusses the objections to the use of moral judgments in historical writing put forward by three historians, and finds them in varying degrees unconvincing. It then examines whether there is a case for moral judgments in history, and concludes that they do have an inescapable role, but one that is not usually accepted by historians.

Etwas Uber Die Judische Historik: Leopold Zunz and the Inception of Modern Jewish Historiography

Abstract: Modern Jewish historiography -the study of Jewish sources, by Jews, according to shared methods of research and interpretation was launched in the last century by an uncommonly learned twenty-three-year-old German Jew called Leopold Zunz. Of course he was not the first to submit Jewish texts to the godless rigors of historical criticism. In sixteenth-century Italy Azariah de Rossi had skillfully applied the scholarly procedures of Biondi and the rhetorical sensitivities of the ancients to Scripture, and with unsettling results. Azariah was by all accounts a man of faith, however, albeit one devoted at once to tradition and truth a pious savant inviting trouble and he had confined his explorations in the Bible largely to its chronological passages. Zunz, a child of his own century, was more ambitious. He insisted that all of Judaism's works be consigned to the historian. He submitted a detailed and systematic plan for the totality of Jewish historical research for Wissenschaft des Judentums, as it came to be known. And he proposed, finally, that the Jew of his age adopt the historical attitude not merely as an instrument of study but as a view of life. All this young Zunz packed into an epoch-making manifesto entitled Etwas Uber die rabbinische Literatur, which appeared in Berlin in May, 1818.1 Zunz's essay is short but dense, by turns stolid and shrill, at once an erudite prolegomenon and a popular pamphlet. Its impact upon the intellectual world of nineteenth-century Jewry was considerable; it inaugurated one of the richest and most characteristic enterprises of that world, the distillation of a theory of Judaism out of the scrupulous and doctrinally unprejudiced examination of its past. The Jewish historian envisaged by Zunz was to be a new source of cultural authority, a rival of the rabbi and the philosopher. And such became the often thankless role of Zunz's students and heirs, of Zechariah Frankel, Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, Gershom Scholem, Yitzhak Baer, Jacob Shatzky and of the master himself. But these larger implications of Zunz's ideal the far-reaching implications of Jewish historiography for Jewish identity are best approached through the polymathic thicket of his program

The Myth of Historical Evidence

Abstract: At the present time philosophers of history, in their treatment of historians' claims as to the occurrence of events in the past, may be divided into two schools: "realist empiricists" and "instrumentalists/constructionists."I The realist empiricist sees the historian as first collecting his evidence and then building his account of the past on the basis of this sound foundation. Such an approach is open to a form of skepticism where it is claimed that nothing can serve as evidence about past events because they are unobservable and "E can be regarded as evidence for P if and only if E and P have sometimes been found together."'2 It is partly in response to this skepticism that the "instrumentalist/constructionist" position has been developed. According to this view the historian takes objects in the present and constructs an account of the past in order to explain the presence of these objects. Such an approach is vulnerable: "historiographical instrumentalism asserts both that there is no real past and that its constructions of that past account for or explain present evidence . . . only a construction that is offered as representing a real past can have force in accounting for the present evidence that is held to survive from the past.."3 More important, however, is the fact that realist empiricism and instrumentalism/constructionism share a common fallacy: both subscribe to the myth of evidence. For both, the description of a present object (the "evidence") is given. It will be the argument of the present essay that the historian's description of his data (presently perceptible objects) is never independent of his narratives of events in the past, such that all data descriptions are "narrative-laden."

A Note on Begriffsgeschichte

Abstract: Historical research in recent years has witnessed a persistent trend away from the surface of kaleidoscopic "events" to the substructures of the historical process in which the demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic conditions of historical change are receiving more attention. The French historical school of the Annales has been the avant garde of this reorientation in historical research. Participating in the new quest for an histoire non-evenementielle is the German Begriflsgeschichte. A few years ago a multi-volume encyclopedia, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, began with an extensive begriflsgeschichtliche analysis and inventory of political language in Germany.' In Begrifjsgeschichte as in histoire non-evenementielle the focus is not on the more tangible and material conditions of historical change, but on the more elusive conceptualizations which accompanied such changes and provided an initial "participant" interpretation of historical realities. The crucial question Begriflsgeschichte raises is whether contemporary conceptualizations can be relied upon when historical situations and developments are to be interpreted. To what extent do these concepts offer adequate interpretations, or "prejudge" the issue? Some preliminary considerations might help to clarify and justify the use of the German term Begriffsgeschichte. No historian needs to be reminded that concepts, both as material of his studies and tools of his presentation, have an historical character; that is, they change their content and application through the passage of time. Every historian is at least in theory aware of this situation, although in practice the temptation to ignore it is great, and all too often historians proceed as though there is an accepted, strictly defined, and unchanging meaning to the concepts employed. The persistence of some of the keywords signifying philosophical, political, and social experiences "state," "democracy," "liberty," and so forth -should not delude historians about the fact that the experiences, ideas, and aspirations constituting the meaning of these words are different according to time and place, and derive their exact meaning from the respective context of their usage. The awareness of these problems grew out of the tradition of historicist thinking. But this heritage has had both a positive and a negative effect. The historicist project of reconstructing each historical epoch, its achievements, ideas, political and social character in its own terms very literally was a remarkable advance in historical scholarship. For example, a careful interpretation of central concepts of medieval sources terra, dominium, Land, Herrschaft led to a decisive reassessment of the constitutional history of medieval Germany as well as to a critique of the anachronistic usage of the term "state." The notion of "state" with

A Note on Sainthood in the Hagiographical Prologue

Abstract: Changing trends in medieval hagiography are most clearly expressed in the prologue or preface to the saint's life, which affords the author an opportunity to explain the circumstances surrounding the work's composition, outline the main themes or chapters, cite his chief sources, or state his philosophical stance. An attempt was made to place the saint within the broader context of sacred history, within a continuing tradition of divine revelations stretching back to the Prophets. Particularly in the thirteenth century, such apologetic remarks were often the result of the conflict of religious orders, each of which sought to legitimize the novelties it had introduced into the monastic life, or between Christian sects which threatened to tear asunder the seamless robe of Christ. Robert of Sulmona's biographer, for example, describes his subject as a divine instrument of the Church Militant, whose mission is a logical continuation of the Old Testament and the Gospel. Robert's virtuous life and signs of sainthood "restore the sick to health, provide rest for the weary, food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, cleanliness for the leprous, life for the dead, freedom for those obsessed by demons, and, through his prayers, lighten the load of the dead."1 Many an author, overtaken with modesty, begins in classical style by bemoaning his lack of skill and eloquence, his inability to do his subject justice, and admits his reliance upon such patristic predecessors as Gregory the Great, Jerome, Cassiodorus, and the Liber vitaspatrum.2 Others, in the style of their humanist descendants who called upon the muse for inspiration, invoke the aid of the Holy Spirit and propose to compose a "rude and simple work, albeit short and truthful," free of subtle rhetoric or flourish.3 In his inimitable way, the Cistercian hagiographer Caesarius of Heisterbach, like his predecessor Sulpicius Severus, both belittles his own writing skills and takes a swipe at the rhetorical acrobatics of the philosophers. He suggests that if some day the diocese of Cologne should possess more learned men, they may compose a more eloquent life of Engelbert of Cologne; for as a monk, and not as a philosopher, Caesarius's powers are insufficient to the task. The philosophers and dialecticians, on the other hand, often write more to display

Marx's Four Histories: An Approach to His Intellectual Development

Abstract: It would seem that no aspect of Marx in recent decades has received more attention than his intellectual development. The debates about the relationship of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to later work, the attention currently being lavished on the Grundrisse, and the recent interest in unraveling the (Hegelian?) "logic" of Capital have all contributed to our sense of the diversity of Marx's work, of the "fits and starts" in which he pursued his writing, and of the possibility of "breaks" in his development, or at least changes in his intellectual strategy.' Yet the general tendency of recent books on Marx is to find a unity in the apparent diversity. Such unity, however, takes a variety of forms: we have Marx the technological determinist, Marx the materialist neo-Hegelian, Marx the philosopher of "organic totality" or of "internal relations," Marx the political millenarian, and several others.2 Such variety is perhaps to be expected in a thinker of Marx's range and complexity. More disturbing than the variety itself is the increasing rarity of confrontations between rival views. The thesis of a "break" between an early "humanist" and a late "scientific" Marx, propounded in two of its major forms by Althusser and Colletti in the 1960s, has of course been widely and severely attacked, if not absolutely discredited. But in the aftermath of these debates, many writers have preferred to avoid declaring themselves on Marx's intellectual development as a whole, or to give it only very summary treatment. Instead the tendency has been to select as the central object of study some purported "master text": the Grundrisse, the 1859 Preface to the

Marxist Historiography and the Methodology of Research Programs

Abstract: The claim of Marxist historiography to be "scientific" has always been rooted in a conception of science derived from the natural sciences; and that conception in turn is represented by a philosophy of science which purports to elucidate the function of laws, the structure of theories, and the logical relations between hypotheses and empirical data. The social sciences for more than a generation modeled themselves on the philosophy of science known as logical empiricism, or positivism, or logicism. As C. G. Hempel's classic "The Function of General Laws in History" showed, historiography and a fortiori Marxist historiography could not accommodate itself to the logicist account of science without radical and perhaps impossible changes such as the development of logically rigorous theory and the discovery of testable general laws. Sir Karl Popper's version of science agreed with the logicists in rejecting Marxist theories of history (though not necessarily empirical historical research by Marxists) as "unscientific." "Scientific" and "unscientific" have come to deserve the noncommittal quotation marks in which they now commonly appear. Provocative arguments such as those by Kuhn and Feyerabend have questioned whether the natural sciences, and therefore the methodologically imitative social sciences, can be characterized by any set of logical or empirical criteria internal to science itself, as distinguished from "external" criteria such as the institutions by which scientific activity is supported and acknowledged. But there are alternatives to the anarchistic theory of science which abandons any attempt to demarcate the boundary between what can legitimately be called "science" and what can't. Imre Lakatos,l in particular, and Larry Laudan in his important book

Conditions of Truth of Historical Narratives

Abstract: The problem to be discussed here is this: is the classical conception of truth applicable to historical narratives? Certain difficulties connected with answering this question have been mentioned in my Methodology of History.' The discussion that followed the appearance of that book was confined to the issue of whether the correspondence theory of truth, which may be considered as part of the classical conception of truth, is adequate to the nature of historical cognition. The adequacy of another part of the classical conception of truth, namely the adequacy of the rules for the truth of sequences of statements for predicating truth of historical narratives, was not discussed. The former problem if we simplify matters reduces to answering the question whether the historian is entitled to use the category of the past in the sense of the reality to which he compares the narrative he produces (and which he intends to be a scientific reconstruction of that reality). It involves subtle philosophical considerations which are, however, of remote significance for the practical activity of the historian. On the other hand, the latter problem, that is, reflection on the conditions of truth of historical narratives, seems to be much closer to his activity. Suppose we reject the category of the past as objective reality and assume, as has recently been done by L. J. Goldstein,2 that there is no difference between an historical fact and a description of that fact by an historian, for it is the historian who constitutes historical facts while describing them; this automatically eliminates the need for studying the truth of historical narratives. In that interpretation, an analysis of the validity of narratives whether a given narrative (and the ways in which the historian has arrived at it) agrees with the prevailing commonly accepted methods of research procedureremains the only criterion of evaluation of results of research. Yet it seems that for a professional historian that threshold of validity (in the sense explained above) is merely the preliminary criterion which,