History—What Is It Good For?
Absolutely Everything.
In recent days, there’s been a small amount of controversy about the meaning and nature of history. I believe, this was started by American Historical Association president James Sweet criticizing what he thought was the modern tendency to look at the past through the politics of the present. My friend Jay Caspian Kang wrote a skeptical look at the dominance of historical “evidence” in contemporary debates for the Times. Then, the economics blogger Noah Smith wrote a series of Twitter threads and a Substack post arguing that historical analogies were akin to scientific theories and therefore historical accounts should be treated with the same standards of evidence and testing as the social sciences: “...if historians want to horn in on the territory of political scientists, they should be held to the same standards.” (I wasn’t aware that the social sciences were now paragons of hard-scientific rigor, but whatever.)
What do I think of these questions? I’m honestly not sure I care anymore or if it’s important to resolve them. Part of me thinks history, which has its own muse on Mount Parnassus, is just one of humanity’s fundamental cultural practices, like music or art, and it really doesn’t need much further justification: it’s an end in itself. Of course, music and art are subject also to criticism, which tries to establish if the products live up to the internal standards of the practice. And so we can criticize history, too, from a number of different angles. I think one can safely say history that is abused and simplified to provide some capsule, Twitter-thread explanation of a present practice or event based on a single episode or idea from the past is probably not the best example of the form.
When I was young, I used to love to read philosophies of history. I particularly enjoyed ones thats proposed patterns of history like Giambattista Vico’s New Science, which proposes the ricorsi, cycles of civilizational development and eventual decline that run from barbarism to civilization to over-civilized decadence then back to barbarism, or the Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which proposed that societies were governed by a sense of solidarity and purpose that eventually decayed, allowing them to be overthrown by more hardy desert tribes that possessed that solidarity, who would then go through the same process of decay after adapting to sedentary life. My favorite philosopher Hegel is famous for his philosophy that interprets history as the unfolding of human freedom; he views history’s “motor” as the contradictions inherent in societies’ self-conceptions. Another favorite of mine, Marx, is famous for attempting to understand history as being driven by the contradictions that arise from the way societies materially produce and reproduce themselves.
Are any of these true? And are there even general laws that be discovered at all that govern the course of history? I honestly have no idea, and if there are such laws, it would seem very difficult to discover and apply them. But I still like to read them from time to time, and sometimes I’m persuaded that there are, in fact, general laws of history, and I can kind of dimly get glimpses of them in operation, which for me is very intellectually exciting if maybe slightly delusional. I suppose we take what fun we can get in life.
As worthwhile and interesting I still find these theories, as I get older I am more interested in particular things than in general rules—I’d rather go to a museum and just see the art than read a textbook on art theory—, and that’s what history at its best gives us: particulars. It tries to reconstruct particular events, particular eras, particular individuals in their particular context. And that’s essentially what life consists of: we do not encounter ever really abstract laws walking around, we only encounter particular situations. And how do we know how to deal with particular situations? Through practical experience with other particular situations that have similarities with what we are facing. When faced with a novel situation, we sometimes don’t know immediately what to do about it or what to make of it, so have to reflect and to compare it to what we already know. History is an aide of those reflections with examples.
Can an historical example be wrong or inappropriate to the present? Of course. In fact historical comparisons are inherently always wrong in a certain sense, because they quite literally are not the present situation, it is something different. And there will always be almost as many valid reasons for accepting an analogy as rejecting it. But in the past we have the time understand how complicated and multifarious the world and its actors really are, and so can return to the present with a bit of that understanding. Scientific theory attempts to reduce things down to a set of rules that hold in all times and all places, and is successful when it can treat specific examples as indifferent expressions of those rules; historical research in effect says the opposite: “this particular event still contains something worth looking into, we have not gotten to the bottom of it yet, perhaps we missed something.”
Still, I am still too much of a Marxist to just totally throw out any scientific conception of history and the hopes we can discover some general theory of history. And there do seem to be observable patterns or general concepts. Otherwise it would not be possible to talk about historical events in any kind of meaningful way to us moderns: they would be totally alien.
The one philosophy of science I find convincing is that of Imre Lakatos, a Hungarian mathematician and philosopher who lived in the 20th century. Lakatos basically tried to synthesize the idea that science progresses rationally according to application of a method with the idea that each different epoch produces radically different notions of what is scientific reasoning, and the transitions from one scientific paradigm to the other are not governed by a rational and regular process, but by social and psychological factors. To do this he came up with the notion of the “scientific research programme.” Each research programme, or theory, has a “hard core” of central assumptions and a “protective belt” of auxiliary hypotheses. When practitioners of a research programme are confronted with data which does not confirm the central assumptions of the theory, they don’t just immediately throw out the whole project, they fall back on auxiliary hypotheses for why this case appears different.
At any given time, there are multiple research programmes, with competing explanations. What makes a research programme “progressive” or “degenerating” is its ability to predict novel empirical phenomena: it says, for example according to my theory, we should be able to observe stellar bodies moving around like x, and if an experiment or observation sees those bodies moving around like x, the research programme is moving in the right direction. My favorite example of this, because it makes makes my idee fixe appear rational, is the “fascism debate:” opponents said it was a stupid theory, a clumsy analogy based on a superficial reading of history, but even its crudest version would predict some kind of extra-legal move on the democratic order by Trump and his supporters, something that many critics mocked as unimaginable. So therefore, the fascism thesis is at least somewhat scientific, right? (Am I trolling with this example? Maybe a little.)
If a research programme is always coming up with justifications and additional sub-theories for why its predictions have failed, it can be said to be degenerating. But Lakatos does not believe we just have to junk degenerating research programmes either: it can be worthwhile work to keep tinkering around with them until they start working properly, that is, coming up with novel predictions. I happen to be a big fan of “degenerating research programmes,” and like to read those who still tinker with them. But I will admit some of them, like phlogiston or the Ptolemaic system, are probably best left alone at this point.
I’m sure if you read this newsletter, you don’t need much convincing that history is worthwhile and interesting. I try to not to do the kind of propaganda history you see on Twitter threads that reduces everything to a single, easy-to-grasp cause. That bugs me, too. But it also bugs me when people who don’t read or appreciate history make grand proclamations about its validity or what it really is about. For some the pursuit of knowledge is about reducing everything to a single, abstract notion. For others, who I think are generally more interesting people to talk to, knowledge is about learning about as many things as possible and then thinking about how they are related. For me, history is the discipline that makes that possible.
Philosophy of history aside, just the process of doing historical research is the cat’s meow, especially outside one’s comfort zone. Learning a language(s), spending time in archives, trying to make sense of a world understood only through the mediation of documents, chasing down vague leads, getting to know librarians and archivists, putting it all in your own words, maybe living in a foreign country. No doubt the internet has drilled a hole in the pure *adventure* of historical research.
A tiny melodrama that cracked me up: 1985, I’m in the spectacularly beautiful public library in Bologna doing some research. If you want to copy any documents, there’s one guy standing behind a photocopy machine who is the only one authorized to do it. That’s his job, all day long. People line up at the machine with their stuff, when it’s your turn, you hand it to him and tell him which pages you want copied.
One day he’s standing there but there’s a hand-written sign on a piece of cardboard on his machine that says, “sciopero per forza maggiore” (“on strike due to force majeure”). I ask him what’s going on and he says, “Just a dispute with the boss. Come back tomorrow.”
No lesson in the “laws” of history here and I don’t think my politics would have been any different if I’d followed my brother into construction, but there’s something about just doing history and trying to make sense of it in a serious way that is intrinsically worthwhile and maybe offers some protection against facile, lazy and simplistic bromides. Not enlightenment, for sure, but more than just a pot to piss in.
Historiography should be a much more prevalent field of study than it currently is. I think E.H. Carr encapsulates it best in his work “What Is History?” but of course I’m likely bias as someone who closely relates to 20th century modernist thought.
The act of history (yes, it’s a verb) requires sources, interpretation, and selection. Carr proposes that none of these has specific primacy over the other, so history becomes not only a view into the past, but an expression of the present as well. The historian, through interpretation, makes clear their framework; and through selection, makes clear their objective. Often times both of these work in tandem to reveal a nagging question so important to the present situation.
Carr is Hegelian in a sense. Not that he thinks progress is some objective science, but in that the study and interpretation of history seeks a path toward a kind of progress.
“The absolute in history is not something in the past from which we start; it is not something in the present, since all present thinking is neces- sarily relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of becoming - something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape our interpretation of the past.”
- E.H. Carr