The Naturalist and the Emperor, a Tragedy in Three Acts; or, How History Fell Out of Favor as a Way of Knowing Nature

M y subject is a crucial episode in the story of how historical explanation fell out of favor as an element of naturalist understanding: how history found itself banished from science. This is a subject close to my heart since I teach at Stanford, where the social and intellectual world, at least among the students, is divided into the Techies and the Fuzzies. Mine of course are the Fuzzies, but it’s a deeply unjust misnomer: they are as rigorous and empirical as any engineer. More to my point here, the Techies’ intellectualworld is greatly limited by its segregation from theirworld, my Fuzzies’, and specifically, from historical knowledge as a mode of naturalist scientific understanding. But I meant to begin not at Stanford, but with Napoleon. Bear with me. I want to begin with Napoleon’s disdain for historical and philosophical forms of explanation in science, and his preference for a scientific approach thatwas specifically neither philosophical nor historical.