In contemporary philosophy
a distinction is made between critical philosophy of history (also
known as analytic) and speculative philosophy of history. The names of
these types are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.
The former studies the past itself whereas the latter is the equivalent of what the philosophy of science is for nature.
Though there is some overlap between the two aspects, they can
usually be distinguished; modern professional historians tend to be
skeptical about speculative philosophy of history.
Sometimes critical philosophy of history is included under historiography. Philosophy of history should not be confused with the history of philosophy, which is the study of the development of philosophical ideas in their historical context.
Pre-modern history
In his Poetics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) maintained the superiority of poetry over history because poetry speaks of what must or should be true rather than merely what is true.
Herodotus, a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Socrates, broke from the Homeric tradition of passing narrative from generation to generation in his work "Investigations" (Ancient Greek: Ἱστορίαι; Istoríai), also known as Histories. Herodotus, regarded by some as the first systematic historian, and, later, Plutarch (46–120 CE) freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally
improving the reader. History was supposed to teach good examples for
one to follow. The assumption that history "should teach good examples"
influenced how writers produced history. Events of the past are just as
likely to show bad examples that one should not follow, but classical
historians would either not record such examples or would re-interpret
them to support their assumption of history's purpose.
From the Classical period to the Renaissance,
historians alternated between focusing on subjects designed to improve
mankind and on a devotion to fact. History was composed mainly of hagiographies of monarchs or of epic poetry describing heroic gestures (such as The Song of Roland—about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) during Charlemagne's first campaign to conquer the Iberian peninsula).
In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun,
who is considered one of the fathers of the philosophy of history,
discussed his philosophy of history and society in detail in his Muqaddimah (1377). His work represents a culmination of earlier works by medieval Islamic sociologists in the spheres of Islamic ethics, political science, and historiography, such as those of al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950), Ibn Miskawayh, al-Dawani, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274). Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced a scientific method
to the philosophy of history (which Dawood considers something "totally
new to his age") and he often referred to it as his "new science",
which is now associated with historiography. His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of the state, communication, propaganda, and systematic bias in history.
By the eighteenth century historians had turned toward a more positivist approach—focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), historical studies began to move towards a more modern scientific form. In the Victorian era, historiographers debated less whether history was intended to improve the reader, and more on what causes turned history and how one could understand historical change.
Cyclical and linear history
Narrative history tends to follow an assumption of linear
progression: "this happened, and then that happened; that happened
because this happened first".
Many ancient cultures held mythical concepts of history and of time that were not linear. Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato taught the concept of the Great Year, and other Greeks spoke of aeons (eons). Similar examples include the ancient doctrine of eternal return, which existed in Ancient Egypt, in the Indian religions, among the Greek Pythagoreans' and in the Stoics' conceptions. In his Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Some scholars
identify just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the
Heroic age as a description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would
match the Vedic or Hindu ages known as the Kali, Dwapara, Treta and Satya yugas. According to Jainism,
this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns
(utsarpini) and downturns (avasarpini) constantly. Many Greeks believed
that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as the healthy régimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted régimes common to the lower ages.
In the East, cyclical theories of history developed in China (as a theory of dynastic cycle) and in the Islamic world in the work of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406).
The story of the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden, as recounted and elaborated in Judaism and Christianity, preserves traces of a moral cycle; this would give the basis for theodicies
which attempt to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the
existence of a God, providing a global explanation of history with
belief in a coming Messianic Age. Some theodicies claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, such as the Apocalypse, organized by a superior power. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Bossuet (in his Discourse On Universal History of 1679) formulated such theodicies, but Leibniz (1646-1716), who coined the term Théodicée, developed the most famous philosophical theodicy. Leibniz based his explanation on the principle of sufficient reason,
which states that anything that happens, does happen for a specific
reason. Thus, while man might see certain events as evil (such as wars,
epidemics and natural disasters), such a judgement in fact only
reflected human perception; if one adopted God's view, "evil" events in fact only took place in the larger divine plan.
In this way theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative
element that forms part of a larger plan of history. Leibniz's principle
of sufficient reason was not, however, a gesture of fatalism. Confronted with the antique problem of future contingents, Leibniz invented the theory of "compossible worlds", distinguishing two types of necessity, to cope with the problem of determinism.
During the Renaissance, cyclical conceptions of history would become common, with proponents illustrating decay and rebirth by pointing to the decline of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (1513–1517) provide an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself ascendance and decadence, as in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) (which the Roman Catholic Church placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum).
Cyclical conceptions continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the works of authors such as Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), Nikolay Danilevsky (1822–1885), and Paul Kennedy (1945– ), who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, like Butterfield, when writing in reaction to the carnage of the First World War of 1914–1918, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism
after its soul dies. Spengler thought that the soul of the West was dead and that Caesarism was about to begin.
The development of mathematical models of long-term secular
sociodemographic cycles revived interest in cyclical theories of history
(see, for example, Historical Dynamics (2003) by Peter Turchin, or Introduction to Social Macrodynamics
by Andrey Korotayev et al.).
Sustainable history
"Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man" is a philosophy of history proposed by Nayef Al-Rodhan, where history is defined as a
durable progressive trajectory in which the quality of life on this
planet or all other planets is premised on the guarantee of human
dignity for all at all times under all circumstances. This theory views history as a linear progression propelled by good governance, which is, in turn, to be achieved through balancing the emotional, amoral, and egoistic elements of human nature with the human dignity needs of reason, security, human rights, accountability, transparency, justice, opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness.
Human dignity lies at the heart of this theory and is paramount for ensuring the sustainable history of humankind. Among other things, human dignity
means having a positive sense of self and instilling individuals with
respect for the communities to which they belong. Thus, reconciling
humans' predisposition for emotionally self-interested behavior with the
imperatives of human dignity appears as the one of the most important
challenges to global policymakers.
At national level, they have to protect their citizens against violence
and provide them with access to food, housing, clothes, health care,
and education. Basic welfare provision and security are fundamental to
ensuring human dignity. Environment and ecological considerations need
to be addressed as well. Finally, cultural diversity, inclusiveness and
participation at all levels, of all communities are key imperatives of
human dignity.
In this respect, the sustainable history philosophy challenges existing concepts of civilisations, such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations.
Instead, it argues that human civilisation should not be thought of as
consisting of numerous separate and competing civilisations, but rather
it should be thought of collectively as only one human civilisation.
Within this civilisation are many geo-cultural domains that comprise sub-cultures. Nayef Al-Rodhan envisions human civilisation as an ocean into which the different geo-cultural domains flow like rivers, "The Ocean Model of one Human Civilization". At
points where geo-cultural domains first enter the ocean of human
civilisation, there is likely to be a concentration or dominance of that
culture. However, over time, all the rivers of geo-cultural domains
become one. There is fluidity at the ocean's centre and cultures have
the opportunity to borrow between them. Under such historical conditions
the most advanced forms of human enterprise can thrive and lead us to a 'civilisational triumph'. Nevertheless, there are cases where geographical proximity of various cultures can also lead to friction and conflict.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
concludes that within an increasingly globalised, interconnected and
interdependent world, human dignity cannot be ensured globally and in a
sustainable way through sole national means. A genuine global effort is
required to meet the minimum criteria of human dignity globally. Areas
such as conflict prevention, socio-economic justice, gender equality,
protection of human rights, environmental protection require a holistic
approach and a common action.
The Enlightenment's ideal of progress
During the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. Condorcet's interpretations of the various "stages of humanity" or Auguste Comte's positivism were one of the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted social progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) treatise on education (or the "art of training men"), the Aufklärung conceived the human species as perfectible: human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy. In What is Enlightenment? (1784), Immanuel Kant defined the Aufklärung as the capacity to think by oneself, without referring to an exterior authority, be it a prince or tradition:
Enlightenment is when a person leaves behind a state of immaturity and dependence (Unmündigkeit) for which they themselves were responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence or education, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.
In a paradoxical way, Kant supported in the same time enlightened despotism as a way of leading humanity towards its autonomy. He had conceived the process of history in his short treaty Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
(1784). On one hand, enlightened despotism was to lead nations toward
their liberation, and progress was thus inscribed in the scheme of
history; on the other hand, liberation could only be acquired by a
singular gesture, Sapere Aude! Thus, autonomy ultimately relied on the individual's "determination and courage to think without the direction of another."
After Kant, G. W. F. Hegel developed a complex theodicy in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which based its conception of history on dialectics:
the negative (wars, etc.) was conceived by Hegel as the motor of
history. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic
clash, with each thesis encountering an opposing idea or event antithesis. The clash of both was "superated" in the synthesis, a conjunction that conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx famously explained afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI's monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublated in Napoleon, who reconciled the revolution with the Ancien Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel thought that reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History. Through labour,
man transformed nature so he could recognize himself in it; he made it
his "home." Thus, reason spiritualized nature. Roads, fields, fences,
and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the result of this
spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social progress as the
result of the labour of reason in history. However, this dialectical
reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was
also conceived of as constantly conflicting: Hegel theorized this in his
famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.
According to Hegel,
One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it... When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
— [16]
Thus, philosophy was to explain Geschichte (history)
afterward. Philosophy is always late, it is only an interpretation of
what is rational in the real—and, according to Hegel, only what is
recognized as rational is real. This idealist understanding of
philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
Social evolutionism
Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular conception in the nineteenth century. Auguste Comte's (1798–1857) positivist
conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the
metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by modern
science, was one of the most influential doctrines of progress. The Whig interpretation of history, as it was later called, associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay,
gives an example of such influence, by looking at human history as
progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and
science. Maine described the direction of progress as "from status to
contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined
by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice.
The publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 introduced human evolution. However, it was quickly transposed from its original biological field to the social field, in "social Darwinism" theories. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest", or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society
(1877) developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works,
which would be later interpreted as social Darwinism. These
nineteenth-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilisation with progress.
Ernst Haeckel formulated his recapitulation theory in 1867, which stated that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": the evolution of each individual reproduces the species' evolution, such as in the development of embryos. Hence, a child goes through all the steps from primitive society to modern society. This was later discredited.[citation needed] Haeckel did not support Darwin's theory of natural selection introduced in The Origin of Species (1859), rather believing in a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Progress was not necessarily, however, positive. Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55) was a decadent description of the evolution of the "Aryan race" which was disappearing through miscegenation. Gobineau's works had a large popularity in the so-called scientific racism theories that developed during the New Imperialism period.
After the first world war, and even before Herbert Butterfield
(1900–1979) harshly criticized it, the Whig interpretation had gone out
of style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole
notion of linear progress. Paul Valéry famously said: "We civilizations now know ourselves mortal."
However, the notion itself didn't completely disappear. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by Francis Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal democracies as the single accredited political system and even modality of human consciousness would represent the "End of History". Fukuyama's work stems from a Kojevian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).
Unlike Maurice Godelier who interprets history as a process of transformation, Tim Ingold suggests that history is a movement of autopoiesis.
A key component to making sense of all of this is to simply
recognize that all these issues in social evolution merely serve to
support the suggestion that how one considers the nature of history will
impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history. The
critical under-explored question is less about history as content and
more about history as process.
In 2011 Steven Pinker
wrote a history of violence and humanity from an evolutionary
perspective in which he shows that violence has declined statistically
over time.
The validity of the "great man theory" in historical studies
After Hegel, who insisted on the role of "great men" in history, with his famous statement about Napoleon, "I saw the Spirit on his horse", Thomas Carlyle argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, heroes, such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great,
writing that "The history of the world is but the biography of great
men." His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or
topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil,
sought to organize change in the advent of greatness.
Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare in the
late twentieth century. Most philosophers of history contend that the
motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens
than the one he used for his portraits. A.C. Danto, for example, wrote
of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his
definition to include social individuals, defined as "individuals
we may provisionally characterize as containing individual human beings
amongst their parts. Examples of social individuals might be social
classes [...], national groups [...], religious organizations [...],
large-scale events [...], large-scale social movements [...], etc."
(Danto, "The Historical Individual", 266, in Philosophical Analysis and History,
edited by Williman H. Dray, Rainbow-Bridge Book Co., 1966). The Great
Man approach to history was most popular with professional historians in
the nineteenth century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition
(1911), which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great
men of history. For example, to read about (what is known today as) the
"Migrations Period," consult the biography of Attila the Hun.
After Marx's conception of a materialist history based on the class struggle, which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the unfolding of history, Herbert Spencer
wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the
long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which
he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly
grown....Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."
The Annales School, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, were a major landmark on the shift from a history centered on individual subjects to studies concentrating in geography, economics, demography, and other social forces. Fernand Braudel's studies on the Mediterranean Sea as "hero" of history, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's history of climate, etc., were inspired by this School.
Is history predetermined?
There is disagreement about the extent to which history is ultimately deterministic. Some argue that geography, economic systems, or culture
prescribe "the iron laws of history" that decide what is to happen.
Others see history as a long line of acts and accidents, big and small,
each playing out its consequences until that process gets interrupted by
the next.
Even determinists do not rule that, from time to time, certain
cataclysmic events occur to change course of history. Their main point
is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large
shocks like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary
effects on the evolution of the society.
Karl Marx
is, perhaps, the most famous of the exponents of economic determinism.
For him social institutions like political system, religion and culture
were merely by-products of the basic economic system (see Base and superstructure).
However, even he did not see history as completely deterministic. His essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history: Men
make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.
Does history have a teleological sense?
Theodicy claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, given by a superior power. However, this transcendent teleological sense can be thought as immanent
to human history itself. Hegel probably represents the epitome of
teleological philosophy of history. Hegel's teleology was taken up by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man (see Social evolutionism above). Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Althusser, or Deleuze
deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best
characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales,
which the Annales School had demonstrated.
Schools of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they saw, and see, progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled (see above). History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist, and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward "civilization", and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the "End of History". In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy,
he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of
philosophy; it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself
apprehended in a specific modality.
Historical accounts of writing history
A classic example of history being written by the victors—or more precisely, by the survivors—would be the scarcity of unbiased information that has survived to the present about the Carthaginians. Roman historians left tales of cruelty and human sacrifice practiced by their longtime enemies; however no Carthaginian was left alive to give their side of the story.
Similarly, we only have the Christian
side of how Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe.
However, we know very little about other European religions, such as Paganism. We have the European version of the conquest of the Americas, with an interpretation of the native version of events only emerging to popular consciousness since the early 1980s. We have Herodotus's Greek history of the Persian Wars, but the Persian recall of the events is little known in Western Culture.
In many respects, the head of state may be guilty of cruelties or
even simply a different way of doing things. In some societies,
however, to speak of or write critically of rulers can amount to
conviction of treason and death. As such, in many ways, what is left as
the "official record" of events is oft influenced by one's desire to
avoid exile or execution.
However, "losers" in certain time periods often have more of an
impetus than the "winners" to write histories that comfort themselves
and justify their own behavior. Examples include the historiography of the American Civil War,
where it can be argued that the losers (Southerners) have written more
history books on the subject than the winners and, until recently,
dominated the national perception of history. Confederate generals such
as Lee and Jackson are generally held in higher esteem than their Union counterparts. Popular films such as Cold Mountain, Gone with the Wind, and The Birth of a Nation have told the story from the Southern viewpoint. Also, despite "losing" the Vietnam War, the United States produces more scholarship on the war than any other country, including Vietnam. Popular history abounds with condemnations of the cruelty of African slave traders and colonists, despite the "winning" status of those people in their heyday.
As is true of pre-Columbian populations of America, the historical record of America being "discovered" by Europeans
is now sometimes presented as a history of invasion, exploitation and
dominance of a people who had been there before the Europeans. This
reinterpretation of the historical record is called historical revisionism, which can take the form of negationism, which is the denial of genocides and crimes against humanity.
The revision of previously accepted historical accounts is a constant
process in which "today's winners are tomorrow's losers", and the rise
and fall of present institutions and movements influence the way
historians see the past. In the same sense, the teaching, in French secondary schools, of the Algerian War of Independence and of colonialism,
has been criticized by several historians, and is the subject of
frequent debates. Thus, in contradiction with the February 23, 2005 law on colonialism, voted by the UMP conservative party, historian Benjamin Stora notes that:
As Algerians do not appear in their "indigenous" conditions and their sub-citizens status, as the history of nationalist movement is never evoqued, as none of the great figures of the resistance — Messali Hadj, Ferhat Abbas — emerge nor retain attention, in one word, as no one explains to students what has been colonisation, we make them unable to understand why the decolonisation took place.
Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse
The historico-political discourse analyzed by Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (1975–76) considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized under the name of "race struggle"—however,
the meaning of "race" was different from today's biological notion,
being closer to the sense of "nation" (distinct from nation-states; its signification is here closer to "people"). Boulainvilliers,
for example, was an exponent of nobility rights. He claimed that the
French nobility were the racial descendants of the Franks who invaded
France (while the Third Estate was descended from the conquered Gauls),
and had right to power by virtue of right of conquest. He used this
approach to formulate a historical thesis of the course of French
political history—a critique of both the monarchy and the Third Estate.
Foucault regarded him as the founder of the historico-political
discourse as political weapon.
In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by
the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle
against the monarchy—cf. Edward Coke or John Lilburne. In France, Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then Sieyès, Augustin Thierry, and Cournot
reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at the end of the
nineteenth century, this discourse was incorporated by racialist
biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (Nazism). According to Foucault, Marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle",
defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian.
This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of
Foucault's thought: discourse is not tied to the subject, rather the "subject" is a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economical infrastructure, but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces—which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies.
Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from the
juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth: truth
is no longer absolute, it is the product of "race struggle". History
itself, which was traditionally the sovereign's science, the legend
of his glorious feats and monument building,he(the sovereign) built
monuments,fought in wars and claims victory on behalf of himself which
ultimately became the discourse of the people (modern population), a
political stake. The subject is not any more a neutral arbitrator, judge, or legislator, as in Solon's or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, what became the "historical subject" must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried blood", the multiple contingencies from which a fragile rationality temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared to the sophist discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with Machiavelli's or Hobbes's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the Sovereign
is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an
enemy. It is {the historico-political discourse} a discourse that
beheads the king, anyway that dispenses itself from the sovereign and
that denounces it".
History and education
Since Plato's Republic,
civic education and instruction has had a central role in politics and
the constitution of a common identity. History has thus sometimes become
the target of propaganda, for example in historical revisionist attempts. Plato's insistence on the importance of education was relayed by Rousseau's Emile: Or, On Education (1762), a necessary counterpart of The Social Contract (also 1762). Public education
has been seen by republican regimes and the Enlightenment as a
prerequisite of the masses' progressive emancipation, as conceived by
Kant in Was Ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?, 1784).
The creation of modern education systems, instrumental in the construction of nation-states, also passed by the elaboration of a common, national history. History textbooks are one of the many ways through which this common history was transmitted. Le Tour de France par deux enfants, for example, was the Third Republic's
classic textbook for elementary school: it described the story of two
French children who, following the German annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1870, go on a tour de France during which they become aware of France's diversity and the existence of the various patois.
In most societies,
schools and curricula are controlled by governments. As such, there is
always an opportunity for governments to impose. Granted, often governments in free societies serve to protect freedoms, check hate speech, and breaches of constitutional rights;
but the power itself to impose is available to use the education system
to influence thought of malleable minds, positively or negatively,
towards truth or towards a version of truth. A recent example of the
fragility of government involvement with history textbooks was the Japanese history textbook controversies.
Narrative and history
A
current popular conception considers the value of narrative in the
writing and experience of history. Important thinkers in this area
include Paul Ricœur, Louis Mink, W.B. Gallie, and Hayden White.
Some have doubted this approach because it draws fictional and
historical narrative closer together, and there remains a perceived
"fundamental bifurcation between historical and fictional narrative"
(Ricœur, vol. 1, 52). In spite of this, most modern historians, such as Barbara Tuchman or David McCullough,
consider narrative writing important to their approaches. The theory of
narrated history (or historicized narrative) holds that the structure
of lived experience, and such experience narrated in both fictional and
non-fictional works (literature and historiography) have in common the
figuration of "temporal experience." In this way, narrative has a
generously encompassing ability to "'grasp together' and integrate ...
into one whole and complete story" the "composite representations" of
historical experience (Ricœur x, 173). Louis Mink writes that, "the
significance of past occurrences is understandable only as they are
locatable in the ensemble of interrelationships that can be grasped only
in the construction of narrative form" (148). Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson
also analyzes historical understanding this way, and writes that
"history is inaccessible to us except in textual form ... it can be
approached only by way of prior (re)textualization" (82).
History and causality
Narrative and causal approaches to history have often been contrasted
or, even, opposed to one another, yet they can also be viewed as
complementary.
Some philosophers of history such as Arthur Danto have claimed that
"explanations in history and elsewhere" describe "not simply an
event—something that happens—but a change".
Like many practicing historians, they treat causes as intersecting
actions and sets of actions which bring about "larger changes", in
Danto's words: to decide "what are the elements which persist through a
change" is "rather simple" when treating an individual's "shift in
attitude", but "it is considerably more complex and metaphysically
challenging when we are interested in such a change as, say, the
break-up of feudalism or the emergence of nationalism".
Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the
relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular
and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group
and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions.
John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and general causes
(following Marc Bloch) and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in
causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on
August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to the fact that President
Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of
the Army Air Force to carry out his orders."
He has also pointed to the difference between immediate, intermediate
and distant causes. For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four
"general concepts of causation" used in history: the "metaphysical
idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of the universe are
products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such final cause";
"the empiricist (or Humean) regularity concept, which is based on the
idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of events";
"the functional/teleological/consequential concept", which is
"goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the "realist, structurist
and dispositional approach, which sees relational structures and
internal dispositions as the causes of phenomena".
History as propaganda: Is history always written by the victors?
In his "Society must be Defended", Michel Foucault
posited that the victors of a social struggle use their political
dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical
events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical revisionism. (See Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse above.) Nations adopting such an approach would likely fashion a "universal" theory of history, a manifest destiny
in the US, to support their aims, with a teleological and deterministic
philosophy of history used to justify the inevitableness and rightness
of their victories.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat
took a completely different view—according to him, defeat is a major
driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor—confirmed
in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry
gains made, may be less creative and fall back. The concept evokes
Hegel's Master–slave dialectics—the
master is dependent of the work of the slave, the slave has to take his
master's and his own interests into account, gets more knowledge and
more insight as the master; and in realising that the world around him
was created by his own hands he may gain self-consciousness and
emancipation. Schivelbusch worked on three basic examples, the South and
its Lost cause
after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, and
Germany following World War I. Wolfgang Schivelbusch view includes
complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations, from
every level of society and sees a need and rise of creativity and
various narratives for the defeated.
Within a society Walter Benjamin believed that Marxist historians must take a radically different view point from the bourgeois and idealist points of view, in an attempt to create a sort of history from below,
which would be able to conceive an alternative conception of history,
not based, as in classical historical studies, on the philosophical and
juridical discourse of sovereignty—an
approach that would invariably adhere to major states (the victors')
points of view. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur asked instead for a plurality
in history writing. "We carry on several histories simultaneously, in
times whose periods, crises, and pauses do not coincide. We enchain,
abandon, and resume several histories, much as a chess player who plays
several games at once, renewing now this one, now the another" (History and Truth 186). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a fictional account of the manipulation of the historical record for nationalist aims and manipulation of power.
To some degree, all nations are active in the promotion of such
"national stories", with ethnicity, nationalism, gender, power, heroic
figures, class considerations and important national events and trends
all clashing and competing within the narrative.
With regard to the history of science, the introduction of new paradigms is depicted by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Innovation in science or technology is not based on single experiments
or ideas per se, but needs a supportive environment and technical
achievements to allow for a change of perspective. In all sorts of
science (for e.g. mathematics see Bair et al. 2013) innovative concepts are often being made in parallel (compare Zeitgeist),
and the "winning" concept or individual contribution depends not on the
idea per se, but other aspects as supportive circumstances, personal
networks, usability or simple wording. The process may lead to format wars, which leaves losers and winners behind.
The Semmelweis reflex
is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or
new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or
paradigms, Semmelweis himself being driven into insanity, but his
concept prevailing after his death grew in a strong narrative of the history of medicine.
Judgement of history
For Hegel, the history of the world is also the Last Judgement. Hegel adopted the expression "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht" ("world history is a tribunal that judges the world"; a quote from Friedrich Schiller's
poem "Resignation" (published in 1786) and used to assert the view that
History is what judges men, their actions and their opinions.
Since the twentieth century, Western historians have disavowed the aspiration to provide the judgement of history. The goals of historical judgements or interpretations are separate to those of legal judgements, that need to be formulated quickly after the events and be final. The issue of collective memory is related to the issue of the "judgement of history".
Related to the issue of historical judgement are those of the pretension to neutrality and objectivity.
Analytical and critical philosophers of history have debated whether
historians should express judgements on historical figures, or if this
would infringe on their supposed role. In general, positivists and neopositivists oppose any value-judgement as unscientific.
