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Question 4 Have more recent discussions of historical practice made any significant advances on earlier discussions of how historians go about what they do?
Earlier discussions of historical practice centred on the debate between those historians who claimed that history was a science and those who insisted it was an art. From the nineteenth century onwards, historians have still been engaged in this dispute, but discussions have not moved in a linear progression whereby continuing advancement has been made. In recent twentieth century discussions, it appears that new and innovative models have been formed but on closer analysis, it is evident that many of the older themes and theories have simply been adopted. Historians have then, it seems, modernised the views to fit the current era or/and extended on what had originally been argued.

The assertion that history was a science in which a systematic and rigorous method was required to uncover the facts of the past originated from the German historian Leopold von Ranke, the father of scientific history1 and was supported by those such as John Bury some years later. Ranke was determined in his study of history only to show what actually happened, and he was resolute that the facts needed to be strictly presented.2 Thus, he strongly objected to philosophy of history and its leading figure, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had argued that history and historical events were independent of one another, and that there was a general directing will guiding the development of the human race.3 This was criticised by both Ranke and Karl Marx, who contended that the physical, the actual living man, was the basis to understanding the past and forwarding the present.4 Unlike the philosophers, who had simply interpreted the world, Marx wanted to change it,5 and Ranke thought this only possible through the separation of the two disciplines and the establishment of history as autonomous.6

Furthermore, Ranke insisted that when evaluating sources, historians must adopt a technique of analysis that applied critical methods, if an objective and universal history of mankind was to be attained.7 These procedures were embraced by Bury, who argued that the sole aim of a historian was to present an untainted and unpainted truth, which could only be achieved through critical method.8 Bury held a firm belief in history as a science and was committed to the concept of progress; he believed that a true knowledge of the past was essential to developing the future and hence an interest in causality or at the very least historical

Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present , (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 64 2 Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History from Voltaire to Present, (New York, Vintage Books, 1973), p. 57 3 Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History, (2nd edn), (New York, Routledge, 2008), p. 297 4 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur, (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 106 5 Ibid., p. 123 6 Stern, The Varieties of History, p. 54 7 Iggers, The German Conception of History, p. 64; Stern, The Varieties of History, p. 61 8 Stern, The Varieties of History, p. 212

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patterns, which would explain how society operated.9 He was adamant that once the practical importance of history was realised, the discipline would occupy a much larger place within national education.10 This is important when considering the period because the nineteenth century was the age of science; science was becoming professionalised and it held a privileged and prestigious position. Ultimately, historians wanted this same status for their discipline.

However, the claim that history was a science was not universally accepted. Thomas Macaulay disagreed with Ranke and Bury that history should be solely concerned with hard facts and George Trevelyan argued that history was an art. Macaulay believed that a work of history needed to be truthful, a historian must abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis, but it also needed to produce a narrative that captivated and educated the reader, thus a balance between reason and imagination was essential.11 This balance was something, he believed, that Herodotus had not achieved. He was praised as the best Romantic historian, but was not seen to have composed a good history because he depended too much on imagination and told everything dramatically, much like a small child with a simple mind.12 During the nineteenth century, Herodotus was dismissed by many historians because he was considered too accessible and accessibility ultimately translated as simplistic and inappropriate for the professionalism that had been prescribed to history.

Macaulay, unlike Ranke and Bury, refused to believe that a universal truth was possible. In his 1828 essay History, he uses an analogy to portrait painting to illustrate that no history can present us with the whole truth. For no painting can be exactly like the original; the artist does not view his subject through a powerful microscope and he does not transfer to the canvas the pores of the skin, the blood vessels of the eye.13 In order for a history to be absolutely true it would need to record all the slightest particulars and all the slightest transactions and that was simply not possible.14 Therefore, the historian should cease in attempting to produce perfection and instead adopt the narrative techniques of antiquarian and novelist, Sir Walter Scott, in order to produce an improved history.15

Trevelyan further contended that an unbiased, objective and complete view of history did not exist by explaining that one cannot ever give an entirely true account of the causes of the French Revolution because it is impossible to know the psychology of 25 million people, thus there will only ever be interpretations.16 Trevelyan went further than Macaulay in his argument concerning narrative; he believed that the historians
9

John Cannon et al., The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, (Oxford, Blackwell Reference, 1988), p. 59; Stern, The Varieties of History, p. 217 10 Stern, The Varieties of History, p. 216 11 Ibid., p. 72 12 Ibid., p. 73, 74 13 Ibid., p. 76 14 Ibid., p. 76 15 Ibid., p. 87, 89 16 Ibid., p. 231

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first duty was to tell the story, as the art of history always remained the art of narrative.17 Hence, he condemned the German method of doing history and thus Ranke, because it essentially substituted the narrative for facts.18 However, Anthony Grafton in his book The Footnote: A Curious History, has argued that Ranke was concerned with creating a powerful narrative and did not just consider the actual facts, and so modern scholars are not sure whether he was the first scientific historian or the last Romantic.19 This I think shows that there was a surprising amount of overlap between the earlier discussions of historical practice, as even Trevelyan agreed that there was an element of science within history the accumulation of facts and sifting of evidence.20

This overlap is also visible in the more recent discussions of how historians go about what they do, whereby many of the earlier themes and theories have been drawn on, extended or modernised, thus it appears that significant advancements have not actually been made. In the first half of the twentieth century, French historian Marc Bloch adopted the view of history as a scientific discipline, but he essentially modernised the nineteenth century theory. Peter Burke has explained how Bloch was determined to move away from the type of history represented by Ranke; he argued Ranke wrote narrowly about political and military events and portrayed them as great deeds of great men.21 But for Bloch, history should study laws and trade, morals and manner a history of society.22 This rejection of political history reflected the anti political feeling in France at the time. The Dreyfus Affair, in which captain Alfred Dreyfus had supposedly sold military secrets to the Germans, caused a polarisation of the country between those who protested his innocence and those he claimed he was guilty.23 Furthermore, Rankes history was condemned as outdated and naive because the mental climate had changed; what it meant to be a science had developed and become more flexible. The deterministic Newtonian physics of the nineteenth century, which concentrated on the exact and strictly measurable, was essentially replaced by a model that was inherently probabilistic, based on Einsteins formulation of relativistic mechanics and quantum theory.24 As a result, Bloch dismissed the idea of causality and the possibility of constructing laws and patterns, much like Trevelyan did, arguing that causes cannot be assumed.25 This rejection of cause and effect could also be seen to result from the two World Wars, which had shattered beliefs and left an intense feeling of pessimism among those historians, such as Bury, who had argued that it was possible to develop models of progression.

17 18

Ibid., p. 233, 234 Ibid., p. 229 19 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, (London, Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 70 20 Stern, The Varieties of History, p. 239 21 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School 1929 89, (Cambridge, Polity, 1990), p. 6 22 Ibid., p. 6 23 Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992), p. viii 24 Ibid., p. 15 25 Ibid., p. 163

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Although Bloch discarded the positivism of the 1800s, he did develop and stress the importance of using critical method when analysing sources as one should not accept all historical evidence so blindly.26 Unlike Ranke, Bloch did not ignore sources found to be forgeries because essentially, a fraud is a piece of evidence.27 Simply proving something as false and disregarding it, does not provide knowledge and does not provide answers to why things happened.28

Bloch does acknowledge how imagination and narrative is important in the discipline of history, but his argument is rather limited and his does not offer anything new from earlier discussions. By the latter half of the twentieth century however, this argument has been developed and expanded by historian Hayden White. White called for a revival of the narrative, (which has been repressed in the attempt to be scientific and objective) and as a result history as a discipline is in bad shape today.29 This was ultimately what Trevelyan had argued, but White extended on this, arguing that we can no longer look at history as a simple art; instead we must study it as a form of writing and representation and thus he sees historical narratives as verbal fictions... which are as much invented as found.30 By this, he did not mean that histories were forged but that they were constructed by the historian through a technique he termed emplotment, which essentially involved giving meaning to mere chronicle facts (that were already constituted) through interpretation and explanation.31 Therefore, unlike the nineteenth century historians such as Ranke and Marx who saw the physical human being as central to studying the past, White believed that it was actually language that needed to be understood in historical practice. White uses the sequence a,b,c,d,e...n, to show the chronological and linear fashion of historical facts, before they are emplotted.32 Influenced by literary theorist, Northrop Frye, White suggested four emplotment structures that were used to shape facts into a narrative: romantic, comic, tragic and ironic.33 Once the facts were given a plot he argued, the sequence would change, for example, to a,b,c,D,e...n, or a,B,c,d,e...n.34 By emphasising certain facts (the capital letters) and suppressing others (the lower case letters), historians were able to create a specific meaning and choose a plot which was must appropriate for his story.35 However, he also argued that no historical event was bound to one structure, as the perspective of the historian determined whether it was to be emplotted as tragic or comic for example.36

26 27

Ibid., p. 66 Ibid., p. 77 28 Ibid., p. 77

29

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Baltimore London, John Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 99 30 Ibid., p. 82 31 Ibid., p. 83, 84, 93 32 Ibid., p.92 33 Ibid., p. 82 34 Ibid., p. 92 35 Ibid., p. 84, 85 36 Ibid., p. 84

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Like Trevelyan, White did not think it possible to create an objective history because the historian is ultimately a practitioner of it and is thus biased.37 Through emplotment, he is placing his own interpretations on the facts and giving events meanings, both of which may differ from another historian. He goes onto stress that the historical structures produced in a narrative cannot be like the originals because there is no way to go back and check.38 This can be linked to Macaulay and his analogy to portrait painting in which he argued there can be no perfect history. Whites model of emplotment may have been a new way of looking at what historians do, but in effect, it was built from discussions originating in the nineteenth century.

To conclude, on closer analysis it does not appear that significant advances have been made from earlier discussions on historical practice. History as a scientific discipline was essentially, but not principally, the view of the nineteenth century, and only with the two world wars and the shifts in the connotation of science, was the argument discredited. By the twentieth century, the earlier theories and themes had been modernised and extended, but it does appear that history as a narrative art has become more influential. For example, at university, history is categorised as a bachelor of art, not science. It is interesting to note that discussions of historical practice no longer focus exclusively on the physical, but consider language and discourse to be just as important, and thus one could argue that recent discussions are in fact looping back around and returning to a theory which is comparable to the philosophy of history that nineteenth century historians were so opposed to.

37 38

Ibid., p. 81 Ibid., p. 88

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Bibliography Bloch, Marc, The Historians Craft, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992 Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School 1929 89, Cambridge, Polity, 1990 Cannon, John, et al., The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, Oxford, Blackwell Reference, 1988 Grafton, Anthony, The Footnote: A Curious History, London, Faber and Faber, 1998 Iggers, Georg G., The German Conception of History: the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1983 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970 Stern, Fritz (ed.), The Varieties of History from Voltaire to Present, New York, Vintage Books, 1973 Warrington, Marnie Hughes, Fifty Key Thinkers on History, (2nd edn), New York, Routledge, 2008 White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore London, John Hopkins University Press, 1985