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Towards
a New Philosophy of History
SSHA
November 2006
Daniel
Little
University
of Michigan-Dearborn
“History” is a
deceptively simple concept. It
invokes the notion of change over time, human agency, the role of material circumstances
in human affairs, and the question of the putative meaning of historical
events. It raises the possibility
of “learning from history”—whether from the experience of the
Peloponnesian War or the Korean War, the 1918 avian flu or the Chinese post-Great
Leap Forward famines. And it
suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by
understanding the forces and circumstances that brought us to our current
situation. It is therefore
unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned their attention to efforts
to interrogate “history” and the problems that the concept raises, from a
philosophical point of view. These
reflections can be grouped together into a body of work called “philosophy of
history.” But it is a highly
heterogeneous grouping, involving idealists, positivists, logicians, and
theologians. Some philosophers
have been primarily interested in the “metaphysics” of historical change. Others have focused on the epistemology
of historical knowledge. And yet
others have asked large questions about the meaning or direction of history. Given
this plurality of voices within the “philosophy of history”, it is impossible
to give one definition of the field that suits all these approaches.
Why
do we need a better philosophy of history? Because we think we know what we mean when we talk about
“knowledge of history,” “explaining historical change,” or “historical forces
and structures.” But—we do
not! Our assumptions about history
are superficial and fail to hold up to scrutiny. We often assume that history is an integrated fabric or web,
in which underlying causal powers lead to enduring historical patterns. Or we assume that historical processes
have meaning—with the result that later events can be interpreted as
flowing within a larger pattern of meaning. Or we presuppose that there are recurring historical
structures and entities—“states,” “cultures,” and “demographic regimes”
that are repeatedly instantiated in different historical circumstances.
I
do not say that these assumptions are all wrong. I say that they are superficial, misleading, and simple in a
context in which complexity is the rule.
Take the idea of recurring historical structures. Is there some state “essence” possessed
in common among the Carolingian state described by Marc Bloch, the theatre
state of Bali described by Clifford Geertz, and the modern Chinese party state
described by Vivienne Shue? If so,
what is this set of essential properties that states have? If not, what alternative interpretation
can we provide to “state talk” that makes coherent sense?
Or
take the idea of historical causation: “The French Revolution was caused by the
fiscal crisis of the Ancien Regime.”
Perhaps this is true. But
what does it mean? How do fiscal
crises bring about revolutions?
What do we know about “causal mechanisms” in historical circumstances
such that we can assign rigorous and useful meaning to the causal proposition?
And
what about the idea that large historical configurations have “meaning”? “All history is the unfolding of human
freedom; so specific episodes can be interpreted in terms of their contribution
to the saga of freedom.” Meaning
to whom? Inherently? Participants assign meanings to many
things, as do those who follow (including historians). But is there any rigorous basis for
attributing meaning to a congeries of events?
This
body of research intends to raise fresh questions about the nature of
historical knowledge. And it
proposes to begin to answer these questions--and discover new ones as
well--through careful attention to the best and most innovative historians
writing today. As critical minds
cope with the intellectual challenge of offering concrete historical explanations,
they are implicitly compelled to deal with these conceptual complexities. And so we can tease out new answers to
these questions.
The
position I will take advocates that there is indeed a rigorous interpretation
to be offered for historical knowledge. It is an interpretation that does without
teleology; that emphasizes causal mechanisms; that emphasizes conjunction and
contingency; and that offers a nuanced understanding of “large historical
structures.” And we will
make every effort to draw lessons from best historical practice.
The
working title of this research project is History’s Pathways.
The “pathways” glyph works well as metaphor in characterizing the
philosophy of history that you will find here. Paths are created by purposive agents, going somewhere with
an understanding of the topography. Pathways become roadways, and they become
systems of constraint and opportunity.
And they sometimes become the elements or segments of larger systems
with long historical and human consequences. They illustrate the meaning of
“path-dependence”; once the pathway exists, other approaches become less
likely. And the metaphor illustrates as well the perpetual interaction of agent
and structure that I emphasize; the plasticity of social entities; the
contingency of their specific properties; and their constraining power
influencing human choices.
This
research falls within what I would like to call a “new philosophy of history.”
Why do we need a new philosophy of history? Because the subject is intellectually important, and because
philosophy has made very little progress in this field in decades. This
research will attempt to lay out the lineaments of a “new” philosophy of
history—one informed by the best current philosophical thinking and the
best current historical writing.
The
philosophy of history was an active area of philosophical research in the
nineteenth century, and it received some attention from analytic philosophers
in the first half of the twentieth century. The discipline has not received much consideration by
philosophers in the past forty years, however.[1]
There
are at least three large areas of question within the philosophy of
history: Metaphysical questions: What is history? Is there an imperative of development in history? Are there historical patterns? Are there causes or meanings in
history? What sorts of entities
can be discerned in history (structures, states, movements, ideologies)? Epistemological questions: What is the nature of historical
knowledge? What can we know about
the past? What are the limits on
our knowledge of the past? What
varieties of evidence exist to guide and constrain historical beliefs? Methodological questions: Are there reliable methods of historiography
that can guide the historian in pursuing historical knowledge and historical
explanations? What is the rational
status of those methods? Are they
well designed to lead to good understanding of the past? Are they
“veridical”--that is, truth-enhancing, leading to an overall more truthful and
representative set of beliefs about the past?
Philosophers
have treated history from an abstract, apriori point of view. Historians have sometimes engaged in
meta-historical reflections. There
is a productive strand of thinking within the philosophy of history that
differs from each these. On this
approach, there is a bundle of middle-level conceptual questions about the
past, and the constitution of the past, that are appropriately addressed by a
philosophical perspective. What is
causation in history? What is the
role of the individual in history?
Is historical change necessary or contingent? Does history fall into discrete “periods” or “regions”? This set of questions bears some
similarity to the first the metaphysical approach, in that it asks substantive
questions about historical structures and causes. And it has something in common with the epistemological
approach as well, in that it is intended to shed light on the nature of the
phenomena concerning which we are attempting to arrive at beliefs or
interpretations. We might call
this approach one of “middle level metaphysics.”[2]
The
past dozen years has witnessed a flourishing of reflective writing about the conceptual
problems of historical understanding by historically-minded social
scientists. Such contributors as
Andrew Abbott (Abbott 1999, 2001), William Sewell (Sewell 2005), Terry McDonald (McDonald 1996), George Steinmetz (Steinmetz 2004, 2005), Kathleen Thelen (Thelen 2004), and Julia Adams (Adams, Clemens, and
Orloff 2005)
have raised probing and difficult questions about the nature of the historical
and the assumptions that we make about historical occurrences, processes, and
periods. These writings would not
be characterized by their authors as “philosophy of history”; but I believe
they are centrally important contributions to this field. And this demonstrates that the
“philosophy of history” is not exclusively a part of philosophy, but rather an
overlapping set of research interests among philosophers, social scientists,
and historians.
An outstanding
case in point is William Sewell’s recent Logics of History (Sewell 2005). Sewell addresses a handful of foundational questions about
how we should conceptualize historical processes, whether we are historical
sociologists or working historians.
The book is a perfect example of the space that exists for
intellectually profound engagement among historians, social scientists, and
philosophers on topics that are foundational to historical reasoning and
representation.
So far I have
talked a bit about why and how to pursue a philosophy of history. Let us turn now to one basic question
in the philosophy of history: What
is history? Most innocently, it is
the human past and our organized representations of that past. We can of course write about the
chronology of non-human events—the history of the solar system, the
history of the earth’s environment over a billion year expanse of time. But the key issues in the philosophy of
history arise in our representations of the human past—a point emphasized
in Collingwood’s philosophy of history ((Collingwood 1946) : 215-16). And history is fascinating for us,
because (in Marx’s words) “Men make their own history, but not in circumstances
of their own choosing” (Marx 1974 [1852]). That is to say: history reflects agency—the choices by
individuals and groups; and it reflects constraining structures and
circumstances. So historical
outcomes are neither causally determined, nor entirely plastic and
unconstrained. Therefore it is
open to the historian to attempt to discover the historical circumstances that
induced and constrained historical agents to act in one way rather than
another—thus bringing about a historical outcome of interest. So we might begin by saying that
history is a temporally ordered sequence of events and processes involving
human doings, within which there are interconnections of causality, structure,
and action, within which there is the play of accident, contingency, and
outside forces.
But we might also
say: there is no such thing as “history in general.” The description just
provided suggests that there is a comprehensible collection of historical
processes that might be characterized as a “total” human history: population
growth, urbanization, technological innovation, economic differentiation, the
growth of knowledge and culture … But this impression is highly misleading. It suggests
a degree of order and structure that history does not possess. There are only
specific histories: histories of various conditions or circumstances of
interest to us. Historical space is dense: at any given time there are
countless human actions and social processes underway in the world, and the
“cardinality” of historical events does not diminish over time. So to single out the history of
something specific—agriculture, the French Revolution, modern science,
Islam—is unavoidably to select, from the full complexity of events and
actions, an abstract set of characteristics that will be traced through a
process of development. And this
in turn raises the point that “history” depends partly on “what occurred” and
partly on “what we are interested in.” This point does not undercut the objectivity of the
past. Events and actions happened
in the past, separate from our interest in them. But to organize them into a narrative about “religious
awakening” or “formation of the absolutist state” is to impose a structure of
interpretation on them that depends inherently on the interests of the
observer. There is no such thing
as “perspective-free history.” So
there is a very clear sense in which we can assert that history is constituted
by historical interpretation and traditions of historical interest—even
though the events themselves are not.
What
does history consist of? There are
numerous usual suspects: individual actions, collective actions, enduring
structures, political regimes, social classes, ideologies and mentalities,
… I take the position that all
social facts consist of socially situated individuals acting in given social
and historical circumstances (Little 2006). This implies that structures, regimes, classes, or
mentalities are ontologically subordinate; they are constituted and embodied in
the states of action and mentality of socially situated individuals. This approach, which I denote as
“methodological localism,” has an implication for the question of the nature of
history. We might define a happening as an incident in which one or more
persons act, singly or in concert.
Happenings are then objective occurrences in space and time. History is
a congeries of happenings, in which individuals and groups constitute goals,
arrive at identities, and engage in internal development and action. And we
might say that larger historical entities—states, regimes, social
classes, revolutions, wars—are constructs created by the historian and
the social scientist as an analytical tool for drawing together a constellation
of happenings. So a large
historical event—the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks during the
Russian Revolution, say—can be understood as a constellation of
happenings, drawn together conceptually in an act of historical unification.
What is the nature
of a “historical event”? Are
events objectively given, or are they constructed in the representations of
persons, storytellers, and historians?
Something is objectively given; things happen. Stones are thrown, speeches are made, children go hungry,
within a specific period of time and in a given geographical domain. The question is whether these speeches,
acts of violence, moments of hunger and anger, aggregate objectively into
“events”. One period of time in
France might be variously characterized as “famine with attendant social
violence,: “incipient rebellion in the context of widespread hunger,”
“ecological crisis creating hardship and collective violence”. That is to say: the higher-level
historical event must be constructed by observers, participants, and
interpreters—even granting that the materials of which the large event is
composed are themselves objective historical realities. And of course there is the fact that a
single human action is amenable to multiple to multiple interpretations; so
even this grain of historical reality is at least partly constructed rather
than given.
This
is not to say that historical events have no historical reality; it is to say
that there is a contestable and elastic relationship between the positing of an
event and the underlying happenings that made it up.[3]
There
is a further complication about events, in that we can ask how they were
conceptualized, understood, and analyzed by participants, and we can ask how
they are best conceptualized for the purpose of historical explanation. It is likely that there is a
substantial difference between “folk understandings” and after-the-fact
analytical conceptualizations.
Perhaps the typical Roman citizen would not have described his society
as a Republic, and yet it may be that reference to the Roman Republic is an
effective way of bundling together a set of historical agencies and structures
that historical explanation favors.
Did ordinary Chinese peasants in 1936 know that they were living through
a “revolution” in its early stages?
Certainly not.
Let
us turn now to the question of historical things. Are there objective historical entities, structures, or
processes? And are such things a
legitimate and feasible object of knowledge by the historian? The perspective of methodological
localism mentioned above gives some basis for an answer to this question. But let us first turn to the resource
of innovative social scientists to see what new light can be shed. Andrew Abbott is one of the most innovative
and fruitful sociologists working in the United States today. Most insightful is his formulation of
the ontological questions that sociologists need to raise—but seldom do:
what is a social structure or entity? How do actors create, embody, and change
the social world around them? His ontological insights are most clearly expressed
in Department and Discipline (Abbott 1999), a micro-study of the
“Chicago school of sociology.” He analyzes the historical twists and turns of
this “school”—the founders, the theories, the department politics, the American
Journal of Sociology, the American
Sociological Association.[4] But more profoundly, he draws sharp
attention to the fluidity and permutability of this social “entity.” A social
entity is not a fixed thing with stable properties. It is rather a continuing
swirl of linked social activities and practices, themselves linked to other
“separate” social traditions.[5]
And particularly important, he endorses a social localism—that all social
facts are carried by socially constructed individuals in action. He writes,
“The entire social world is made up of local interaction, and even the
“largest” of events ... have to be built or recreated or reversed moment to
moment.... No structure exists
outside the current present, immune to action” (225).
This set of views captures much of what I have come to believe is most fundamental about social ontology. First, it is scientifically important for historians and social scientists to arrive at a more adequate understanding of the social ontology that underlies their work, and such an ontology can be reasonably simple. The socially constituted agent within a set of social relations and institutions provides us a rich basis for characterizing social phenomena, and permits us to hypothesize higher-level structures and institutions as well.
Second, higher-level social structures exist; but they have their properties solely in virtue of the specific practices, rules, and arrangements that constitute them at a time and within a group of people. Higher-level structures are composed of the individuals, networks, and sub-institutions that coordinate and constrain the actions of persons throughout the scope of the social structure.
Third, macro-social entities exercise causal properties through the individuals who constitute them at a given time. Social entities convey causal properties through their effects, direct and indirect, on individuals and agency.
Fourth, social structures and institutions are plastic over time and space. We need to exercise great caution in postulating high-level abstract structures that recur across instances—state, mode of production, protestant ethic, Islam. Social institutions, structures, and practices “morph” over time in response to opportunism and power by the participants.
Why
does it matter? Because bad method
leads to bad science; because too many disciplines possess the feature that
Wittgenstein attributes to psychology: “Psychology consists of experimental
methods and conceptual confusion” (Wittgenstein 1968) [6];
and because historical thinking is particularly prone to the error of
reification—the postulation of permanent, fixed entities that “cause”
other outcomes to occur. But likewise, historical writing is sometimes pushed
to extremes at the other end of the spectrum: excessive “micro”-level studies,
excessive attention to the particulars of the actors with disregard of the
circumstances in which they act; excessive allegiance to the goal of getting
the narrative exactly right. It is
both challenging and important to try to figure out what it is that historians
are doing across a wide range of successful practice, with a range of levels of
focus; and to ask how these historical writings might tie together.
So
it is indeed important to reinvigorate the discipline of the philosophy of
history. But it cannot proceed by
picking up the traces from Hempel or Gardner, or from Hegel or Gadamer. Those fields have proven barren. We need to pose new and more
penetrating questions. We need to
work in close concert with the most gifted historians and historical social
scientists. And we need to arrive
at a framework of discussion that invites even more innovative and illuminating
historical research and explanation in the future.
Abbott,
Andrew Delano. 1999. Department & discipline : Chicago sociology at one
hundred. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
———.
2001. Time matters : on theory and method.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Adams,
Julia, Elisabeth Stephanie Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, eds. 2005. Remaking
modernity : politics, history, and sociology,
Politics, history, and culture.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Bengtsson,
Tommy , and et al. 2004. Life under pressure : mortality and living
standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, The
MIT Press Eurasian population and family history series. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Bloch,
Marc Léopold Benjamin. 1963. The historian's craft. [Manchester, Eng.]: Manchester University Press.
Carr,
Edward Hallett. 1962. What is history?
[1st American ] ed, The George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures, 1961. New York,: Knopf.
Danto,
Arthur Coleman. 1965. Analytical philosophy of history. Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press.
Dray,
William H. 1964. Philosophy of history.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
Gardiner,
Patrick L. 1952. The nature of historical explanation. London: Oxford University Press.
———.
1974. The philosophy of history, Oxford
readings in philosophy. London ; New York:
Oxford University Press.
Hempel,
Carl. 1942. The Function of General Laws in History. In Aspects of
Scientific Explanation, edited by C.
Hempel.
Hexter,
J. H. 1971. Doing history. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Little,
Daniel. 2006. Levels the Social. In Handbook for Philosophy of Anthropology
and Sociology, edited by S. Turner and M.
Risjord. Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier Publishing.
McDonald,
Terrence J., ed. 1996. The historic turn in the human sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Perdue,
Peter C. 2005. China marches west : the Qing conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Pomeranz,
Kenneth. 2000. The great divergence : Europe, China, and the making of the
modern world economy, The
Princeton economic history of the Western world. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Sabel,
Charles F., and Jonathan Zeitlin. 1997. Worlds of possibility : flexibility
and mass production in western industrialization, Studies in modern capitalism = Etudes sur le capitalisme
moderne. Cambridge [England] ; New York:
Maison des sciences de l'homme ; Cambridge University Press.
Sewell,
William Hamilton. 2005. Logics of history : social theory and social
transformation, Chicago studies
in practices of meaning. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Steinmetz,
George. 2004. Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and
"Small N's" in Sociology. Sociological Theory 22 (3).
———,
ed. 2005. The politics of method in the human sciences : positivism and its
epistemological others, Politics,
history, and culture. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Thelen,
Kathleen Ann. 2004. How institutions evolve : the political economy of
skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein,
Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical investigations.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Wong,
R. Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of
European Experience. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press.
[1] Analytic
philosophy of history is represented by (Hempel 1942), (Gardiner 1952, 1974), (Dray 1964), and (Danto 1965). “Substantive” or “speculative” philosophy of history was the
work of such thinkers as Vico, Herder, Hegel, Fichte, Croce, Collingwood, and
Toynbee. One might include Marx’s theory of historical materialism on this list
as well.
[2] Historians
who have written at this mid-level of meta-history include (Wong 1997), (Pomeranz 2000), (Sabel and Zeitlin 1997), and (Bengtsson and al 2004). Each of these authors raises
new questions about historical comparisons, the units of space and time that
make for useful comparisons, and the reality of historical alternatives for
large historical processes.
[3] When Peter Perdue (Perdue 2005) walks carefully through the series of diplomatic calculations, negotiations, tributes, campaigns, battles, retreats, and shifting alliances that constituted the three-way relationship between Qing, Russia, and Inner Asia, he relies on historical documents that record various conversations and decisions; various historical movements of troops; various victories and defeats by the several players and leaders. Various things happened; and the historian can pull these happenings together into a somewhat orderly representation that sheds light on the causes, constraints, opportunities, and contingencies that permitted events to develop in this way rather than that. In Perdue’s case, he provides an eventful narrative of development of the struggle over Inner Asia, and he emphasizes the contingency of the linkages of these events in historical context.
[4] He writes, “What does it mean to say that a social thing exists: that the Chicago school was or is something? ... The Chicago school, I shall argue, was not a thing, a fixed arrangement of social relationships or intellectual ideas that obtained at a given time. It was rather a tradition of such relationships and ideas combined with a conception of how that tradition should be reproduced over time” ((Abbott 1999) : 1).
[5] “What we usually call social things—the Chicago school—are not so much things as processes, ways of becoming that are characteristic of particular locales in social life.... I argued that all social things are traditions—lineages was my word—and that the secret of their thingness lies in the way they bind together various preceding lineages in the social process.... The continuity of names should not fool us into believing in the continuity of the named” (Abbott 1999) : 223).
[6] “The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a “young science”; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings...For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion...The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by” (Wittgenstein, 1968, II xiv, 232e).