When historians discuss methodological issues in their research they
more commonly refer to “historiography” than to “philosophy of history.” What
is the relation between these bodies of thought about the writing of history?
We should begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its
most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices.
Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and
heuristics about how to proceed, and “experts” evaluate the performances of
practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the
standards. So one task we always have in considering an expert activity is to
attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is
true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history.
Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular
body of historical writing.
Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those
claims based on the reasoning they present. So, a major aspect of the study of
historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and
standards of reasoning for historical inquiry. We presume that historians want
to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that
they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by
standards of scientific rationality. So,
the apprentice practitioner seeks to gain knowledge of the practices of his/her
elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling argument, how to assess a
body of archival evidence, how to offer or criticize an interpretation of
complex events that necessarily exceeds the available evidence. The
historiographer has a related task: he/she would like to be able to codify the
main methods and standards of one historical school or another.
There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these
criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Discerning the
historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So,
discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian's
work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the
student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of
historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or
school.
A full historiographic “scan” of a given historian might include
questions like these: What methods of discovery does he/she use? What
rhetorical and persuasive goals does he/she pursue? What models of explanation?
What paradigm of presentation? What standards of style and rhetoric? What interpretive
assumptions?
A historical “school” might be defined as a group of interrelated
historians who share a significant number of specific assumptions about
evidence, explanation, and narrative. Historiography becomes itself historical
when we recognize that these frameworks of assumptions about historical
knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of
historical thinking and writing is itself an interesting subject. How did
historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and
presentation of history? Under this rubric we find books on the historiography
of the ancient Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of
German romanticism. Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient historians fall
in this category (Momigliano 1990). In a nutshell, Momigliano is looking at the
several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set of normative practices
that can be dissected and understood in their specificity and their cultural
contexts.
A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more
present-oriented and methodological. It involves the study and analysis of
historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by
more-or-less contemporary historians. How do contemporary historians go about
their tasks of understanding the past? Here we can reflect upon the
historiographical challenges. Sometimes these issues have to do with the
scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical records. Sometimes they
have to do with the difficulty of interpreting historical sources.
An important question that arises in historiography is that of the
status of the notion of “global history.” One important reason for thinking
globally as an historian is the fact that the history discipline—since the
Greeks—has tended to be Eurocentric in its choice of topics, framing
assumptions, and methods. Economic and political history, for example, often
privileges the industrial revolution in England and the creation of the modern
bureaucratic state in France, Britain, and Germany, as being exemplars of
“modern” development in economics and politics. This has led to a tendency to
look at other countries' development as non-standard or stunted. So global
history is, in part, a framework within which the historian avoids privileging
one regional center as primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong
makes this point very strongly in China Transformed (Wong 1997). Because China organized
his bureaucratic state thousands of years ago.
Second is the related fact that when Western historical thinkers—for
example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu—have turned their attention to Asia, they
have often engaged in a high degree of stereotyping without much factual
historical knowledge. The ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation,
and Chinese stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the
intricate and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a
single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of thought. So, doing
“global” history means paying rigorous attention to the specificities of
social, political, and cultural arrangements in other parts of the world
besides Europe.
So a historiography that takes global diversity seriously should be
expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more open to
discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in the experiences of
India, China, Indochina, the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire, and Sub-Saharan
Africa. Variation and complexity are what we should expect, not stereotyped
simplicity. A global history needs to free itself from Eurocentrism.
This step away from Eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied
by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically interesting.
So, a global history ought to be global and trans-national in its selection of
topics—even while recognizing the fact that all historical research is
selective. A globally oriented historian will recognize that the political
systems of classical India are as interesting and complex as the organization
of the Roman Republic.
An important current underlying much work in global history is the
reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the
equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and nation building in the
1960s and 1970s. “The world” was important in the early-modern capitals of Great
Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium because those nations exerted colonial
rule in various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. So there was a
specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those
societies—in order to better govern them and exploit them. And post-colonial
states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global historiography in their
own universities and knowledge systems, in order to better understand and
better critique the forming relations of the past.
A final way in which history needs to become global is to incorporate
the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in non-western
countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world developments. Indian
and Chinese historians have their own intellectual traditions in conducting
historical research and explanation; a global history is one that pays
attention to the insights and arguments of these traditions. So global
historiography has to do with a broadened definition of the arena of historical
change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas; a
recognition of the complexity and sophistication of institutions and systems in
many parts of the world; a recognition of the trans-national interrelatedness
that has existed among continents for at least four centuries; and a
recognition of the complexity and distinctiveness of different national
traditions of historiography
Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some of
these issues .Sachsenmaier devotes much of his attention to the last point
mentioned here, the “multiple global perspectives” point. He wants to take this
idea seriously and try to discover some of the implications of different
national traditions of academic historiography. He writes, “It will become
quite clear that in European societies the question of historiographical
traditions tended to be answered in ways that were profoundly different from
most academic communities in other parts of the world”
As should be clear from these remarks, there is a degree of overlap
between historiography and the philosophy of history in the fact that both are
concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are
used in various historical traditions. That said, historiography is generally
more descriptive and less evaluative than the philosophy of history. And it is
more concerned with the specifics of research and writing than is the
philosophy of history.
Topics from the
historians
There is another current of thinking about the philosophy of history
that deserves more attention from philosophers than it has so far received. It
is the work of philosophically minded historians and historical social
scientists treating familiar but badly understood historical concepts:
causation, historical epoch, social structure, human agency, mentality, and the
like. These writings represent a middle-level approach to issues having to do
with the logic of historical discourse. This approach puts aside the largest
questions—“Does history have meaning?”, “Can we have knowledge of the past?”—in
favor of questions that are more intimately associated with the actual reasoning
and discourse of historians as they attempt to categorize and explain the past.
Contributions at this level might be referred to as “middle-level
historical ontology”. This aspect of current philosophy of history brings the
discipline into close relation to the philosophy of the special sciences
(biology, sociology, archaeology). Philosophically reflective historians ask
critical questions about the concepts and assumptions that are often brought
into historical thinking, and they attempt to provide more adequate explication
of these concepts given their own encounters with the challenges of historical
research and historical explanation. William Sewell provides an example in his
treatment of the concept of a “historical event” and the associated assumptions
that social scientists make about the temporality of historical events. Andrew
Abbott questions the assumptions that historians make about the ontological
status of “historical things” (for example, the Chicago school of sociology),
arguing that historical things are inherently malleable and plastic over time.
Charles Tilly challenges a common assumption that causal reasoning depends on
identifying background causal regularities; he argues instead for an approach
to causal reasoning that emphasizes the role of concrete causal mechanisms,.
Simon Schama questions the concept of an objective historical narrative that
serves to capture the true state of affairs about even fairly simple historical
occurrences. Charles Sabel casts doubt on the idea of fixed patterns of
historical development, arguing that there were alternative pathways available
even within the classic case of economic development in western Europe.
Marshall Sahlins underlines the essential role that the interpretation of
culture should play in our ability to read history—whether of the Peloponnesian
War or the Polynesian War, and sheds important new light on the question of the
“historical subject” or agent of history . And the literary critic and advocate
of the “new historicism” in literary studies, Stephen Greenblatt, demonstrates
the historical insights that can result from a close literary reading of some
of the primary documents of history—for example, the journals of Christopher
Columbus. As these examples illustrate, there is ample room for productive
exchange between philosophers with an interest in the nature of history and the
historians and social scientists who have reflected deeply on the complexities
of the concepts and assumptions we use in historical analysis.
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