History as Science: An Exposition & a Critique

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Human beings have an emotional and psychological need to convert history into a science, for we have longed to have life and the world make sense. Yet, there are no general laws of history that can give precise measurement to human thought or action. There is for historians only the intelligible disorder of life, the fragments of which they gather, and from which they try to uncover truth, describe reality, and craft meaning.

I. The Rise and Development of Scientific History

René Descartes considered history a subject unworthy of attention from those on a quest for truth. To be sure, history had its value. Knowing the “famous deeds” that men in the past had accomplished could elevate and ennoble the mind and, “if read with understanding, aid in maturing one’s judgment…. Reading all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times.” But, Descartes continued, “those who are too interested in things which occurred in past centuries are often remarkably ignorant of what is going on today…, and even the most faithful histories, if they do not alter or embroider episodes to make them more worth reading, almost always omit the meanest and least illustrious circumstances so that the remainder is distorted.”[1] Too often history degenerated into an amalgam of legends, rumors, and gossip. Explorations of the past might constitute an enchanting diversion, but they were beneath the dignity of serious thinkers. 

If historians wanted others to afford their research the esteem that they believed it deserved, they were obligated to study the past as an objective and empirical reality, subject to verifiable evidence. This “elevated standard of truth,” as J.B. Bury referred to it, was among the most important contributions of scientific history.[2] The application of the critical method was supposed to make reconstructing the past simple and clear; historians had only to recount events as they actually happened, relying on facts instead of hearsay, fable, myth, or divine intervention. To establish the significance of the facts often required only their arrangement in chronological order. Historians themselves were neutral observers intent to discover the coherent pattern of change that both governed and defined human life.

During the nineteenth century, historians such as Bury assumed a more objective, scientific, and critical approach in part to shield the study of the past from the partisan enthusiasms of the moment,which, they feared, threatened to obscure truth and disfigure reality. Nationalism offered the most common and powerful motive to examine the past. Peoples seeking to create a national identity found in history one of their most effective instruments. A shared past could provide a sense of national unity and purpose. “The inevitable result,” Bury observed, “was the production of some crude uncritical histories, written with national prejudice and political purpose….”[3] As an antidote to the misuse of history, especially for political ends, the nineteenth-century French historian N.D. Fustel de Coulanges argued that investigations of the past must be objective and impartial, conducted without “prejudice or partisanship.” History, he declared, “is not entertainment but science,… its aim is not to have us make a pleasant acquaintance with such and such a period of our choice but to have us know man completely in all the phases of his existence.”[4] In the effort to counteract partisan manipulation, the development of a science of history represented an important advancement in Western thought. 

The emphasis on critical and analytical rigor also initiated efforts to reveal the universal laws that guided human progress, to discern “regularity in the midst of confusion,” as the popular historian Thomas Henry Buckle wrote. Under the influence of Positivism, Buckle rejected the supposition that human beings acted according to blind chance, divine providence, or free will.[5] Instead, he posited that a set of general, uniform, and invariable laws determined the course of events. The thorough and meticulous study of documents and the gradual accumulation of facts provided the raw material from which historians formulated their scientific models. Embracing mechanical causality, Buckle explained that “everywhere else increasing knowledge is accompanied by an increasing confidence in the uniformity with which, under the same circumstances, the same events must succeed each other.”[6] Human beings could not but respond similarly under similar circumstances, however distant in time and space. For Buckle, the value of scientific history lay not only in its ability to explain the past but also in its capacity to predict the future. Human beings, he thought, exercised no control over the forces that shaped their lives, even if those forces were neither random nor providential. Like chemical processes or the laws of motion, human conduct was regular, unvarying, and predictable. Buckle expressed every confidence that:

the progress of inquiry, is becoming so rapid and so earnest, that … before another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete, and it will be as rare to find an historian who denies the undeviating regularity of the moral world, as it now is to find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material world.[7]

Science was the most effective method of discerning, organizing, classifying, and evaluating information. Although rejecting the premises of scientific history, Isaiah Berlin affirmed that it was “only natural to wish to apply methods successful and authoritative in one sphere to another, where there is far less agreement among specialists.”[8] Historians, Buckle maintained, had to eliminate the artificial barriers separating the investigation of the human and the natural worlds. If they could identify the natural laws linking biology, physiology, and environment to government, society, and conduct, historians could devise an infallible science of human behavior. Only the intellectual inferiority of historians to scientists, Buckle complained, had thus far delayed that rapprochement.

Like other advocates of scientific history, Buckle embraced the inevitability of progress. The Enlightenment had marked a critical departure from the past and an audacious leap into the future. The concept of a scientific history, much as science itself, promised not only increased understanding through the patient accumulation of knowledge but also the sure expectation that knowledge was power and would lead to progress. No longer enslaved to tradition, no longer bound by the dictates of providence, human beings were neither condemned to the stagnation of endless recurrence nor destined to repeat past mistakes. The rigorous mastery of facts, the systematic analysis of human experience, enabled them both to fashion and then to transform the world. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, progress in this world gradually replaced salvation in the next as the purpose of life. The present was better than the past. The future would be better than the present. The modern, scientific conception of history was as teleological and the Judeo-Christian vision that it sought to replace.[9]

Sacred history also rested on a linear conception of time. In Christian thought, history moved from the Creation through expulsion from the Garden, from the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment, where it ended. “Christianity is a religion of historians,” observed Marc Bloch.“Other religious systems have been able to found their beliefs and their rites on a mythology nearly outside human time.” For Christianity, by contrast, the “great drama” of human existence from the Fall to Redemption and Judgment unfolded in time.[10] Every event in history, however trivial it might seem, was linked to this divine schema, which became, and which in some ways remains, the central reference point for all of Western history.

By the seventeenth century, the contours of Christian history had eroded, eventually giving way to a secular framework that divided the past into ancient, medieval, and modern. Hardly unbiased and disinterested, the enlightened philosophes condemned all previous eras, but especially the Middle Ages, as repositories of superstition and barbarism that the scientific method of inquiry was now poised to correct. They never doubted the absolute truths of science and the unchanging laws of nature and society, which experimentation and research were certain to disclose.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel located truth and meaning within history itself. “History…,” he proclaimed, “has constituted the rational necessary course of the World-Spirit–that Spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds this its one nature in the phenomena of the World’s existence.”[11] Hegel constructed what he called a secular theodicy in which history determined human consciousness and human consciousness discerned the meaning of history. For Hegel, meaning was immanent in history just as, for example, an oak tree is immanent in an acorn. History, in brief, progressed toward freedom. 

In contemplating world history we must thus consider its ultimate purpose. This ultimate purpose is what is willed in the world itself…. It is the Idea in general in its manifestation as human spirit, which we have to contemplate. More precisely, it is the idea of human freedom….Philosophy teaches us that all the properties of Spirit exist only through Freedom. All are but means of attaining Freedom; all seek and produce this and this alone. It is an insight of speculative philosophy that Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit…. It may be said that world history is the exhibition of spirit striving to attain knowledge of its own nature.[12]

Such progress could achieved, Hegel concluded, only by the deepening of human consciousness. 

Hegel found the source of reality in the Idea, which he called God. “God and the nature of His will are one and the same; these was call, philosophically, the Idea.” [13] But God was only implicit in Nature, that is, in the material world. God expressed his being explicitly as the Spirit in history. Hegel saw history as teleological; it had an inherent purpose,which, he repeated, was the advance of freedom. At the same time, the instrument for achieving freedom, which Hegel defined as the moral condition of self-consciousness, was not God Himself but the hero, a figure such as Napoleon Bonaparte, the World-Spirit made manifest, whom history used to realize its essence. According to Hegel’s secular theodicy, the highest medium through which history operated was the State. The State was both the foundation and the epitome of order; Reason was the catalyst that propelled historical change, which, in Hegel’s view, was invariably progressive.

Hegel’s vision of reality unfolded in four stages. First was Being and its antithesis, non-Being. Consciousness of Being and non-Being made possible the scientific investigation of matter. Second was Reason, which marked the origin of History. Third was Freedom. History ended in Freedom, the achievement of which was the purpose of History. Tautological though his argument may have been, Hegel extolled Freedom as the perfect consciousness of Truth in which Being and Idea become one (synthesis). With the union of Being and Idea, the tensions and contradictions of existence disappeared and the world at last became all that it ought to be. Finally, fourth, was the State. The State, and specifically for Hegel the Prussian state, reconciled all tensions and contradictions, unifying freedom and authority, law and morality. Obedience to the state was a legal and moral imperative, furthering the progress of history and making possible the realization of the meaning that had until then remained inchoate and implicit. Human beings could not discover Truth outside of History, and the deified State was the instrument though which Truth was embodied and revealed. If ever there was a grand design for history, Hegel’s secular theodicy was it. 

Hegel elevated the prestige of history. Although emphasizing “Idea” and “Spirit” rather than science, he prepared the way for later thinkers, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to make the study of the past entirely secular and scientific. Marx’s and Engel’s critique of industrial capitalism had not inspired them to write moralistic tracts condemning suffering and injustice, but instead to formulate a theory of history based on an exposition of the material conditions of life. Attempting to elucidate reality, Marx and Engels, at the same time, hoped to provide human beings with the means to better their circumstances. 

Human nature depended on the conditions of production. “In acquiring new productive forces,” Marx and Engels announced in The Poverty of Philosophy, “men change their mode of production, and in changing their mode of production, their manner of gaining a living, they change all of their social relations. The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill a society with the industrial capitalist.”[14] The social relations of production established relations of human beings to one another and to nature. “This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse,which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as `substance’ and `essence of man….’” From the social relations of production evolved society and the state. Religion, morality, philosophy, law, politics, indeed consciousness itself, were intertwined with the conditions and relations of production. “Life is not determined by consciousness,” Marx and Engels asserted in The German Ideology, “but consciousness by life…. In direct contrast to German philosophy [i.e. Hegel] which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.”[15] The first historical act that human beings undertook was production of the means necessary to sustain life. Human beings also needed to reproduce themselves. Production and reproduction, that is both social and natural relations, were cooperative activities requiring a division of labor. Emerging from human need, the division of labor had nonetheless engendered inequality of property. 

Marx’s and Engel’s historical analysis traced the origins of inequality to the family, and specifically to the patriarchal order of authority and subordination. Wives and children were the first species of property, enslaved to their husbands and fathers. The division of labor that grew from arrangements in the family served those who commanded the labor-power of others. Producing value for another’s benefit, men and women become alienated. Under capitalism, a few accumulated money and property while the masses fell into poverty and degradation. All social distinctions at last disappeared save those between “the property-owners and the propertyless workers.” Workers, paradoxically, became “all the poorer” the more wealth they produced. “The increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men.”[16] Workers not only produced commodities but, as Marx lamented, in the process of their labor they also reduced themselves to commodities, and thus, in their “exploitation” and “objectification,” become estranged from being.

The conflicting interests between the propertied and the propertyless were the motive force of history, propelling it toward its final confrontation and resolution. In contrast to Hegel, Marx viewed the State as presenting only the illusion of communal life, disguising the struggle between the classes for dominance. The State merely reinforced the legitimacy of the class that wielded power and was thus itself an instrument of oppression, as were law, religion, thought, and culture. To alter these relations of power and subjugation, and the consciousness that sustained them, Marx and Engels called not only for a social, political, and economic revolution, but also for a revolution in historical thought. They cultivated a science of history to ignite the revolutionary transformation of the world. Realignment of the social relations of production was inevitable, since no society could ever detach itself from the material base that supported its existence. According to the iron logic of dialectical materialism, all efforts to inhibit or resist change were sure to provoke antagonisms that could be resolved only by violent confrontation until human beings at last attained ideal conditions. 

Marx articulated what he conceived of as the true laws of history, “the science of real men and of their historical development,”as Engels put it.[17] He and Engels assumed that the history of dynasties, empires, wars, ideas, and beliefs would in time become obsolete, recede, and disappear. In the new era, only the history of material abundance, economic justice, and human satisfaction remained. Characterized by peace and freedom, society would then be a heaven on earth just as the laws of history had foretold.

Along with subsequent generations of Marxist historians, Marx and Engels believed their conclusions to be universally valid and applicable. Based on the scientific method of observation and analysis, Marxism contributed to the integration of the history of all times and places to modern Western categories of interpretation and development, and even to Western concepts of time. Following the Second World War, other schools of historical thought, such as the Annales school in France, offered the ambitious concept of “total history.” As an alternative to Marxism, historians who identified with the Annales school elaborated a model of universal history designed to blend all aspects of the past into a comprehensive synthesis.[18]

“A carefully constructed model,” advised Ferdinand Braudel, the most theoretical and systematic thinker of the Annales school, “although in fact based on the observation of one particular social environment can thus be applied to other social environments of a similar nature occurring at other times and in other places. This gives the model its recurring validity.”[19] Like the Marxists, Braudel focused on social and economic at the expense of political, cultural, or intellectual history.[20] But he minimized the influence of class struggle, concentrating instead on climate, demography, and geography. This three-tired model of historical reality, which consisted of enduring but rationally explicable structures that had persisted over long periods of time, brought coherence to the past. Braudel emphasized the continuities of human life, regarding change as slow and gradual. “At first glance,” he acknowledged, “the past appears to consist of this mass of details,”

some spectacular, others unsensational…. But this mass is far from constituting the whole of reality, the immense and complex fabric of history which alone can be the object of scientific study. Social science shies away from the event: and not without reason, for the short-term perspective is the most distorting and unpredictable lens through which to view reality…. A new type of historical narrative has appeared which we might call the “recitative” of the total situation…; it offers us selection of time scales: the decade, the quarter century or, as its largest unit, the half century.[21]

Transitory events, ephemeral ideas, and temporary beliefs were largely irrelevant to understanding the past. Histoire événementielle, the history of events, tended to simplify the complex and to obscure reality. Braudel proposed instead to cultivate a long perspective (longue dureé), exposing the underlying structures that had given order and substance to the past, the “almost motionless depths…, the center of gravity around which all revolved,” thereby permitting historians to reconstruct the whole from the splinters and shards.[22]

Marriage, birth, and mortality rates, population growth or decline, incomes, prices, and taxes, fluctuations in temperature and rainfall, all of which were quantifiable, became the raw materials, the social facts, from which historians reconfigured the past. By investigating these conjonctures, as they referred to the orderly patterns of change in climate, geography, and population, the Annalistes intended to encompass all of life, the plentitude of reality, not merely to recount disparate events, however monumental, or to compile the biographies of individuals, however prominent. Even historical documents were of limited utility for they only codified the perspective of their authors. A scientific approach to the past, on the contrary, required overarching generalizations rather than particular insights. In this respect, the Annaliste scholars, properly speaking, practiced a kind of historical sociology and statistics, a “social mathematics” as Braudel described it, rather than history, which attends to the significance of the exceptional and the unique.[23] There was, after all, only one Napoleon Bonaparte and one Adolf Hitler. They were not only different men who lived in different countries at different times and operated under different circumstances. They were also unique individuals, even though both conquered Europe.

Historians, of course, are concerned to make generalizations, to clarify the relation between the typical and unique. But doing so invariably entails comparative analysis, not reliance on an abstract theory of history with a logic of its own.[24] Science–at least the science practiced before the twentieth century–accentuated commonalities, omitting all that was not applicable to the limited questions that scientists posed. Scientists proceeded to draw from the answers they received general theories and universal laws. Historians differentiate one event, person, situation, experience, or period from others, any similarities between them notwithstanding. They are interested mainly in the particular, the variable, the unpredictable, that which cannot be easily arranged or understood according to standard rules of classification. To them, human beings are not mere organisms, congeries of biological and electro-chemical processes, whose behavior is always and everywhere uniform and predictable. Experience alone suggests that historians have had to find coherence and purpose amid the welter of human beliefs, principles, values, ideas, feelings, motives, and purposes. It is such imponderables that constitute the fabric of historical judgment, “the vast tapestry” of which no historian ever “perceives more than a tiny patch.”[25]

In this sense, as was the case with Marxism, the Annales’ vision of history was determinist, at least in as much as it imprisoned human beings in external structures over which they exercised no control. Braudel’s “unconscious history” moved without human agency or purpose, flowing along far below the surface of life and events.[26] Unlike Marxism, the Annalistes for the most part ignored relations of power, a deficiency that arose from the effort to distance their scholarship from old-fashioned political, and especially from Marxist, history. In the United States, historians needed neither Marxism nor the Annales school to excite the appeal of social history–history written “from the bottom up.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, even before the emergence of the Annales school, historians such as James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard called for a “New Social History,” urging their colleagues to explore “every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on earth.”[27] Without the theoretical underpinnings of the sort that Marxism and the Annales school afforded, the “New Social Historians”risked schism and fragmentation. Modernization theory, which came of age following the Second World War, offered a unifying vision that promised to restore coherence.

Theorists of modernization conjectured that a nearly uniform pattern of economic development operated in all developing societies regardless of differences in climate, geography, history, politics, religion, and culture. They studied the history of advanced Western nations to delineate the characteristics of that process in the contemporary world. Like the Marxists and the Annalistes, the theorists of modernization sought to confirm a pervasive universal history. By relying on quantitative methods of research and analysis, they also aimed to make history more scientific and mathematical. Allegedly dispassionate, impartial, and objective, quantification could be applied to any society, culture, or era. The numbers did not lie and the facts spoke for themselves. 

Modernization theory fell into disrepute in the late 1960s and early 1970s and retreated into the background of historical studies, although some of the questions it asked remain vital to the pursuit of comparative historical studies. Some criticized its inherent Western bias. By subjecting non-Western cultures and societies to Western standards and values, modernization theory had discredited its findings. It was tantamount to intellectual imperialism, the scholarly equivalent of American political and military intervention into such nations as Vietnam. Other scholars dismissed modernization theory as ahistorical, more concerned with replicating modern economic conditions than with understanding the past in its own terms and for its own sake. Despite the rejection of modernization theory, some historians have continued even now to look upon history more or less as a scientific discipline. John Lewis Gaddis, for instance, remained adamant that “the connection… between science and history now seems quite feasible, and in a way that does violence to the work of neither scientists nor historians.” The natural sciences, have “changed dramatically during the twentieth century,” and, as a consequence, it turns out historians are nothing but physicists in disguise. “Metaphorically at least,” Gaddis wondered, have not historians “been doing a kind of physics all along?”[28] His judgment rested on the observation that the indeterminacy of twentieth-century physics, specifically of quantum theory, approximates the indeterminacy of historical interpretation, which is “the historians’ equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”[29] Invoking chaos and complexity theory, Gaddis attested that “the old scientific perspective, in which one could assume the absolute nature of time and space, objectivity in observation, [and] predictable rates of change… was about as outdated in the natural sciences as the Ptolemaic model of the universe had been in Newton’s day.” Yet, he also reasoned that chaos and complexity theory could show how “the predictable becomes unpredictable,… orderly systems can become disorderly, or the other way around, patterns can still exist when there appear to be none,… and that these patterns can emerge spontaneously, without anyone having put them there.” Finally, by “visually representing relationships between predictable and non-predictable phenomena,” chaos
and complexity theory bestowed “a new kind of literacy, and hence a new set of terms for representing historical processes.”[30]

Although Gaddis was right to dismiss scientific objectivity and to confirm that historians were not, and had never been, capable of the exactitude once attributed to the natural sciences, he wrongly insinuated that the association with science lent to history a cachet and validity that it would not otherwise have possessed. With the introduction of such words and expressions as “con-silience,” which he borrowed from Edward O. Wilson, “particular generalization,” “contingent causation,” “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” “phase transitions,” and “punctuated equilibrium,” Gaddis alleged that science gave to historians something else that they did not need: a new, more sophisticated vocabulary. As Marc Bloch observed in The Historian’s Craft, history neither has nor requires a specialized, technical language. Whenever historians have adopted and applied esoteric language, they have too often been guilty of substituting vocabulary for thought.[31]

Yet, Gaddis among others kindled the hope that a scientific approach to the past would yield a universal narrative, a history of the world, that encompassed all times, all places, and all peoples. No one could tell the whole story themselves but individual historians, toiling in their own fields, could produce increments of the larger whole. Historians thereby established themselves as the masters of the past. Their research, guided and circumscribed by evidence, reason, and logic, not only illuminated the past but supplied the antidote to all forms of superstition and tyranny in the present–a continuation of the Enlightenment project to free humanity from the burdens of ignorance and the horrors of oppression. 

II. A Critique of Scientific History

It is an admirable goal to want to liberate peoples from habits, practices, customs, traditions, ideas, and beliefs, from the poverty and despotism, which, in the past, kept them from improving their lives. But the hope to discern the archetypical and the homogenous in the past that would render historical judgments universally valid was misplaced. For the advocates of scientific history, the traditional approach to studying the past had become an intellectual anachronism, unsuited to the analysis of mass phenomena. Even those historians, such as E.H. Carr, who dismissed scientific objectivity and certitude and who ascertained that historians were not, and had never been, capable of definitive precision, could not discard two attributes characteristic of scientific history. First, Carr avowed that knowledge was power. “To enable man to understand society in the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history…. Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment, of the effects of man on his environment, and of his environment on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s understanding of, and mastery over, his environment.”[32] The study of history was utilitarian; it functioned as a guide to action, even to conquest. Historical thought, for Carr, was also logical and rational. Like scientists, even following the advent of quantum mechanics, historians were attentive only to those aspects of the past that they could explain and use. 

Second, Carr could not bring himself to relinquish his devotion to progress. By nature history was progressive, although he thought progress neither “automatic” nor “inevitable.” Rather, Carr was content:

with the possibility of unlimited progress–or progress subject to no limits that we can need or envisage–towards goals which can be defined only as we advance towards them, and the validity of which can be verified only in a process of attaining them. Nor do I know how, without some such conception of progress, society can survive.[33]

At the same time, he no longer expected history to confirm unqualified, absolute truth. The hallmark of modern thought is perspective. This recognition introduced the more fruitful elements in Carr’s understanding of history: his acceptance both of the limits of objectivity and the historicity of thought. He implied a deep connection between historical consciousness and self-consciousness, which violates the parameters of scientific history. “The abstract standard or value, divorced from society and divorced from history, is as much an illusion as the abstract individual. The serious historian… recognizes the historically conditioned character of all values (historicity), not the one who claims for his values an objectivity beyond history.”[34] A complete separation between self and world, between subject and object, was impossible.

Knowledge of self required knowledge of the past. Despite thinking of history as a science, Carr reasoned that history

cannot accommodate … a theory of knowledge which puts subject and object asunder, and enforces a rigid separation between the observer and the thing observed. We need a new model which does justice to the complex process of interrelation and interaction between them. The facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian. Objectivity in history – if we are still to use the conventional term – cannot be an objectivity of fact, but only of relation, of the relation between fact and interpretation, between past, present, and future…. The concept of absolute truth is also not appropriate to the world of history – or, I suspect, to the world of science.[35]

History, Carr suggested, is not the past and does not necessarily reveal the past as it was. History, rather, is what historians can know and say about the past. Historical knowledge thus requires continuous re-imagining and re-thinking. “We no longer feel obliged to impose upon every subject of knowledge a uniform intellectual pattern, borrowed from the natural sciences,” wrote Marc Bloch, “since even there, that pattern has ceased to be entirely applicable.”[36] Nearly a century ago, Henri Pirenne made clear that “all historical narrative is… a hypothesis. It is an attempt at explanation, a conjectural reconstitution of the past.”[37] The nature of historical study, then, is always speculative; all interpretations are contingent; all conclusions are incomplete. 

This evolution of historical consciousness defied assumptions that history is, or can be, a science. If nothing else, it showed that human actions were unscripted and unpredictable, that historical laws are, and ever had been, a figment of the imagination. Pirenne discerned that 

the conditions indispensable to all really scientific knowledge–calculation and measurement–are completely lacking in the field [of history]. And the interference of chance and individuals increases still more the difficulty of the historian’s task by constantly confronting him with the unforeseen, by changing at every moment the direction which events seemed to take.[38]

The materialist theories of the nineteenth and twentieth century–Positivism, Marxism, and the Annales school–diminished human beings, reducing them to things among things. Each in its own way recommended that the business of human beings was not to study themselves but to study the environment. The conviction that science delivered objective truth–that science, in other words, was external to thought and imagination–enabled human beings to dominate nature while losing mastery over themselves. 

This simplifying determinism undermined not only the freedom of action but also the autonomy of mind. Events unfolded according to the orderly, inexorable logic of “social forces,” “material conditions,” or “environmental factors” that constituted the scientific laws of history, depriving human beings of the ability to shape their individual and collective future. They were instead condemned by uniform patterns into a fixed destiny that they could neither alter nor evade. Not content merely to explain events, the scientific view of history imagined that events could not have turned out differently, that past, present, and future were inevitable. Individuals, societies, and nations were predestined to act as they did. They could do no other. In their impotence, they exercised no control over their lives. The application of science to history thus instructed human beings in little else save how to conform, submit, and obey.

This rage for order has not only confined human beings and diminished human nature, it has also distorted reality. Historians endeavor to make sense of the past, to disentangle fact from fiction, truth from falsehood, reality from appearance, to clarify what would otherwise remain lost in hopeless confusion. But they must always contemplate what did not happen yet might potentially have taken place. “The historian…must always maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view,” stated Johan Huizinga. “He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known facts still seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win.”[39] There is a danger in wanting too much precision, intelligibility, and coherence. “In the indeterminateness of its supreme object,” Huizinga added, “the close connection between historical knowledge and life itself is revealed anew.”[40] Those who made a science of history applied l’esprit géométrique (e.g. Braudel’s “social mathematics”) to the study of the past, which called instead for l’esprit finesse. They privileged theory over experience and statistics over life. 

The appeal of science, ironically, rested on the expectation of discovering order, regularity, and predictability in the midst of apparent chaos. Human beings, it seems, had an emotional and psychological need to convert history into a science, for we have longed to see history, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, “as something possessing a certain objective pattern… expressed in laws,” in the hope that “the march of events can plausibly be represented as a succession of causes and affects [sic], capable of being systematized by natural science…. What we are then affirming is that this order is an objective order.”[41] Human beings, in short, want life and the world to make sense. Yet, to force the vast complexity of human experience into a rigid theoretical structure is an exercise in futility and misrepresentation. Better, perhaps, for historians to be untidy and to leave a little mess behind. There are no general laws of history that can give precise measurement to human thought or action. There neither is, nor can there be, a formula that apprehends disparate ideas and beliefs in all their incongruity. There is for historians only the intelligible disorder of life, the fragments of which they gather, and from which they try to uncover truth, describe reality, and craft meaning.

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Notes:

 1 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. By Laurence J. Lafluer (Indianapolis, IN, 1960), 6-7.

 2 J.B. Bury, “The Science of History” (1902), in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History (New York, 1973), 212.

3 Ibid., 213.

4 N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, “An Inaugural Lecture” (1862), in Stern, ed., Varieties of History 187, 181.

5 The reference to Positivism merits brief clarification. The French social thinker Auguste Comte invented the term “Positivism” during the 1830s. In Comte’s view Positivism defined the quest to identify the universal laws governing society and history. As with the scientific laws of nature, the general laws of society and history emerged from the observation of various phenomena. Although not himself interested in conducting historical research (his writings are speculative and theoretical) Comte believed that during the mature, or “positive,” stage of history, the application of these universal laws would ensure the advance of knowledge and understanding toward the development of a science of society and human behavior. See Gertrud Lenzer, ed., Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (New York, 1975) and Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, & Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore, MD, 1971), 10-20, 65-69.

6 Thomas Henry Buckle, “General Introduction to the History of Civilization in England”(1856),  in Stern, ed., Varieties of History, 125,126.

7 Ibid., 127.

8 Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” in William H. Dray, ed., Philosophical Analysis and History (New York, 1966), 7.

9 Greek and Roman historians showed the effects of human action on the course of events but did not seek or fashion expansive patterns of meaning in history. See Gerald A. Press, The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity (Montreal, 1982) and Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern, Second Edition (Chicago, 1994), 5-76.

10 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. by Peter Putnam (New York, 1953), 4-5; compare, 30-32.

11 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York, 1956), 10. For a discussion of Hegel’s concept of freedom in the context of his political thought, see Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Chicago, 1972), 125-38.

12 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, trans. by Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis, IN,1953), 21-23.

13 Ibid., 21. Italics in the original.

14 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, 1976), 166.

15 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845), in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. by Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 165, 155, 154.

16 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in Ibid., 70-71. Italics in the original.

17 Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York, 1935), 51.

18 On the Annales school, see Breisach, Historiography, 370-76, Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method:The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY, 1976), and Lynn Hunt, “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986), 209-24. The Annales school derived its name from the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, which Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded in 1929. In 1946, the journal changed its name to Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 

19 Ferdinand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Long Term” (1958), in Stern, ed., Varieties of History,421.

20 The Annalistes did not ignore the life of the mind, although their focus remained on collective rather than individual thought and psychology. The principal concept that they developed came to be known as mentalité, the intellectual structures that encompassed the ideas and beliefs available to persons living in certain times and places. See Breisach, Historiography, 375-76. 

21 Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 408-409.

22 Ibid.,414.

23 Ibid.,429.

24 See, for example, E. H.Carr, What is History? Second Edition (London, 1987, originally published in 1961), 60-65.

25 Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 50.

26 Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 420.

27 James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Bread, “Preface to The Development of Modern Europe”(1902), in Stern, ed., Varieties of History, 265.

28 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford, U.K., 2002), 88, 89.

29 Ibid., 29. 

30 Ibid., 78. Italics in the original. 

31 Ibid., 49-50, 79-81, 97-100. See Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 156-69.

32 Carr, What is History?, 55, 86. See also H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science: Twin Vistas on the Past (Chicago, 1964). 

33 Carr, What is History?,119. 

34 Ibid., 84.

35 Ibid., 119-20.

36 Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 17.

37 Henri Pirenne, “What Are Historians Trying to Do?” (1931), in Leonard M. Marsak, ed., The Nature of Historical Inquiry (New York, 1970), 32.

38 Ibid., 31.

39 Johan Huzinga, “The Idea of History,” in Stern, ed., The Varieties of History, 292.

40 Johan Huizinga, “The Task of Cultural History,” in Men & Ideas: Essays by Johan Huizinga, trans. by  James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle (New York, 1959), 76. 

41 Berlin,”The Concept of Scientific History,” 10.

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