Modern Historiography: an Introduction

195 Pages·2.213 MB·English

by  Bentley, Michael

MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY
MODERN
HISTORIOGRAPHY
An Introduction
Michael Bentley
London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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© 1999 Michael Bentley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bentley, Michael
Modern historiography : an introduction/Michael Bentley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Historiography. I. Title.
D13.B427 1999
907'.2-dc21 98–39603
CIP
ISBN 0-203-98173-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-20267-1 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
Preface v
Prelude 1
1 The Enlightenment 9
2 The Counter-Enlightenment 17
3 Romanticism 25
4 Ranke 35
5 The Voice of Science 43
6 Culture and Kultur 53
7 The English ‘Whigs’ 63
8 Towards an Historical ‘Profession’ 73
9 Crisis over Method 83
10 From the New World 95
11 Annales: The French School 105
12 Repression and Exile 117
13 Post-War Moods 129
14 The History of the Present 139
Postscript 151
References 163
Further Reading in English 179
Index 181
PREFACE
Most of this brief account first appeared in 1997 as part of a large-scale
study of historiography, edited by the present writer and published by
Routledge under the title Companion to Historiography. There were and
are strong arguments for leaving it there. The piece had taken shape in
an attempt to provide some context for a number of essays aimed at
analysing recent currents in historical thinking; and to that extent the
self-conscious positioning of trends and schools and moods that the
reader will find in this essay defies easy translation into a free-standing
survey. It too readily acquires an authorial voice that descants without
ground bass or counterpoint such as the sister studies offered in the
Companion. Not only that, but the accompaniment of many pieces that
had explored the nature of historiography before the onset of the
modern era (or had done so in an Asian or Middle-Eastern setting) made
it possible to throw those using the Companion into the Enlightenment
or romantic period with only a cursory allusion to what had gone before
and without any serious comparative ambition. The text assumes, in
other words, that the reader is already well down the runway with
engines roaring: those still taxi-ing may feel with some justification that
they deserve a smoother departure and wish to return to the gentler pace
of the larger study.
Perhaps these and other considerations made it necessary that any
recommendation to excerpt the piece should come from someone
else. The suggestion came initially from an old friend and colleague,
R.I. Moore, who asked Routledge to look into the possibility of
reissuing the essay as a short book. Following some discussion and
helpful reports from readers, we decided to go ahead with this proposal,
largely on the strength of two considerations. First, the larger volume
had been intended for reference collections in libraries and its cost
placed this brief account beyond the pocket of most students and faculty.
There seemed much sense in finding a format that would allow an
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inexpensive paperback issue of the most ‘immediate’ section of it so that
students could use it in studying their history courses or as part of a
general approach to the subject. But a second thought also appeared
germane. Something approaching a revolution in the status and content
of historiography is currently underway; and it struck both author and
publisher that some good might be done by making this review of
recent discussion more widely available at once.
Time was when ‘historiography’ featured as an optional extra in
university and college curricula. Students would be made to sit an
examination in ‘General History’ (deemed the more challenging for its
never having been taught); or possibly some aged member of staff
would cast his or her thoughts across a lifetime’s empirical work in the
archives and tell an audience what history was about. Or large classes of
students, especially in the US, would find themselves in a 101-style
survey of ‘classic’ historical writing which could find a fit with World
Civs as a staple of undergraduate education. None of these approaches
deserves to be despised: some of them were well-judged and effectively
presented. Occasionally a student would be fired by experiencing them
into taking a genuine interest in historical assumptions and tendencies
or into thinking more critically about a particular author or text. What
united this sort of teaching, all the same, was a sense of luxury, of icing
on the cake. It might be made ‘interesting’, but until around 1970 few
teachers raised the awkwardness that historiography ought to be seen as
a crucial ingredient in the cake itself rather than its superficial
decoration. Now, undoubtedly, the running together of ‘history’ and
‘historiography’ into an intellectual form in which one eliminates and
substitutes for the other has become pernicious: it makes no more sense
to argue for fusion than it does for treating one of the elements as
redundant. And in recent years a rather trite form of postmodern
‘understanding’—triter for the unbearable vacuities of its vocabulary
— has implied that history is finished as a form of intellectual enquiry
because it has been shown to reveal nothing but what historians happen
to believe at any particular period—a conclusion which ‘historiography’
is supposed to prove. None the less we live in a world whose ‘turn’
towards postmodern questions has done inestimable good in shaking
one of the more conservative disciplines to its foundations and giving
rise to much innovative and intelligent writing. Rarely has a generation
had the opportunity of the current cohort of students to rethink what
history means. Very heaven is it now to be young, bright and eager to
think about the past and what the study of it can yield. This is the
environment in which historiography has moved to centre-stage as a
core element in any historical education, and this is the rationale for
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reflections such as the ones offered in this sketch of historiographical
developments since the Enlightenment.
‘Historiography’ means at least two things and this account is about
only one of them. At its highest level of originality, an historiographical
statement may attempt an enquiry which former generations would have
been happier to call ‘philosophy of history’ in an applied form. It might
range from Hegel’s bewildering and magical visions of time’s patterns,
through Marx’s extraordinary penetration of them, on towards Dilthey’s
never-written Critique of Historical Reason to the works of Croce and
Ortega y Gasset and Raymond Aron in Europe, of Oakeshott and
Collingwood in Britain. At a less elevated, but no less original level,
modern analytical historiography has produced instances of deep-
structural enquiry which has brought to the surface important aspects of
a particular writer or school of historical writing. Such work has left
virtually no major historian of the nineteenth or early-twentieth
centuries looking now as he or she looked twenty years ago.
Researchers have taken their own questions—moulded inevitably by the
intellectual climate that has fastened itself on the West over the last
quarter-century—and used them to expose layers of meaning and
possible connections with worlds outside history that had eluded
scholars who had brought no less intelligence and training to their texts
but whose objectives and starting-points had sent them elsewhere. So
when we now review the historical work of Edward Gibbon or Thomas
Carlyle or Jules Michelet or Theodor Mommsen or the nineteenth-
century’s historical titan, Leopold von Ranke, the shelves contain
critical accounts which locate these authors in ways that would not have
been attempted until quite recently. The task of supplying such critiques,
which often seem as demanding to read as to write, falls to the
historiographer and one definition of historiography is that it is the class
or set of all such studies.
But that is not what this book does. How could it in so short an
account of so many historians? What we shall be examining in these
pages is rather a subject that once might have been labelled ‘the history
of historiography’. The task lies not in providing an original reading or
interpretation of any single writer or school but instead to seek
freshness of viewpoint by offering a synthetic account which searches
for connection and comparison and which is not afraid to look beyond
the subject of history for explanation of what historians do and how they
think. It seeks sophistication less in its depth than in its width and in the
shaping of its narrative—one of many that could have been contrived—
to explain developments with maximum clarity. Nor does a history of this
kind escape its contemporary climate any more than would a
viii
substantive history of the period or a detailed analysis of a given writer.
Just as the modern historiographer applies an older ‘philosophy of
history’ in new ways, so an historian of historiography moves beyond
what a previous generation might have believed to be relevant or
appropriate; and the result is a text that has a different scope and an
expanded sense of what historical ‘knowledge’ might be taken to
include. The greatest historiographer of the twentieth century, Arnaldo
Momigliano, knew more about historical writing than the present writer
could ever pretend to know; and his work will live on undimmed into the
next century. Yet even he supplies a fascinating case in point, since his
own horizons of explanation were formed during the turbulent politics
and positivist intellectual environment of the 1930s and 1940s. When he
constructed his insights into the working of an historical mind, he made
them from within that horizon and asked the questions that seemed
most urgent within the mental landscape around him. In the longer
perspective we have of his work and from inside a different
Weltanschauung, the commentator has himself become an object of
study, the historiographer an example of his own subject. No one will
‘supersede’ Momigliano; but we may choose to see his world through
lenses he did not have and paint in colours he would have avoided.
‘Are you a postmodernist?’ The tedious question emerges
pretty quickly among gatherings of historians nervous of historiography
and terrified by ‘theory’. It is meant to carry the same force that ‘Are
you a Protestant?’ might have exerted during the Counter-Reformation.
It is a bad question in that it has no serious or unambiguous answer.
Those who reply in the negative are often historians whose work suggests
that they are in fact irremediably steeped in the poison they pride
themselves on having refused to swallow. Equally, those who adopt the
label with triumphal complacency are often underpowered individuals
who would welcome any argot that made them appear discerning
intellectuals. Better, perhaps, to move beyond an assumed contrast of
position and recognize, quite simply, that the form and content of
discussion throughout the humanities since the 1970s have shifted in
ways that have produced distinctive approaches to many of the concepts
that historians assume every day—knowledge, understanding,
imagination, explanation, analysis, narrative—and that, whether the
result has been desirable or not, no one but a hermit in a cave is likely to
have remained unaffected by some of them if only in self-conscious
reaction. Indeed consciousness itself has been the victor in this dubious
jihad. We may not all be postmodernists but we are, each of us, more
self-conscious about what we are trying to achieve in writing history
(and about the obstacles in our way) than the generations of the 1950s,
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say, had any reason to be. Complaints heard everywhere that history has
become obscure rest on an important truth as well as a weary groan.
Historians have lost some of their transparency because they have
learned that historiography teaches blurredness in its constant assertion
of cultural interference and the predominance of standpoint. Once allow
historiography a role in an understanding of how history fashions itself,
therefore, and complexity comes in through every pore with its
contested assumptions and tortured mentalités.
Horizons of explanation and landscapes of the mind form part of the
texture of this introductory volume. To those who accuse it of
superficiality I submit immediately. Many specialist writers know more
about all the historians mentioned here than the present writer and all of
them know more about one or two. I have ransacked the writing of
others in order to compose my account and gladly acknowledge the help
and expertise of those without whom no general view could be achieved.
Sometimes, however, specialists spend more time looking down than
across; and very knowledgeable scholars, let alone students, can learn a
little by glancing sideways to see how history was constructed in a
different country or former epoch. ‘The past is a foreign country’ has
become historiography’s most persistent cliché as well as its most
worthless. For the very description that the past can never fulfil is that
of a visitable place or space: its essential no-where-ness and nothing-
ness is what makes us project our images of it. This little book is about
those images as they are implied in historical accounts written at
various moments and in a number of intellectual locations over the past
two hundred years. Not unreasonably in an introduction, it does no more
than introduce. If one student picks it up and comes away thinking that
history is a good subject because it makes the mind turn by challenging
it to explain why the past looks the way it does, and why it once looked
some other way, then the project will attain its objective. If one
professional historian glances at it and finds three sentences that stimulate
a cultural comparison or a tremor in perspective, then it will more than
serve its modest purpose.