Some initial thoughts on history and historiography

by Scott Nelson

This was originally written as an email to a friend on 16 February 2019. It was in response to an article he had sent me in the New Yorker, entitled “The Decline of Historical Thinking”.

The state of historical studies is always an issue of interest to me, and it’s with mixed feelings that I read Eric Alterman’s piece. It’s become a platitude at this point to repeat George Santayana’s phrase about how those who no longer remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So of course I am in agreement with the fundamental thrust of the article, that more of us need to have a better understanding of history.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if the historians themselves are not also responsible for declining interest in their discipline (more on that in a moment). And it’s not just because the study of history tends not to lead to lucrative jobs. It is an unfortunate fact of life – made all the more unfortunate by the prohibitively high costs of education in the US – that students see their education as a means to a high-paying job. In the ideal world we would study the liberal arts, say, for their own sake. Beyond the decline of historical studies, I can’t help but feel that the greater casualty is our increasingly utilitarian approach to education (and much else besides). Paradoxically, this utilitarian approach may close as many doors as it opens in the future. Who is to say that the ways of thinking fostered in pursuing a degree in literature or classics or philosophy will not be relevant in some future job? Many years ago I chose, for example, to learn Italian out of the sheer joy I took in Italian culture and history. It was a useless language to learn when I decided to pick it up (I was still living in Canada in those days). And yet, little did I know at the time that it would later enable me to befriend and work with a man who has since become as a brother to me (and it also helped me make ends meet while I was working on my PhD in Vienna). Naturally, I could have spent that time endeavouring to learn something more relevant such as the STEM disciplines, and perhaps I would have landed a more lucrative job that way. But the whole point is that we do not know what the future will bring and, pace all of our attempts at prediction, the world appears to be getting less predictable. The other danger of the utilitarian approach is that we might close our minds off to other avenues of knowledge simply because they do not conform to our present parameters of useful knowledge.

Another problem is that academic historians do not always make the best case for their own discipline. So while it is good to see that students at “Yale and places like it can “afford” to major in history” and “have the luxury of seeing college as a chance to learn about the world beyond the confines of their home towns, and to try to understand where they might fit in…”, I also find myself wondering if the point of history is only to help us figure out how and where we fit in. Thucydides, for example, wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War because it was such a destructive episode whose causes and progress were so universal that he felt it behooved his contemporaries as well as posterity to understand its course. Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives – “A Bible for heroes”, as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it – in order to inspire his readers with examples of moral rectitude. Edward Gibbon wrote his monumental history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire partly in order to lambast the influence of Christianity and religion on the Romans. Karl Marx’s works are suffused with an understanding of history as the battleground between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, culminating in the inevitable victory of the latter. Along similar lines, the Whig interpretation of history envisioned all past events as stepping stones on the path of progress to enlightened and liberal ideals. Without commenting as to whether any of these approaches to historiography are right or wrong, they do prove that historical inquiry has been conducted for a variety of reasons in the past.

Is it enough today for history “to help us figure out how and where we fit in”? Isn’t this a bit too self-referential, as if history’s only purpose were to make us feel comfortable with ourselves and our place in the world? What could we possibly gain from studying history if the only philosophical conclusion, which also serves as the starting point for our research, is that previous time periods were unjust and that we must continue the long march toward perfect equality and justice for all of mankind? If we view history through our liberal democratic ideals – and these are fine ideals, to be sure – then how can history appear to be anything other than an incoherent web of injustice? And if this is indeed the way that much history today is being conducted in the universities, then it is no wonder that so many students are opting for other disciplines: history, in the form I have just outlined, really is nothing more than one damn thing after another, with little significance beyond reaffirming our initial proposition that we are more just now than we were then, and that we must continue down the path to perfect justice and equality.

One starting point for historiography – and surely there are and have been many historians who write like this – would be to examine the reasons that historical actors gave for their own actions, i.e. what did their thoughts and words and actions mean for them? We could then much better see where we and our societies are different from historical actors and their societies, and where we are similar. We would also be in a better position to compare and evaluate the philosophical presuppositions we bring to bear on our historical research.