Some historians have considered the tracing of historiography’s course from Clio to cliometrics a nostalgic endeavor, akin to idle rummaging among dusty period pieces. They have been trying to restructure and redefine history without looking back beyond the recent decades, seemingly unaware that by doing so they were denying the fruitfulness of the very historical approach they had set out to defend. The difficulties encountered in tracing historiography’s course render such neglect explainable but not justifiable. More accurately and substantially than anything else, the story of historiography can help define the task facing historiography today, demonstrate the essential role of the historian, and dispel the present doubts about history’s utility and viability.
From a review of its long career, historiography emerges as an endeavor inextricably linked with Western culture. Its purpose has been understood in many ways; to be the guardian of collective memories, source of serious and light entertainment, teacher of lessons, and field of scientific exploration. Nevertheless, underlying these diverse forms and intents of historiography has been a basic concern. In every period historians have been called upon—in the face of relentless change—to establish the nexus between the past, the present, and expectations for the future. That task has given historians a key role in the perennial struggle, especially keen in Western culture, for a proper balance between the two basic dimensions of human existence: change and continuity. The history of historiography represents, therefore, not a mere list of historical interpretations—arranged chronologically or typologically—but a story whose plot was devised by the course of Western culture itself. The exceptional vigor of Western historiography originated in the fact that in Western culture change and continuity had to be reconciled in a complex and perennial balancing and rebalancing of the claims of human freedom and order. In other societies that balance, once established and mostly weighted toward order, shifted little. Western historians on the other hand had to devise a great variety of syntheses of the past, present, and future in the images—among others—of the Greek city-state, the Roman ideal, the Christian commonwealth, the nation, and the Enlightenment. Since the 1880s, the search for such a synthesis has driven the quest for a New History appropriate to the modem period. Now, after many attempts, some historians have become frustrated by the elusiveness of the goal, a frustration to which exaggerated expectations have contributed significantly.
In the first three decades after 1945, historiography was both favored and hampered by developments in Western culture. It benefited from the memories of momentous events and changes in the immediate past and the awareness of the ongoing grand historical stmggle, the Cold War. In those years, history as a profession acquired much strength and vitality. But historiography also encountered strong ahistorical sentiments. In the democratic countries of Europe and in America, an increasing affluence evoked the conviction that human development was reaching a timeless plateau of pleasure and comfort. Condorcet’s envisaged ideal Tenth Stage of history seemed within reach where the rational individual fit without friction into a benign order and a creative synthesis between a reevaluated past, the known present, and uncertain future had become superfluous. The past as the record of collective human experience was no longer seen as offering an unsurpassable opportunity to study the dynamics of human life. What of human life still was to be mastered would be studied by different means. The past remained as an abandoned launching pad of human destiny—a museum piece, a data pool, or a source of interesting and entertaining stories. At least in the democratic countries historiography flourished as a free and pluralistic academic enterprise. Its works, however, rarely touched the public, partially because they were not meant to do so but primarily because historiography’s function of reconciling change and continuity appeared to have become superfluous now that the continuity of the good life seemed assured by the ever fuller realization of the ideal vision. Historical thought found an even less propitious intellectual climate in the countries under Communist rule. Having declared the end of the “old” order. Communists in the Soviet Union reduced historiography to the description of the “bad” past, of the triumph of the “new Soviet man,” and of the struggles of other people not yet “liberated.” There, too, the future had arrived with a timelessly valid social order into which, by definition, the individual fit without friction.
The human world appeared to be no longer subject to fundamental changes, being in essence timeless. Scholars in the Communist area constructed a Marxist scholasticism for the repetitious exegesis of a development which, as they saw it, had already reached its fulfillment. Social scientists in the democratic West set out to find the timeless dimensions of human life and interpreted human phenomena in terms of nondirectional equilibria of forces, structural and functional networks, and conditioned behavior. In this ahistorical world, viewed as entirely manageable and constructible, studies of human phenomena found their true justification in the development of appropriate social, economic, or political technologies.
In that period, historians paid a price for not being among those scholars who tried to transform their research results—gained from the investigation of present conditions—into technologies on how to prevent crime, cope with personal problems, develop economies, adjust human behavior at will, manipulate political power, reconstruct societies—and then popularized their findings in books, pamphlets, and advice columns in newspapers and magazines. Historians rarely joined in those endeavors because many of them had lost awareness of their public role but even more so because their discipline proved well-nigh impossible to convert into a technology. Many historians came to agree with George M. Trevelyan that history should not pose as a technology because “it has no practical utility like physical science. No one can by a knowledge of history, however profound, invent the steam-engine, or light a town, or cure cancer, or make wheat grow near the arctic circle.”' He could have added: or engineer a perfect society. Historians could not join in celebrating the triumph of technique over fundamental Interpretations because their study of the past made them not only recognize how much more complex human life was than social science models assumed but above all how illusory was the denial of fundamental change. Past human experience—some of it quite recent—contradicts the assumptions that human destiny is an endless replay of the same script with different actors and scenery or that its fundamental changes have miraculously come to an end in the twentieth century.
Then in the 1970s the illusion of a timeless age of technique and technology began to give way. The Communist order, instead of moving toward its perfection, showed many undesirable features of the “old order,” and, after 1989, began to disintegrate. Around the globe, the social, economic, and political configurations showed increasing strain: industrial societies experienced grave ecological problems; affluent societies were beset by existential boredom; genocide, terrorism, and the new despotisms continued; and the whole world confronted the uncertainties of the nuclear age. When the future no longer could be perceived simply as a more finely tuned present or even as a state of perfection, the assertion that modernity and tradition have little to say to each other also lost much of its power of conviction. To the degree that the explanations with a static quality and a technological character have been weakened, historiography could regain influence and strength. Indeed, the very difficulties suggested that Western culture had arrived at one of those decisive points at which historians were called upon to assist in gaining an appropriate understanding of change and continuity. The emerging world was not so new as to defy the understanding gained from the past. And the history of historiography offered a splendid record of how human beings have reflected on the development of the human condition. The core feature of that condition had remained the same: the temporality of human life, and with it the historical nature of the human condition.
Ironically, at that point, historians became beset by doubts about their ability to give answers—doubts that were connected with the recurrent disappointments in the now century-old quest for the New History. That quest showed two principal thrusts; one relied on the patterning of historiography as closely as possible after the sciences, and the other distinguished the human world more sharply from the natural one and tried to understand it in those terms. The former began with the affirmation of a possible ultimate certainty for historical accounts in the manner of the natural sciences. Objective inquiry, with a maximal separation of the observer from the observed reality, was expected to yield cumulative knowledge of a factual kind and reveal the elements and processes of history.
The early “scientific” historians, who had purged the traditional transcendent ordering forces (God, Reason, or World Spirit) from the explanatory inventory of the historian, soon found the history of events and individuals insufficient for a scientific history. Over the decades, with the extremes of the positivist methodology modified, a variety of structural histories of society became the most prominent scientific histories. They were seen as a fitting response to the quest for a historiography permitting large-scale generalizations (for some historians even laws) that reflected reality’s basic structural patterns and forces. The beneficial result has been a greatly enhanced knowledge of the economic, social, and political structures and forces that shape human life. Yet to various degrees that conception of historiography has denied the human world an existence separate from the world of nature and necessity. If pushed to its extremes it ends in paradox: the denser the net of determining anonymous forces is drawn in the interest of an ever more rigorous scientific knowledge, the less room is left for the original hope that historical knowledge would become one of the efficient instruments for the mastery of human life. Reflective reason, the source of creativity, loses all autonomy as human beings become part of an impersonal network of anonymous forces. The recent discourse about the “end of history” and deconstructionism has its roots here.
Against that conception of history other historians have put one that has stressed the impossibility of separating cognitively the observer from the observed reality and has stipulated the immersion of historians in the life they analyze and interpret. As for the human world, these scholars have stressed its contingent character—impossible to comprehend by quasi-natural structures and laws—and the role of rational consciousness, purposes, and acts of will. Such attempts to avoid “scientific” systems of history, while preserving the ability to produce more than a descriptive history of myriad phenomena, have continued over the decades. They have explored the shaping power of nontranscendent ideas and of concepts. Still, critics have always pointed out the danger of subjectivism in this approach to historical truth-findings; it lacked an authoritative frame of reference in which to make judgments on historical accounts. As a response, mental structures that gave temporary stability to a conceptually constructed world were offered, such as Weltanschauung, climate of opinion, Zeitgeist, and, more recently, mentalite. In the past three decades, other scholars have found the human world shaped by rhetorical and linguistic structures that.
However, had an unclear, often absent, link to human life. The many contributions of this approach could not hide that it, too, when pressed to extreme positions, ended in paradox. The more radical the stipulated contingency became, the more historiography took on the character of a mere construction by the historian. With a well-defined relationship between rhetorical and linguistic concepts and reality missing, historical accounts joined the genres of storytelling and fiction. Reflective reason, as the creative link to reality, found no legitimate place in these theories either.
Yet the recognition of these paradoxes provides no reason for asserting historiography’s inescapable end in a hopeless relativism. The history of historiography shows Pyrrhonism’s prior threats and failures. Instead, historians can continue to use the insights gained into the philosophical issues and processes of truth-finding in their seemingly plodding and usually eclectic ways of “doing history.” For that they have at their disposal a precious asset. For at least four centuries generations of scholars have developed a historical methodology— testing, retesting, and absorbing elements from other disciplines—until by now it can act as a wall of defense against the fanciful tale, willful distortion, and honest error, as well as a sufficiently reliable instrument for truth-finding. Even the by now acknowledged omnipresence of the creative imagination in all phases of historical truth-finding—which Maurice Mandelbaum called the ‘fountainhead of relativism’—does not doom historiography’s ability to deliver useful results— useful in the sense of being sufficiently akin to the processes of life to offer knowledge of a high truth value. The presence of imagination leaves intact the need for a critically ascertained factual base as well as the requirements of skill, craftsmanship, and integrity. Only if historians assert such a base for the historical enterprise will there remain a proper gap between the fantasies of visionaries, zealots, and propagandists and the works of historians.
The second task facing the historian at this point is to create integrative conceptual models that reflect twentieth-century changes and experiences. This at a time when the view of history as progress, long the dominant guarantor of certainty and continuity, is being questioned, even completely rejected by some scholars. For coping with this issue the history of historiography offers once more a basic insight: interpretive theories of history devised by scholars, delivering innovative insights, and interpretive schemes of history, interwoven into the life of societies, are of a different nature but intricately connected. The prevailing sense of history of a given society, which hardly ever is a systematic whole, changes as a result of its being tested over and over again in the course of collective life. In this process of exceedingly slow change, interpretations of history devised by scholars have acted as useful spotters of weaknesses, contradictions, and possible improvements in the collective sense of history. Whenever the interchange between historiographical theory and collective praxis has been severed, life made even harsher corrections. Communism offers a prime example of an explanatory scheme of history that stifled new insights into human development and persisted in basing its historical understanding on a frozen interpretive scheme. And many theories of history designed at too great a distance from life have been quite short-lived because they worked with oversimplified definitions of the human condition. The corresponding far distance from their society’s life-tested and prevailing sense of history diminished their impact.
Here, too, the diagnosis comes easier than the remedy. Historians who deal with progress deal no longer with a theoretical proposition of some eighteenth-century European and American scholars but with progress as a part of the actual past. That progress in its scientific, technological, industrial, and economic reality is not identical with the exorbitant hopes and claims of its many advocates. Although human life has benefited from it greatly, the predicted rational world with its corollaries—profoundly peaceful and moral societies with respect for human rights, totally rational people, and a prevailing sense of happiness— has emerged only imperfectly. Those forces considered “irrational” have maintained much of their disturbing strength. The discrepancy between hope and reality has prompted historians to voice reservations and objections to both the dominance and the perceived accuracy of the progress view of history. Those who wished to banish the concept of progress outright did so because they saw it as a seduction to speak only of successes and winners, hide suffering and the disadvantaged, neglect the full range of experiences in daily human life, and disregard the value of other cultures.
Yet modifying the progress view of history seems a more viable alternative than negating it. The facts that world history does manifest a strong element of progress and that the progress view has pervaded all aspects of Western culture make a negation of progress both inaccurate and impossible. The more so since, in many ways, even the arguments voiced by opponents of the concept often cannot do without propositions that are linked to the progress tradition. Thus, the arguments on behalf of fuller human rights for, and the emancipation of, the disadvantaged rely on the very dynamic of progress, and the call for respect for the autonomy of other cultures depends on a development that weakens crude passions and increases rationality. Even Annates scholars, not given to an admiration for progress, harbored an indirect link to progress: some through Marxism and others through a vision of a development toward a humanisme historique. All this does not obligate historians to fealty to the progressive view of history but must caution them not to treat the concept of progress in their reassessment of Western history as just an illusion or a grand mistake.
Indeed, in their very work of historiographical revision, historians will have to acknowledge one more link to their society’s progressive predilection. Even those scholars who demand freedom from values most ardently affirm at least one value: the freedom to explore the past and formulate interpretations without restrictions, a freedom given only in at least minimally democratic states. Modem totalitarian states have granted to historians the minor privilege to cite and write footnotes according to the rules while prescribing for them what matters: their research topics, their approaches, and their interpretations. A relatively value-free historiography can only exist as long as individuals are free to inquire and draw their own conclusions. Thus, paradoxically the aim of a neutrality on values can only be preserved if contemporary historians support a democratic society, itself a historical and value-laden phenomenon. Any new public role of the historian will have to be based on that insight.
At another turn of centuries, historians face a series of complex tasks. Among them are the finding of a proper public role for history, the coming to terms with the role of creative imagination in historiography, the proper balance between free individuals and a binding order in historical accounts, and the acknowledgment of a truly global history without undue erosion of national traditions pose most challenging tasks. But rather than despair, historians should rejoice because the illusion of timelessness has faded and they once more are called upon to perform the key role of interpretation. And the task reaffirms what the history of historiography shows so clearly: no other endeavor fits as well as history does with the peculiar needs of human beings, to whom the temporality of life allots the roles of emigrants from the past, inhabitants of the present, and immigrants into the future.
World History
