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the bare chronicle of facts, with the highest possible form of poetry, tragedy,
does indeed make a point about poetry, but it tells us very little about history and therefore nothing about its true essence. As the most complete of
the modern English commentators on the Poetics notes: "There is no really
satisfying explanation of Aristotle's absolute neglect of Thucydides . . . who
had unmistakably tried to make history 'philosophical' . . . It seems a genuine
blind spot - or a deliberate omission."5
The distinction in Poetics IX between poetry and history is rhetoric, not
philosophy, and to found an argument on this distinction without rearguing
the case is to build on foundations of sand. Like many "theories" used by
the authors of critical books, Sen Gupta's serves the same function as the
love story in the average musical comedy: it provides a place to begin, a
place to end, and in between it is best forgotten.
Still Shakespeare's Historical Plays is a better book than its argument. The
author's "close reading" of the plays is, I think, the best we have, and the
difference between the merits of his perceptions and the weakness of his
premises should not surprise a student of criticism. There have been many
great critics, few great critical theorists. And, we might add, it is not only
the critics who write better than they know. For it is quite possible that
Shakespeare, if he thought about the problem of the relationship of poetry
and history at all, might well have accepted Sidney's story of the quarrel
between the poet and the historian and Sen Gupta's modern formulation of
their essential differences. But surely once Shakespeare actually began to write
his histories, the only problems that would matter to him would be not those
of the theoretical quarrel between the poet and the historian but the practical problems of the quarrel between the poet and his poem.
OWEN JENKINS
Carleton College
No famous thinker has suffered such long and strange neglect as Ibn Khaldufn; his case must surely be unique. It was his misfortune to live when
Arabic culture, of which he was so bright an ornament, was in full decline,
and Western Europe had ceased to borrow from it. Had he flourished a century or two earlier, he might have been studied in the schools of Paris and
(London, 1965), 84: "As a theoretical statement about the writing of history (and we
have no other from Aristotle)
it is woefully inadequate .
. .
. It is a mistake to try to
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which a medieval North African townsman was always conscious. (Ibn Khaldun asserts that his native Barbary had not even in his day recovered from
the fierce ravages of the Bedouin tribe of the Banu-Hilal in the eleventh century.) The author's claim of originality in this comprehensive and penetrating
survey appears to be justified; nothing comparable to it had been attempted
before. Above all, his discussion of the economic aspect was thoroughly novel.
Arabic treatises on taxation existed, and some elementary advice on fiscal
and related matters was commonly found in the "mirrors for princes" which
viziers compiled for the instruction of their often ill-educated masters; but
no one before Ibn Khaldufn,in either Islam or Christendom, had entered so
fully and shrewdly into questions of money and prices, wages and tariffs, state
revenues and balanced budgets. He was the first to treat economics scientifically and to see its importance in the life of societies.3
But as Mahdi warns us, Ibn Khaldufn is a whole world removed from
modern sociology. He never rated his "new science" very highly: it was merely
a humble addition to falsafa, the corpus of scientific (i.e., organized) knowledge which Islam had inherited from the Greeks and in which political philosophy had always had a place. Since there is in Islam no distinction between
Church and State, ecclesiastic and lay, politics cannot be separated from
theology and comes within the scope of the shari'a. If Ibn Khaldun is a rationalist, as is often said, he is one operating fully within the Platonic-Islamic
tradition. His 'ilm al-umran was designed to supplement history, and history
itself had the purely practical aim of enabling men to be ruled more wisely.
Nothing would have surprised him more than to see the high rank assigned
in the modern West to historical knowledge, though he would probably have
reflected that one could hardly expect anything else from unbelievers.
Yet here, one suspects, Mahdi has exaggerated the wide gulf which separates
Ibn Khaldun's thought from ours. Noting that Ibn Khaldun created his "new
science" without disturbing the traditional philosophy of his time, Mahdi
asserts that the "moderns" have thrown over their traditional philosophy
altogether and, repudiating universal essences, natures and causes, have proclaimed all knowledge to be historical. This is much too sweeping. The historicism which came in with the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment's
faith in the uniformity of human nature has been on the defensive some time
now against the assaults of Popper and others, who flatly deny there is any
ultimate meaning in history. In any case, only idealists of the Croce-Collingwood school ever claimed that history could or would absorb philosophy.
Neo-Kantians, following Dilthey, are engaged in a Critique of Historical
Reason, and assure us that the past can never be known as Ranke thought
3. J. J. Spengler, "Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun," Comparative Studies
in Society and History 6 (1964), 268-306.
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it could, that we never see it "as it really was," but only partially and through
spectacles of many colors; that (in Simmel's words) "history as knowledge
cannot be a copy of reality."4 We have given up Comte's positivist approach,
and few historians would today echo Bury's famous claim that history was a
science, no more and no less: they are more likely to describe themselves,
as Becker did, as "keepers of useful myths." Marc Bloch criticized the haphazard inquiry into "causes," demanded of the historian an analytical and
methodical approach, and set him to search for "collective sensitivities" which
involved seeing cultural patterns and historical situations as wholes. Is this
so far removed from Ibn Khaldufn's'ilm al-umran? And Bloch certainly did
not claim unique status for historical knowledge. True, Bloch was a secular
rationalist and Ibn Khaldu'na theological one, but a strong current is running
in favor of "putting God back into history," as we can see from the writings,
in England alone, of such scholars as Professor Butterfield and Father D'Arcy
and the recent Bampton lectures of Professor Alan Richardson.5 Perhaps
there is a growing conviction that, as Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, we cannot
interpret history without a principle of interpretation which history as such
does not yield.6
What has happened is that history has won recognition as an independent
discipline (a very recent victory: Tout of Manchester talked as late as 1923
as though it had only just been achieved) at a time when the traditional
philosophy (if by this is meant the old Christian-Hellenic scheme of thought)
is disintegrating; and nothing so imposing or comprehensive, neither history
nor natural science, has been found adequate to take its place. Ibn Khaldufn
would have held that history cannot exist detached from the theological setting which alone gives it meaning. The Western world has yet to prove that
it can.
J. J. SAUNDERS
University of Canterbury
New Zealand
4. G. Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig, 1907), 51.
5. A. Richardson, History Sacred and Profane (London, 1964).
6. R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York, 1941), I, 151.