History and Theory最新文献

Intellectual history's methodology remains dominated by the Cambridge school and its approaches, which focus almost exclusively on the discursive context of political debates. However, a different practice of historical investigation may be found in the works of Isaiah Berlin. Although he is best known as a political theorist and an ethicist, Berlin pursued his philosophical agenda mostly through his works in the history of ideas that focus on Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers. Nonetheless, this methodology has never been presented in a systematic way—not by Berlin, and not in scholarship on his thought. This article argues that Berlin's understanding of past philosophers was different from that of the Cambridge school: he did not neglect the fundamental importance of historical context, but he did not understand the “context” primarily as comprised of interventions in political discourse; rather, he attempted to understand every thinker in his or her own right. Berlin's methodology as a historian can be summarized as an empathetic reconstruction of somebody else's mental world, and it was derived from the idea of fantasia, which was developed by the early modern Italian writer Giambattista Vico (who is a protagonist in many of Berlin's historical essays), and from the concept of “absolute presuppositions,” which was forged by R. G. Collingwood. Berlin's methodology allows for more in-depth comparisons between thinkers from different historical periods, as his approaches were founded on a philosophical belief in the existence of a transhistorical human nature that is confined by a horizon of shared human experiences.

As wondering “what if?” about the past has become increasingly prominent in Western life, scholars have sought to historicize the phenomenon. The latest attempt to do so is Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou's A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. A stimulating, if somewhat meandering, book of essayistic reflections on historical speculation, A Past of Possibilities highlights the challenges of, and continuing opportunities for, historicizing the field that today is called “counterfactual history.” Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, historians have recognized the presence of “what-ifs” in historical scholarship, but they have disagreed about what to call them. For over a century, they have embraced a bewildering array of phrases, including “imaginary history,” “hypothetical history,” “subjunctive history,” “conjectural history,” “conditional history,” “probable history,” “iffy history,” “alternate history,” “allohistory,” “uchronia,” “historical might-have-beens,” and “historical ifs.” Deluermoz and Singaravélou continue this tradition by employing many different terms for historical counterfactuals in their effort to explain their increasing prominence. This conceptual pluralism, which is rooted in an interdisciplinary methodology, enables the authors to arrive at important insights about the field of counterfactual history. However, it also prevents them from generating a systematic argument that builds toward a larger conclusion. A Past of Possibilities is thus an important study that nevertheless highlights the need for further research.

In Zeitgärten: Zeitfiguren in der Geschichte der Neuzeit, Lucian Hölscher distinguishes between an embodied time and an empty time. Simply put, an embodied time includes histories, while its counterpart includes only dates and chronologies. He prefers the latter, for it offers an alternative to Reinhart Koselleck's idea of different layers of time. According to Hölscher, historians can achieve more unity in history through his empty temporality than through Koselleck's time of various speeds. Hölscher connects time with space to form a framework that, in addition to eras, chronologies, years, dates, and so on, especially includes time patterns, which he calls Zeitfiguren. These time figures form the infrastructure of all kinds of historiography, as Hölscher shows through his analysis of the studies of twenty German and four non-German authors. He exposes patterns such as progress, acceleration, and discontinuity, which form the building blocks of a philosophy of history based on the aforementioned empty time. Despite his criticism of Koselleck's ideas about time layers, Hölscher continues to follow in his footsteps, especially concerning his time of two levels, his future-oriented time, and his analytical, nonlinguistic method, which neglects absolute presuppositions. That's a pity, but what is positive is Hölscher's invention and thorough explanation of time figures.

If the directed focus on “scholarly personae” recommended in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000 is to be genuinely useful, we would need to attend far more systematically to historiographical differences, debates, and styles as rooted not only in the counterpoint between individuals and institutions but also in the larger contexts that govern how we identify what historical issues matter and the larger purposes and conditions of historical scholarship. We would need to identify more clearly not just how historical work is conducted but the ways prevailing debates over historical meaning and method have come to have specific names attached to them. The current crisis in the academic humanities puts all this in sharp relief, since the interest in scholarly personae also invites discussion about institutional conditions of historical work, from the existence of regular opportunities for careers and employment in the academic historical world to the vastly uneven distribution of institutional resources. What I argue for here is a kind of reflexive institutional historicism—the imperative, in other terms, to conduct historical work with a simultaneous concern for the present meanings and implications of the work itself and for the complexity of the interpretive questions raised by one's historical engagement with sources, questions, traditions, theories, and institutional conditions. Indeed, we need not focus on the theoretical aspects of history in order to appreciate the extent to which theory inflects, and is inflected by, the choices we make (and that are made for us) about everything from how to be a historian and who can be a historian to what kinds of historians we might be and, ultimately, what kind of history we write.

A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound, by Joshua Kates, examines a range of philosophical, literary, and literary-theoretical approaches in attempting to formulate a view of language sheerly as individual events. Kates considers works from philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the Continental tradition; Donald Davidson and W. V. O. Quine in the analytic tradition of philosophy of language; and such “crossovers” (an arguable categorization) as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Martha Nussbaum. The book also investigates the work of literary scholars including Mary Poovey, Charles Altieri, Paul de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, and Steven Knapp, among others. In each instance, the thinkers under scrutiny offer some support for the new philosophy of discourse that Kates proposes but fall short of the radicality of his anti-foundational, anti-structural approach. Kates coins the term “talk!” as a way to refer to language in an anti-foundational vein. The new philosophy of “talk!” proposed here emphasizes the shortcomings of the wide range of authors with respect to thinking of language as only its instances, begging the question of what avenues of thought the new philosophy opens.

This article traces the formation of Hayden White's chapter on Hegel in Metahistory by comparing it with his earlier essay titled “Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism.” It also analyzes White's review of George Armstrong Kelly's Idealism, Politics and History and White's well-known essay titled “The Burden of History.” This article argues that White's main concerns in his review essay and in Metahistory were (1) to respond to the existentialist challenge, posed especially by Camus, that history does not matter and (2) to use Hegel to articulate an answer regarding how historical consciousness and action can be combined. White created his version of Hegel early in “Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism” by absorbing (probably) Josiah Royce's interpretation of the Absolute and (more certainly) Erich Auerbach's idea of tragic realism. However, White's idea of tragedy, which focuses on the consequences of action, is not the same as Auerbach's idea, which concerns treating the psychological depth of characters seriously. In his review of Idealism, Politics and History and in Metahistory, White further injected the Kantian philosophy of history—as interpreted by Lucien Goldmann and Lewis White Beck—into Hegel's idea of tragedy and comedy. In doing so, White affirmed the philosophical activist's ability not only to recognize the tragic circumstance of the past and the present but also to hold on to the hope for a better, comic future.

This article makes the argument for renewed cliometrics that could serve history. Over the past century, history and economics have grown relying on each other, but an imbalance has appeared, as the space between history and economics has been occupied by the latter. Consequently, historians have tended to shun these fields of inquiry. I begin my analysis with a discussion of the complex set of separate domains that lie between history and economics, and I determine certain salient features that define them—in particular, the search for nomothetic explanations. I examine the reception of economic method by historians and point out that it has suffered both from this nomothetic angle and from the implicit presumption that economics is only applicable to the economy. Stressing the distinction between understanding and explaining in the philosophy of history, I show that, for historians, explaining should remain in the realm of history. I then propose that economics be considered a methodological auxiliary for understanding, a form of new cliometrics, which does not attempt to offer explanations. I also discuss some examples of using microeconomics as a critical methodology in the study of ancient Greece.