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History and Present Problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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A dream, or perhaps a nightmare, could conceivably haunt the historian's night, in which he imagines that by some chance the agencies in our society which pour forth largesse to subsidize research should undergo a startling conversion and, frightened by social problems or wearying of the senseless march of technology, permit themselves for a moment to doubt whether what our civilization needs most is more and more instruments of destruction, trips to the moon, ever faster and noisier airplanes, etc. Suppose in sheer desperation they turned to the historian for help? What would he answer? It is perhaps comforting to know that such a turn of events is all but inconceivable. Still, the mere thought leads one to reflect, and to remark how little systematic consideration is given to this simple and obvious question. What can historians and history contribute to the solution of existing political and social problems?
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- Copyright © 1969 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Arthur F. Wright has observed that belief in the pattern of repetition (the Chinese "dynastic cycle") helped it to happen. (Certain stock market prognostication theories seem to work the same way). Louis Gottschalk, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History (University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 42.
2 The Spirit of the Age (1831), p. 3. Similarly, the view that history is useful because it trains the mind in critical methodology, teaching habits of careful observation and social analysis, is vulnerable to the criticism that this kind of skill can as readily be acquired by working on present situations.
3 See especially William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford University Press, 1957). The massive rejection of Toynbee's essentially positivistic system may be seen in numerous places, perhaps best in Toynbee's own Reconsiderations (Oxford, 1960). The rather confused revival of scientism among some younger historians, some of whom seem to think that using a computer makes one a scientist, is scarcely worth noting except as a sign of the current malaise among historians; for some comments see G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (Thomas Crowell, 1967), pp. 27-39.
4 A good deal of modern scientific historicizing has combined the two in proposing that there is not one great stream of history but a number of separate and distinct societies or civilizations, whose patterns of development may be compared so as to yield "laws" expressed as similar and necessary states or processes through which all societies must pass. If there was only one stream of history, the impossibility of prediction would be clear: " If a unique plant lived forever and suffered changes throughout its career we should not be able to formulate any law in regard to its life cycle as a whole." Morris R. Cohen, The Meaning of Human History (Open Court Publ. Co., 1947), p. 40.
5 For a discussion see R. G. Collingwood, Essays in Philosophy of History (University of Texas Press, 1965), pp. 13 ff. In his recent biography of Gibbon, Joseph Swain notes that the great historian was a failure as a practical politician because he saw both sides of questions, quite a handicap in Parliament.
6 Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (Yale University Press, 1958), p. 285.
7 Strange Defeat (Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 118.
8 See for example M. M. Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History (Norton, 1948), pp. 392-398. Marx usually refused to predict, calling this utopian and saying that " the man who draws up a program for the future is a reactionary." He went astray mostly in mistaking an actual happening for something else which his theory led him to expect.
9 See Douglas Johnson, Guizot (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), also Karl Weintraub, chapter on Guizot in Visions of Culture (University of Chicago, 1966). Johnson notes that Victor Cousin's "eclecticism," which was the source of Guizot's historicism, tended to "follow events rather than direct them," presenting " no ideal and no vision." It must be noted that the ideal and the vision, in the case of socialist and other prophetic historicisms, do not really come from history, but are imposed upon it from outside and married to historicism in a dubious ceremony.
10 Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (Beacon, 1957) is the most celebrated demonstration of these points.
11 Collingwood, op. cit., p. 68. That historians are reluctant to abandon the prophetic function is suggested in H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and Science (Harper, 1964), p. 88, in a line or two of wistful support for "the predictive character of (the historian's) thought" on which, however, nothing more is said despite a promise to do so in the next chapter.
12 Cf. Cushing Strout, on "Causation and the American Civil War," in George H. Nadel, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of History (Harper, 1966): "After nearly a hundred years of passionate and dispassionate inquiry into the ‘causes of the Civil war' the debate is still inconclusive," and moreover endlessly repetitive.
13 This Whig Interpretation of History (Norton, 1965), pp. 131-132.
14 Frederic Harrison, The Meaning of History (1894), p. 7. Cf. James Anthony Froude, "The Science of History," in Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867), and Paul Valéry's famous comment, in Discours de l'histoire (1932), that " It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything." For a typical example of making the best of this by way of praising the "committed" historian, see Page Smith, The Historian and History (Knopf, 1964), pp. 228-231.
15 John H. Randall Jr., Nature and Historical Experience: Essays in Naturalism and in the Theory of History (Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 23-28.
16 The Listener, September 14, 1967, p. 323.
17 " Currents of Thought in Historiography," American Historical Review, vol. XLII (1937), p. 482.
18 Hughes, op. cit., p. 107.
19 Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 126-139. Gallie argues that historical examples fortify our beliefs and that this in some sense constitutes supplying them, but surely this is a logical error. He admits that history could provide us with "wrong" as well as "right" values; doubtless he means that Hitler and Stalin felt as much fortified by history as Churchill and Roosevelt.
20 Political Science Quarterly, vol. LVI (1941), pp. 23-37.
21 Paul Weiss, History: Written and Lived (Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), p. 52.
22 Folke Dovring, History as Social Science (M. Nijhoff, 1960), p. 91.
23 Joel Hurstfield, "That Arch-liar Froude," Listener, July 9, 1953.
24 G. Lowes Dickinson, in Atlantic Monthly, January, 1915. For Ortega's view, see the chapter on him in Weintraub, op. cit.
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