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inquiry to an extent that H. S. Hughes has perhaps too sanguinely commented that
it is quite possible that the study of history today is entering a period of rapid change
and advance such as characterized physics in the first decades of the twentieth century.I3 What Hughes is suggesting, and I believe rightly, is that what has occurred
has not been a crisis in historiography as such but an increasing questioning of the
theoretical assumptions and methodological procedures of the classical idealistic
conventional tradition of historiography.
I
Modem historical scholarship as a professional discipline had its origin a t the
early nineteenth century German university. From its beginning it was wedded to
basically idealist notions regarding the nature of history and historical science. This
idealism reflected the pre-industrial and pre-democratic character of the society in
which modem historical scholarship arose in the post-Napoleonic Restauration period.
I n the course of the nineteenth century, as historical study became professionalized
and university based throughout the Western and the westernized world, German
historical scholarship, and with it many of its idealistic assumptions, became a model
for historians everywhere.
The basic methodological conceptions, which became the basis for professional
historical writing almost everywhere in the world, were best formulated in Rankes
writings and in his seminars. Ranke wished to raise historical studies to the level of
a rigorous science. His method of inquiry and model of explanation differed, however,
fundamentally from those of the natural sciences. They rested on certain basic
assumptions regarding the nature and character of history which were later shared by
the entire idealistic tradition of historical science. Each individual in history is a
unique centre of meaning which cannot be reduced to a general denominator. The
same applies to the great collective bodies, such as states, nations and churches,
which have grown in the course of history. Nature is thesceneof the eternallyrecurring,
of phenomena devoid of conscious purpose ;history comprises unique and unduplicable
human acts. At every moment in history something new emerges; every individual
and every institution represents a new force irreducible to causal schematization.
Generalizations have no place in history; they violate the individuality and spontaneit y of historical reality. The historian must not explain, that is, fit historical phenomena
into causal schemes; his aim is the understanding (Verstehen) of the unique individualities that compose history in their own terms.
Social and historical processes are therefore incapable of scientific analysis. The
scientific character of history rests not in its theoretical formulations, but in its
critical reconstruction of the past as it actually occurred. This reconstruction must be
based on documentary evidence. Without documents there is no history. Pre-literate
peoples have no history. The reliance on documents, however, implies that history
deals only Mith the conscious volitions, intentions and actions of men. I t introduces a
bias for statesmen-oriented political history. Although Ranke does not outright
reject economic or social history, he nevertheless regards the realm of impersonal
forces as unhistorical.
3H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (New York: 1964), pp. 20-21.
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The debate which ensued at the turn of the century regarding the character of
history as a science has continued to the present. The traditional historiography
remained intact. In Germany, Karl Lamprecht, whose position was seen by the
profession not only as an attack against German idealistic conceptions but also
conservative political institutions, was essentially isolated. In the more democratic
climate of France and the United States, the new social science orientation made slow
but definite inroads. The idealistic tradition reasserted itself, particularly in Italy,
with Croce, and in Germany, with Meinecke. At the same time the philosophic attack
against the scientific character of history-collingwood, Becker, Beard, Raymond
Aron-intensified. It is only the most recent decades which have seen a major confrontation of idealistic and social science traditions generally in the Western world.
I1
It is impossible to reduce the developments in historical scholarship in recent
years to a few simple denominators. I shall limit myself to the four orientations, none
of them new, which I consider to be the most important influences in present day
Western and Central Europe, including the traditional idealistic historiography which
remains very much alive especially in the area of diplomatic history. What unites the
three others is the conscious attempt to reintroduce theory into historical writing,
to make history into a social science which will again approach certain of the problems
regarding the condition and direction of man which the traditional historiography
believed did not fall into the realm of scholarly historical inquiry.
We in the United States tend to underestimate the impact of Marxism on historical science outside the Communist countries. We think of it as a nineteenth century
doctrine now largely discarded b y social science. Marxism, together with the Annales
orientation, however, probably constitutes the strongest theoretical influence in historical writing in Western Europe-in France, certainly since the 1930s; in more recent
years also in Italy and England (we need only mention Hill, Hobsbawm, Thompson,
RudC), considerably less so in West Germany. In the United States, to be sure, its
influence has been marginal although it made itself felt recently among some of the
historians of the New Left. We also generally operate with an oversimplified concep
tion of Marxism as a simplistic and dogmatic materialism, such as outlined in some of
Engels later, more popular pamphlets. In their more serious theoretical writings,
Marx and Engels acknowledged the role of non-economic factors. They were b y no
means economic determinists in their historical writings. The defeat of the 1848
revolutions in Germany and France as discussed in Revolution and Counterrevolutiolt
in Germany and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was not viewed by them
as the inevitable result of impersonal social forces; voluntaristic factors entered, the
courage or lack of courage of political personalities, of groups, ideological factors, the
lack of political education. The core of Marxs position, the interaction of freedom
and necessity in history, is summed up by Marx in the opening passages of the
Eighteenth Brumaire: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
6Karl M a r x , The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New Y o r k : 1963). p. 16.
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political history and to study capitalism not as Marx and Sombart had done as an
autonomous economic individual but as part and parcel of a unique Western culture
with its attitudinal patterns and its bureaucratic state apparatus. In more recent years,
Weber rather than American or French social science has provided the patterns by
which German historians-for example the so-called school of Strukturgeschichte and
such political science oriented historians like K. D. Bracher-sought to reintroduce
theory and institutional analysis into historical practice. Even more recently, Barrington Moores Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Lord and Peasant i n the
Making of the Modern World, published in 1966, has shown how Marxist and Weberian
concepts and methods can be effectively combined in a broad comparative study of
political modernization in various Western and non-Western societies.
The most ambitious attempt at a reorientation of historiography has, however,
occurred in France in the form of the Annales movement which has as yet received
surprisingly little attention in the United States despite the impact which it has had
in recent years not only on the historiography of all of the Western European countries but also on the more liberal of the communist countries, especially Poland.
The forerunner of the Annales journal was Henri Berrs Revue de la Synthdse
founded in 1900 which sought the integration of the social sciences into historical
study. If the spirit of Henri Berr, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929 founded
the Annales, a journal, as the subtitle indicated, for the study of social and economic
history. But from the beginning the journal attempted to do more than this. In
contrast to the Marxist approach, Bloch and Febvre were centrally concerned with the
facts of human consciousness. Febvre wrote a biography of Luther and one of Rabelais; Bloch in Les rois thaumaturges studied the popular medieval belief that the
kings of England and France could miraculously heal scrofula through their powof touch. But the history of consciousness was understood not as intellectual history
in the sense of Croce or Meinecke, as the study of ideas of the great personalities of an
age, but as the collective consciousness of a society within its material and institutional setting.
Bloch and Febvre rejected the positivistic concern with political actions as a
superficial histoire CvCnementielle and in its place sought to uncover an histoire
structurelle which sought to lay bare the long enduring structures of a society. Such
a history, which Bloch attempted in the Feudal Society, seeks to be total history, to
study politics, economics, technology, myths, social organization in an age, using not
merely written documents but all traces which permit reconstruction of a social
pattern. Such history has been called neo-positivistic because it sought to base itself
on the concrete material remnants of a culture. In his work, La Mkditmande et le
monde mkditerrant!eert ri lkpoque de Philippe 11 (Paris, 1949), which became a model
for the school, Braudel treated the history of the Mediterranean world in the age
of Philip I1 on three levels, each with its own historical time, that of the permanent
aspects, the geographic factors of the Mediterranean world, of the relatively stable
social and economic sphere with its cyclical movements of conjmture and recession,
and thirdly the political sphere in which political personalities played a decisive role.
The second, the social time of long duration, in contrast to the individual time of
short duration of the third type, was of primary interest to Braudel. This second area
was the sphere of unconscious history which best suited itself to the application of
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models and social mathematics. E. Labrousses study oi price fluctuations and their
impact on the outbreak of the French Revolution were in the spirit of the Annales
group. It is questionable, however, whether the Annales historians ever succeeded in
effectively linking political to social history. In Braudels L a Miditerranhe, the third
sphere, that of political events, remained basically histoire superficielle, a realm of
accidents which Braudel regarded as essentially uninteresting for the historian while
his treatment of the social sphere essentially ignored the role of political decisions.
The interest of the Annales group broadened itself, as the changes of the title
t o Annales. Economies. Sociitis. Civilisations. indicated, to a broad study of all
aspects of human behavior in the past. The goal of history Febvre believed was to
serve as the science of man, not of the isolated man but of the hornme en groupe,
in Braudels words, the concrete homme social in contrast to the abstract individual.
History, Febvre believed, was to be the central social science. The Annales historians,
in part influenced by Claude Lhvy-Strauss, moved closer to a meeting of history and
anthropology and became concerned not only with the material basis, for example
the role of food and clothing in the cultural and political development of medieval or
early modern Europe, but also of non-European and primitive societies with a strong
emphasis on comparative studies. At the same time Annales historians sought to
fathom the collective psyche as Mandrou did in his Magistrats et Sorciers en France
a u X V I I e sikcle. U n e analyse de psychologie historique (Paris, 1968) which investigated
the abandonment of persecution for witchcraft as part of a dislocation of a mental
structure which for centuries had formed an integral part of the world view. Nevertheless despite their attempt to make history into a science of man, the Annales
historians have always rejected world historical speculations, including those of
Marx and Weber. The historian, they urge, must approach his subject matter with
questions, working hypotheses drawn from the social sciences; the facts do not speak
for themselves. But they agree with Ranke that the historian must confront his facts,
that his generalizations must have a firm foundation in his data, and that he may not
go far beyond.
In recent years, the Annales school has attained an unusual dominance in French
historical research and received considerable attention abroad, in Great Britain, in
Italy, in West Germany, and to an extent also in the more liberal of the communist
countries, e.g. Poland. Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel have emphatically denied
the existence of an Annales school; at most there is an Annales spirit they say.
Probably in no non-communist country is social research so well organized and
subsidized by a central agency as it is in France. The men around the Annales journal
have not only controlled the famous Sixihme Section of the Ecole Pratiques de Hautes
Etudes but have also had the decisive voice in social science allocations by the Conseil
National de Recherches Scientifiques, the national research council which subsidizes
a great part of historical research in France. This has made possible the extensive
team stu&es and quantitative investigations which Lucien Febvre has demanded.
It may be indicative nevertheless of the nature of historical studies, that the outstanding works which have come out of this orientation have been those largely
written by individuals, Bloch, Labrousse, Braudel, and Mandrou.
There is a degree of justification t o the arguments raised by Gerhard Ritter,
Pierre Renouvin, and others against the Annales circle, that they have neglected the
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central role of political power. There is no society without structure of authority and
domination. Social history is not a discovery of the twentieth century. The great
problem is to relate social history to political history, something which the Marxists
and Weberians have done a good deal more successfully than the Annales people.
I t is true that impersonal forces play a much greater role in the complex technological
mass society of our day than they did in Rankes, but so does the state. To be sure
political decisions always take place in a concrete social and historical context, yet
there is inevitably a personal element in political decisions. Lenin and Stalin left their
personal imprint on the character of the Soviet Union, Hitler on Nazi Germany.
Crucial political decisions have been made by individuals, whether Hindenburgs
dismissal of Briining in 1932, Johnsons commitment of American troops to an Asian
landwar in 1965, or Nassers closure of the Straits of Tiran, decisions of immeasurable
consequences which took place in a definite setting but appeared to have been by no
means inevitable. Never before has the very physical survival of the world rested in
the hands of so few persons, in a position to press the button, as in our days of nuclear
weapons. There is thus a residue of historical action which appears not to fit, let us
say, into a cybernetic model of society. The classical tradition of historiography is
thus right in pointing at an element of spontaneity and uniqueness especially in the
realm of political behavior. There may also be an element of irrationality in the
religious, cultural, and national values of collective bodies which may more decisively
effect political decisions than mere rational factors such as economic or diplomatic
interests. Paul Renouvin has pointed at such emotional and ideological factors in
refuting the Marxist interpretation of the outbreak of world war I. I t may very well
be, as the classical idealistic tradition has maintained, that there is an element of
human nature which defies rational reduction but this does not mean that it is incapable of conceptual comprehension. A scientific inquiry into human behavior need
by no means show an unbroken link of causal regularity, as the scientism of the nineteenth century insisted. It is quite conceivable that there are ruptures and irregularities which cannot be reduced to mathematical relationships but which for this reason
do not yet defy all rational inquiry. But the task of historical science is not to reduce
human phenomena to strict regularities but to extend mans rational understanding
of his past.
I11
This survey has been consciously selective. It barely touches on quantification
and various forms of integration of social science methods and history which have
played an important role in the Annales approach and to a lesser extent in Marxist
historiography but have especially in the United States developed relatively independently from either of these two orientations. It ignores a man like Namier who
does not fit nicely into either the conventional or the modern trend we have traced.
It also neglects the broad literature, particularly in the area of diplomatic history,
which continues along traditional lines and which has found its theoretical defender
in Germany in the empassioned writings of Gerhard Ritter. The idea that the historian
is in search of regularities is strongly rejected by British historical theorists such as
Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. Nevertheless there is a broad agreement today, even
among diplomatic historians like Paul Renouvin who in many ways are critical of the
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Annales approach, that history must investigate the interrelation of politics and social
forces and that the individualizing method is inadequate for this purpose. It is
generally recognized that there is no history without theory. Neither the adherents of
the Artnales orientation nor the majority of serious Marxist historians in the West
have, however, offered a closed system of history as classical dialectical materialism
or certain of the speculative philosophies of history did, nor have they even maintained
the certainty of the classical idealistic tradition. They, particularly the historians of
the Annales circle, have realized how tentative and exploratory all historical investigation is. They have nevertheless rejected the position outlined by Charles Seignobes in
1924 in the Introduction to his History of Europe and still maintained by many
conventional historians, that history is a series of accidents incapable of rational
explanations. In the main the trend represented by Marxism, the Annales orientation,
and various other attempts to utilize social science methods marks an effort to extend
the scientific character of history. Unwilling to offer total explanations, Marxists,
Annalists, and social science oriented historians seek to find methods to deal with
a t least a part of the sphere of human actions which traditional historians considered
to be outside the realm of scientific investigation.
This conception of history as a social science, however, stands in direct conflict
with the notion popular in twentieth-century historical thought that all historical
knowledge is subjective, conditioned by the personality of the historian and the sociohistorical setting within which he writes, and that therefore any objective knowledge
of history is impossible. All history, Croce writes-without arriving at fully subjectivistic conclusions-is contemporary history which tells us more about the present than
about the past. Becker carries this position further and argues (as does the German
writer Theodor Lessing) that every man is his own historian, that, in other words,
history is an act of subjective, i.e., arbitrary creation. The past as such exists only in
the thoughts of the historian.
I t seems to me, however, that this subjectivism rests on an obvious fallacy. The
historian is never a being in the abstract but works within a concrete sociocultural
historical context and is confronted by a past which too appears in a definite historical
context. This, of course, does not exclude the presentist argument that all history is
present history reflecting the interests and perspectives of the present. This is true,
but only to a limited extent. For in a sense the situation of the historian is not that
different from that of the natural scientist who, too, reflects the thought patterns of
his time. But both are confronted with an actual sublect matter. In a sense, of course,
it is the past which speaks to the historian. To permit the ideal of the present to dictate
our perception of the past is to admit ideological distortion. Although the historian
like the scientist lives within a definite setting, the basic rules of logical and scientific
procedure, whether in the natural sciences or in history, are not entirely culture
bound. Mathematics and logic may be products of a culture but they possess a validity
which transcends the culture. Historical mindedness requires, as Ranke correctly
taught, that we seek to understand the past in its own terms. To achieve this the
historian must be consciously self-critical of his manner of procedure. The questions
he asks will reflect the interests of his time; the conclusions he reaches will, if he is an
honest historian, avoid present-mindedness, although he will never emancipate himself completely from the thought patterns of his time which he carries into the past
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or even be fully conscious of them. The result is a picture of the past which is always
subject to correction, not only because of the lack of documentation but also because
the historian from the perspective of his time, which leads him to ask certain questions
rather than others, will see only certain aspects of the subject matter under discussion
and because he will probably never free himself completely from the presentism which
he introduces into the past. His picture of the past will be incomplete and tinged with
subjectivity, but at the same time contain elements of truth. The historian in this
sense is in a similar position as the natural scientist. History like the natural sciences
is a continuous dialogue, a sort of dialectical process in which partial formulations of
the truth call forth their own negation. But this process of revision suggests that there
is an element of objectivity and rational method for the establishment of truth.
Now some theorists, like Siegfried Kracower in his recent book, History, The Last
Things Before the Last, will admit that objective knowledge and hence progress in
historical knowledge is possible in the realm of micro-history, of facts, concrete
situations, but that as soon as we leave the realm of the purely factual and deal with
larger historical contexts we enter the realm of the speculative. There has been no
greater historian than Thucydides, Kracower argues. And on a certain level this is
true. We might similarly argue that there neither has been nor can be any progress
in psychology. History is a fonn of social psychology. It seeks understanding of other
persons. Such understanding requires wisdom and judgment. And in a sense there
has been no increase in wisdom since Thucydides. But the historian as social scientist
seeks to formulate explanatory theories of historical change and social behavior and
these theories undergo revision and acquire increasing sophistication. I do believe
that Marx helped us to understand certain aspects of the historical situation which
Thucydides only dimly suspected. To be sure our social science, and hence also history,
is still in its infancy.
To question, however, that histoiical theory is impossible is to question the
possibility of social science as such. To be sure all interpretations of the past are
subject to revision, and not merely to revision but to enrichment. For the human
personality, much more so a whole society, is so rich in nuances and intentions that
we can never exhaust it. The past never reveals itself in all its complexity; we see only
aspects of it, aspects on which our interest focuses or to which we are perceptive, but
aspects which nevertheless, if we remain critical are contained in the past itself. All
history is therefore incomplete as the past continues to reveal itself in the future.
But this is the predicament not only of history but of all science.
While I thus tend to agree with the Marxists, Weber, and the men of the Annales
that a science of history, or rather a scientific approach to history, is possible, I am
much less certain than H. S. Hughes that a major breakthrough in historical science
comparable to that which has taken place in twentieth century physics has already
occurred. History and the social sciences generally are still on a very rudimentary
level. I suspect that the Annales writers are correct in stressing the relevance of
psychology and anthropology for history. We must probe much deeper below the level
of conscious behavior to the motivating forces, psychological, perhaps even physical,
underlying behavior.
A scientific collective psychology must occupy a central role in any scientific
conception of society. But such a science apparently does not exist yet even in a
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