A Second Prefatory Note to Modem Historiography (since 1914)

When in 1914 soldiers marched among masses of jubilant onlookers on their way to the battles of the First World War, many of them were aware that they might die but not that a whole way of life would be buried with them. Indeed, since that year. Western culture has been radically transformed by the four forces: the sciences, industrialization, the emancipation of the masses, and the making of a global world. The impact of these forces also has marked the development of historiography, even the heated discussions on historical methods and truth.

What is the proper “scientific" history? By 1914 there had been two answers to that question. One saw the correct reconstruction of the past as dependent on the imitation of the natural sciences; the other called for an autonomous science of the humanities. Both, however, agreed that history was an endeavor with the purely theoretical interest of reconstructing the past and without any practical interest, be it lessons, devotion, entertainment, or propaganda. Yet since 1914 adherents of both answers have confronted problems. The advocates of historiography patterned after the natural sciences gained much strength from the public belief that empirical research by scientists would continue to yield results sufficiently beneficent to guarantee through their application more and more people a better and longer life. But the experiences of two brutal world wars, the Depression, tyrannies, genocide, and the double threat of nuclear destruction and ecological problems gradually sapped confidence in the power of science to yield progress. Then the New Physics brought the disappointment of earlier hopes that science would reveal in the end the true order of things. Yet the remaining great strength of scientific history manifested itself in the further development of traditional positivistic historiography and its new theoretical version—neopositivist and analytical history—and in a great variety of structural histories that tried to track down the large-scale structures and forces— economic, geographic, social, psychological—whose temporary configurations shaped history. Even the quantification of the historical enterprise seemed possible. These scholars shared the assumption of one objective truth about a coherent reality, which would be progressively uncovered. At the close of the twentieth century, their approaches still shaped most historiography, although the weakening of the progress view has made their task more difficult. Instead, reality became less and less readily understandable the deeper scientists penetrated it. The old ideas of a simple and easily predictable order gave way to doubts whether the inescapable presence of the observer and the act of observing as such did not forever preclude our finding out “what exactly reality was like.” Ironically, the world emerging from the natural sciences—multistructured, far from any simple materialism, hard to grasp, even mysterious—resembled more the subject matter of traditional histories than that of aspiring scientific historians in the Comtean vein.

The adherents of an autonomous historical science, based on historiography’s own development, were beset by a different and no less troubling problem. Dilthey and his successors had discovered how difficult historical explanation became once the traditional method of “subject observes a clearly defined reality” was abandoned in favor of “subject observes a reality at least partially constructed in the process of observing.” The insight that historians were submerged in life and the absence of a priori, stable elements—transcendent and otherwise—involved historians in sheer endless epistemological discussions on how to safeguard the truth of history. Against the objections of scientific historians that the truth of history was jeopardized, the “autonomists” constructed a number of defenses. At first, dissenting historians relied on the history of ideas for safeguarding the truth value of the autonomous history. Since the 1970s, the defense has taken different forms: the history of concepts (safely removed from suspicions of transcendence), narrativism, the radical linguistic turn, and microhistory. In some of them grand schemes and structures, including progress, the value of rationality, one coherent reality, and one ascertainable truth, have been rejected. The approach has produced, in turn, new complex problems and limitations.

In the midst of what has become a veritable Babel of theories, practicing historians have done what they have done all along: they have written histories that may have dominant theoretical accents but have remained at a considerable distance from theoretical purism and close to theoretical eclecticism. On the other hand, that attitude has neither invalidated nor ended the quest for clarifying the theoretical if not philosophical foundations of historiography.

Shifts in assessing economic forces. The role of economic phenomena in history has been increasingly appreciated since 1918, helped by the economic crisis of the 1930s, the prosperity and economic “miracles” of the 1950s and 1960s, and the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s. But that increase in awareness of economic matters, which stimulated methodological advances and a large body of works in economic history, neither reintegrated economic history with theoretical economics nor enhanced the cause of paneconomic interpretations of history.

American economic history flourished in the 1920s as entrepreneurially oriented business history, but the Depression shifted attention to the solutions offered by economic theory, whose generally ahistorical principles seemed to be better guides for mastering mankind’s economic fate. Hence ideas usually flowed from economics to economic history rather than the other way, as was the case, for example, with cliometrics, the cousin of econometrics. Only when, after 1945, a powerful and highly developed Western civilization confronted newly independent but economically underdeveloped nations, did that discrepancy foster studies in economic growth, including economic development theories. Here historical studies returned in a limited measure to economics. As for the Marxist interpretation of history, with its economic determinism, its influence was at first increased by the Russian Revolution and later its aspirations were helped by the crisis of the Depression. Yet its deterministic historical theory, when it brought forth Stalinism, got more and more out of tune with Western thought, until after 1988 the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union rejected their Marxist regimes and thereby put in doubt the viability of Marxism as an encompassing historical theory. Since the 1960s, there have been deliberate attempts to rescue Marxism as simply a historical methodology or a supplier of useful insights. Some scholars weakened its paneconomism by reviving the “young,” still unsystematic Marx or by the infusion of ideas and concepts of other schools of thought, as in the case of the well-known Frankfurt school (also known as Critical Theory).

Varieties of social history. Before 1914 the emancipation of the masses had provoked works full of rhapsodic hopes and grim premonitions. After World War I this emancipation no longer was a hope or a specter but increasingly a reality. Scholars had to take note of it and the historians among them tried to find the proper historiographical expression for the new reality. The task proved to be formidable as it meant no less than to discover the collective past of people of all social strata and link it with the democratic present and an ill-defined future. The result was a steady enhancement in the prestige and quantity of social history, a type of historiography which negated the earlier emphasis on prominent persons or elites. But what exactly was the proper social history? Marxist and American Progressive historians would see it as the tracing of the grand story of the centuries: the great struggle of “the people” against the opponents standing in the way of the people’s full emancipation. This view, though much less obvious, still is inherent in the German Historische Sozialwissenschaft and even in some of the assumptions of the Annales school. Other historians considered the study of people’s marrying, childbearing, working, playing, relating to others, relocating, dressing, eating, and dying as the truly significant task of social history. That element is prominent in the grand structural schools of thought, too, but there the accent still rested on the large forces and structures that shaped the collective life teleologically. As a reaction to this approach, other scholars concentrated on the description of the routine life and small-scale events of “common people” (such as most of the American popular culture history). In the new German Alltagsge-schichte, that approach has taken on a more consciously antithetical stance to the present structural histories of society. Its program called for the recovery of the “forgotten” past—those memories and groups of people not seen as important by structural histories.

Uncertainty about world history. After the mid 1970s, ecological and economic problems and, in the 1990s, the disappointing turbulence of the post-Cold War increased doubts about the interpretation of world history as progress. The latter had provided an optimistic unifying scheme to what otherwise were only incidentally connected histories of diverse people and regions. Now development theory, particularly the economic version of the progress view, came under special criticism from scholars who perceived it as a rationalization for an exploitative modernization (dependency theory). Ecologically minded scholars added their criticism. Other historians wrote world history without reference to the progress view while still treating the world as a world system destined to be realized fully in the course of history (W. McNeill). Quite a few historians replaced the linear interpretation, including progress, with a historicist sequence of cultures and civilizations (O. Spengler, A. Toynbee). More recently, the progress view of history found a radical contradiction from those that spoke of “the end of history” in a nonapocalyptic sense (posthistory or, German, Posthistoire). As for Christian historiography, it still has not found a persuasive replacement for the Eusebian model of world history. Major alternative views have included a rejection of history as beside the point, a revival of outright prophetic history, careful combinations of faith and history, and lately, transformations of the Christian faith into messages of progress and liberation.