Carrhasnowprovided hispublicwitha commentary onhisapproach to thephilosophy of history. He is concerned among otherthings withthehistorian 'sobjectivi, his scoe and breadthof interest, and his relationship to ty p otherscholarship in hisownage. At the same timeMr. Carrairs,occasionally with wit, someof hispet peeves andcomes to the defence notablyof Hegel and Marx against criticslike Professor Popper. Yet mostof the pointsseemso obvious, andtheyaresofrequenfi andsosimply repeated, thatthereadermay Y feelmoreoftenbored thanchallenged.
At thefewplaces whereMr. Carrappears onthevergeof a freshandpossibly important ideaheletsusdownwitha flip phrase, andfailsto exploit-what onewouldbe mostinterested to hear-his thought, forexample, about theblurring ofdivisions in time.
Onlythefuturecanprovide thekeyto theinterpretation of the past He is attracted, though not uneritieally, to thethought of HegelandMarx,andof otherpathfinders like Freud. Th'econscious conservatives, on the otherhand,fill him with a sense of horror andfutility. The historian withthe sense of thefuturein hisbones recognizes thatprogress comes notthrough smallchanges, but by majorchallenges andupheavals. He facestheworldin tm'moil optimistically mvmws 45 with confidence in the oodness of men's rational abilities and airns.
Thus we havem essence a workmg historian s statement of beliefandvalues. Yet it was indubitably brought about by the actions of individuals, each consciously pursuing some totally differeat aim. Nor does the diagnosis of a discrepancy between the inten- tions of the individual and the results of his action always have to wait for the retrospective historian.
Quoted in B. Tuchman, The Zimmerman Telegram N. The facts of history are indeed facts about individuals, but not about actions of indi- viduals performed in isolation, and not about the motives, real or imaginary, from which individuals suppose themselves to have acted.
This is a false assumption. What the historian is called on to investigate is what lies behind the act; and to this the conscious thought or motive of the individual actor may be quite irrelevant. To set up the popular picture of the indi- vidual in revolt against society is to reintroduce the false anti- thesis between society and the individual, No society is fully homogeneous, Every society is an arena of social conflicts, and those individuals who range themselves against existing authority are no less products and refiexions of the society than those who uphold it.
Richard II and Catherine the Great re- presented powerful social forces in the England ofthe fourteenth century and in the Russia of the eighteenth century: but soalso did Wat Tyler and Pugachev, the leader of the great serf rebel- ion. Monarchs and rebels alike were the product of the specific conditions of their age and country. To describe Wat Tyler and Pugachev as individuals in revolt against society is a misleading 1.
The phrase is quoted from I. Berlin, Historical Inevitability p. Ifthey had been merely that, the historian would never have heard of them. They owe their role in history to the sass of their followers, and are significant as social phenomena, or not at all. Orlet us take an outstanding rebel and individualist at a more sophisticated level. Few people have reacted more violently and more radically against the society of their day and country than Nietzsche.
Yet Nietzsche was a direct product of European, and more specifically of German, society -aphenom- enon which could not have occurred in China or Peru. What is the role of the great man in history?
Taylor, From Napoleon to Stalin , P. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. But the higher degree of creativ- ity may perhaps be assigned to those great men who, like Crom- well or Lenin, helped to mould the forces which carried them to greatness, rather than to those who, like Napoleon or Bismarck, 1. Childe, History P.
Philosophy of Right English transl. Leavis, The Great Tradition , p. Nor should we forget those great men who stood so far in advance of their own time that their greatness was recognized only by succeeding generations. The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past. To enable man to understand the society of the past, and to increase his mastery over the society of the present, s the dual function of history.
Burckhardt, Judgaments on History and on Historians , P. Nowadays these questions of classification move me less; and it does not worry me unduly when I am assured that history is notascience. But in the English-speaking world this question has a long past behind it, and the issues raised by it are a convenient introduction to the problems of method in history. In the first part of this period the Newtonian tradition prevailed. Society, like the world of nature, was thought of as amechanism; the title of a work by Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, published in , is still remembered.
Then Darwin made another scientific revolution; and social scientists, taking their cue from. Russell, Portraits from Memory , p. Evolution in science confirmed and comple- mented progress in history.
Nothing, however, occurred toalter the inductive view of historical method which I described in my first lecture: first collect your facts, then interpret them. It was assumed without question that thiswasalsothemethodofscience. What Lyell did for geology and Darwin for biology has now been done for astronomy, which has become a science of how the universe came to be what it is; and modern physicists constantly tell us that what they investigate are not facts, but events.
The historian has some excuse for feeling him- self more at home in the world of science today than he could have done a hundred years ago. Let us look first at the concept of laws.
Students of society, consciously or unconsciously desiring to assert the scientific status of their studies, adopted the same language and believed themselves to be following the same procedure. Today this, terminology sounds as old-fashioned as itis presumptuous; but it sounds almost as old-fashioned to the physical scientist as it does tothe social scientist.
All this has now become something of a commonplace. It is recognized that scientists make dis- coveries and acquire fresh knowledge, not by establishing precise and comprehensive laws, but by enunciating hypotheses which open the way to fresh inquiry.
All thinking requires acceptance of certain presupposi- tions based on observation, which make scientific thinking possible but are subject to revision in the light of that thinking. The test in all cases is the empirical one whether they are in fact effective in promoting fresh insights and adding to our know- ledge.
Take, for example, Max Weber's famous diagnosis of a relation between Protestantism and capitalism. Nobody today would call this a law, though it might have been hailed as such inn earlier period. It is a hypothesis which, though modified to some extent in the course of the inquiries which it inspired, has beyond doubt enlarged our understanding of both these movements.
Such hypotheses are indispensable tools of thought. The division of history into periods is nota fact, buta necessary hypothesis or tool of thought, valid in so far as itis illuminating, and dependent for its validity on interpretation.
Historians who differ on the question when the Middle Ages ended differ in their interpretation of certain events. The 1. Marx-Engels: Gesamtausgabe, 1, vi, P. Most historians assume that Russia is part of Europe; some passionately deny it. I must quote one general pronouncement on the methods of social science, since it comes from a great social scientist who was trained as a physical scientist.
Nowadays both scientists and historians entertain the more modest hope of advancing progressively from one fragmentary hypothesis to another, isolating their facts through the medium of their interpretations, and testing their interpretations by the facts; and ways in which they go aboutit do not seem to me essentially different. While I was preparing these lectures, a physicist from this university, in a B.
Ziman in the Listener, 18 August But it was striking to find a historian and a physicist independently formulating the same problem in almost exactly the same words. These objections - some of them more convincing than others -arein brief: 1 that history deals exclusively with the unique, science with the gen- ral; 2 that history teaches no lessons; 3 that history is unable to predict; 4 that history is necessarily subjective, since man is observing himself; and 5 that history, unlike science, involves issues of religion and morality.
A host of later writers, down to Collingwood? This seems to rest on a misunderstanding. Poetics, ch. G, Collingwood, Historical Imagination , p- 5. Leviathan, 1, iv. But the historian calls them both wars, and only the pedant will protest. When Gibbon wrote of both the establishment of Christianity by Constantine and the rise of Islam as revolutions, hhe was generalizing two unique events. Modern historians do the same when they write of the English, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.
In the s discussions pro- ceeded on the assumption that it was due to rivalries between imperialist powers driven by the stresses of capitalism in decline to partition the world between them. These discussions all involved generalization about the causes of war, or at any rate of war in twentieth-century conditions.
The historian constantly uses generalization to test his evidence. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. Take this on the terror: Horrible, in lands that had known justice - eet Ginwacuiewiear Tarver ae Or, more significantly, this: It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this perio has eo generally been writen in hytris. Exaggera- tion abounds, execration, wailing; and on the whole, darkness. But do not suppose that generalization permits 1us to construct some vast scheme of history into which specific 1.
History of the French Revolution, 1, v, ch. Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians , p. Cambridge Modern History, i , p. And, since Marx is one of those who is often accused of constructing, or believing in, suck a scheme, I will quote by way of summing-up a passage from one of his Ietters which puts the matter in its right perspective: Events strikingly similar, but occurring in a different historical milieu, lead to completely dissimilar results. History is concerned with the relation between the unique and the general.
As a historian, you can no more separate them, or give precedence to one over the other, than you can separate fact and interpretation. The first is the danger oflosing itself in abstract and meaningless generalizations about society in general.
Society with a big S is as misleading a fallacy as History with a big H. Sociology is concerned with historical societies, every one of which is unique and moulded by specific historical antecedents and conditions. Sociology, if it is to become a fruitful field of study, must, like history, concern itself with the relation between the unique and the general, But it must also become dynamic - a study not of society at rest for na such society exists , but of social change and development.
Let the frontier between them be kept wide open for two-way traffic. The real point about generalization is that through it we attempt to learn from history, to apply the lesson drawn from one set of events to another set of events: when we generalize, we are consciously or unconsciously trying to do this. Those who reject generalization and insist that history is concerned exclusively with the unique are, logically enough, those who deny that anything can be learned from history.
But the assertion that men learn nothing 1. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia Eng. No experience is more common. Everyone in the delegation believed that we could learn from the lessons of the Vienna Congress, the last great European peace congress a hundred years earlier.
A certain Captain Webster, then employed in the War Office, now Sir Charles Webster and an eminent historian, wrote an essay telling us what those lessons were. Two of them have remained in my memory. One was that it was dangerous, when re-drawing the map of Europe, to neglect the principle of self-determination.
These lessons of history were taken for gospel and infla- enced our behaviour. This example is recent and trivial, Butit would be easy to trace in comparatively remote history the influence of the lessons of a still remoter past.
Everyone knows about the impact of ancient Greece upon Rome. But I am not sure whether any historian has attempted to make a precise analysis of the lessons which the Romans learned, or believed themselves to have learned, fromthe history of Hellas. The English Puritan revolution cannot be fully understood without it; and the conception of the chosen people was an important factorin the rise of modern nationalism.
The stamp of a classical educa- tion was heavily imprinted in the nineteenth century on thenew ruling class in Great Britain. But I shall recall here the qualification im- posed by the dual character of history. Learning from history is never simply a one-way process. To learn about the present in the light of the past means also to learn about the past in the light of the present.
The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them. This question is involved in a tissue of misunderstandings. As we have seen, scientists are no longer so eager as they used to be to talk about the laws of nature.
But this does not mean that these laws are worthless, or not in principle valid. Modern physical theories, we are told, deal only with the probabilities of events taking place. The historian, 1. Cours de philosophie positive, i, p. But he cannot predict specific events, because the specific is unique and be- cause the element of accident enters into it.
This distinction, which worries philosophers, is perfectly clear to the ordinary man. If two or three children in a school develop measles, you willconclude that the epidemic will spread; and this prediction, if you care to call it such, is based on a generalization from past experience and is a valid and useful guide to action.
But you cannot make the specific prediction that Charles or Mary will catch measles, The historian proceeds in the same way. People donot expect the historian to predict that revolution will break out in Ruritania next month, The kind of conclusion which they will seek to draw, partly from specific knowledge of Ruritanian affairs and partly from a study of history, is that conditions in Ruritania are such that a revolution is likely to occur in the near future if somebody touches it off, or unless somebody on the government side does something to stop it; and this conclusion might be accompanied by estimates, based partly on the enalogy of other revolutions, of the attitude which different sectors of the population may be expected to adopt, The prediction, if such it can be called, can be realized only through the occurrence of unique events, which cannot themselves be predicted.
But this does not mean that inferences drawn from history about the future are worthless, or that they do not possess a conditional validity which serves both as a guide to action and a key to our understanding of how things happen. I do not wish to suggest, that the inferences of the social scientist or of the historian can match those of the physical scientist in precision, or that their inferiority in this respectis due merely to the greater backward- ness of the social sciences.
The human being is on any view the most complex natural entity known to us, and the study of his behaviour may well involve difficulties different in kind from those confronting the physical scientist.
This is the argu- ment that in the social sciences subject and object belong to the same category and interact reciprocally on each other.
Human beings are not only the most complex and variable of natural entities, but they have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species. Here man is no longer content, as in the biological sciences, to study his own physical make-up and physical reactions.
The sociologist, the economist, or the historian needs to penetrate into forms of human bebaviour in which the will is active, to ascertain why the human beings who are the object of his study willed toact as they did. This sets up a relation, which is peculiar to history and the social sciences, between the observer and what is observed. But it is not mercly true that the bias of the social scientist necessarily enters into all his observations.
Its also true that the process of obser- vation affects and modifies what is being observed. And this can happen in two opposite ways. The human beings whose be- haviour is made the object of analysis and prediction may be warned in advance, by the prediction of consequences unwel- come to them, and be induced by it to modify their action, 50 that the prediction, however correctly based on the analysis, proves self-frustrating.
One reason why history rarely repeats itself among historically conscious people is that the dramatis Personae are aware at the second performance of the denoue- 1. K, Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia , P. But this process may workin a converse direction. The political scientist who, on the strength of historical observations, nourishes the conviction that despotism is short-lived, may contribute to the downfall of the despot. Everyone is familiar with the behaviour of candidates at elections, who predict their own victory for the conscious purpose of rendering the fulfilment of the prediction more likely; and one suspects that economists, political scient- ists, and historians, when they venture on prediction, are some- times inspired by the unconscious hope of hastening the realization of the prediction.
All that one can perhaps safely say about these complex relations is that interaction between the observer and what is observed, between the social scientist and his data, between the historian and his facts, is continuous, and continuously varies; and that this appears to be a distinctive feature of history and of the social sciences.
T should perhaps note here that some physicists in recent years have spoken of their science in terms which appear to suggest more striking analogies between the physical universe and the world of the historian, In the first place, their results are said to involve a principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy.
But, while these descrip- tions would apply with a minimum of change to the relations between the historian and the objects of his observations, I am not satisfied that the essence of these relations isin any real sense comparatle with the nature of relations between the physicist and his universe; and though I am in principle concerned to reduce rather than to inflate the differences which separate the approach of the historian from that of the scientist, it will not help to attempt to spirit these differences away by relying on imperfect analogies.
But, while itis, I think, fair to say that the involvement of the social scientist or historian in the object of his study is of a different kind from that of the physical scientist, and the issues raised by the relation between subject and object infinitely more complicated, this is not the end of the matter. Classical theories of knowledge, which prevailed throughout the seventeenth, cighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, all assumed a sharp dichotomy between the knowing subject and the object known.
However the process was conceived, the model constructed by the philosophers showed subject and object, man and the external world, divided and apart. Man was set sharply against the external world, He grappled with it as with something intractable and potentially hhostile - intractable because it was difficult to understand, potentially hostile because it was difficult to master. With the successes of modern science, this outlook has been radically modified.
The scientist nowadays is fr less likely to think ofthe forces of nature as something to fight against than as something to cooperate with and to harness to his purposes. Classical theories of knowledge no longer fit the newer science, and least of all the science of physics.
This is, however, ex- tremely significant for the social sciences. In my first lecture, I suggested that the study of history was difficultto reconcile with the traditional empiricist theory of knowledge. I should now like to argue that the social sciences as a whole, since they involve man as both subject and object, both investigator and thing investigated, are incompatible with any theory of know- edge which pronounces a rigid divorce between subject and object.
Sociology, in its attempts to establish itself as a coherent body of doctrine, has quite rightly set up a branch called the sociology of knowledge. This has, however, not yet got very far mainly, I suspect, because it has been content to go round and round inside the cage of a traditional theory of knowledge. If philosophers, under the impact first of modern physical science, and now of modern social science, are beginning to break out from this cage, and construct some more up-to-date model for the processes of knowledge than the old billiard-ball mode!
This is a point of some importance, to which I shall return later when Tcometo consider what we mean by objectivity in history. Last but not least, I have to discuss the view that history, being intimately involved in questions of religion and morality, is thereby distinguished from science in general and perhaps even from the other social sciences.
To be a serious astronomer is compatible with belief in a God who created and ordered the universe, But itis not compatible with belief in a God who intervenes at will to change the course of a planet, to postpone an eclipse, or to alter the rules of the cosmic game.
Nor can he invoke God as an explanation of par- ticular historical events. Not until we have gone as far as most in tidying up mundane events and the human. Technical history is the only kind of history 1. Butby the use of this odd epithet, he reserves the right to believe in an esoteric or providential history with which the rest of us need not concern ourselves. Writers like Berdyacv, Niebubr, and Maritain purport to maintain the autonomous status of history, but insist that the end or goal of history lies outside history.
For the purposes of these lectures, I shall assume that the historian must solve his prob- Jems without recourse to any such deus ex machina, that history isa game played, soto speak, without a joker in the pack.
It is scarcely necessary today to argue that the historian is not required to pass moral judgements on the private life of the characters in his story.
The standpoints of the historian and of the moralist are not identical. But the historian is interested in hhim in the former capacity only in so far as it afected historical events. If his moral delinquencies had had as little apparent effect on public affairs as those of Henry If, the historian would not need to bother about them.
This goes for virtues as well 2s vices. Pasteur and Einstein were, one is told, men of exemplary, even saintly, private lives. But, suppose they had been unfaithful husbands, cruel fathers, and unscrupulous colleagues, would their historical achievements have been any the less? And itis these which preoccupy the historian, Stalin is said to have be- haved cruelly and callously to his second wife but, as ahistorian of Soviet affairs, I do not feel myself much concerned.
This does not mean that private morality is not important, or that the history of morals is not a legitimate part of history. He has other things to do. This attitude still sometimes reappears in unexpected forms. Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase, p. Acton, Historical Essays and Studies , p. Survey of International Affairs, , ii 3.
Berlin, Historical Invitability, pp. They cannot be held responsible before any tribunal whatsoever, just because they are men of the past who belong to the peace of the past and as such can only be subjects of history, and can suffer no other judgement than that which penetrates and understands the spirit of their work. Those who, on the plea of narrating history, bustle about as judges, condemning here and giving absolution there, because they think that this is the office of history Croce, History as the Story of Liberty Engl.
Radzinowicz, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, , p. These views fare no longer widely shared by criminologists; but my quarrel with them here is that, whatever their validity elsewhere, they are not applicable to the verdicts of history. Let us therefore reject the notion of the historian as a hanging judge, and turn to the more difficult but more profitable ques- tion of the passing of moral judgements not on individuals, but on events, institutions, or policies of the past.
Moreover, laudatory moral judgements on individuals can be just as misleading and mischievous as the moral denunci- ation of individuals. Peuples et civilisations, vol.
The historian does not sit in judgement on an individual oriental despot. But he is not required to remain indifferent and impartial between, say, oriental despotism and the institutions of Periclean Athens. He will not pass judgement on the individual slave-owner, But this does not prevent him from condemning a slave-owning society.
The losers pay. Suffering is indigenous in history. Every great period of history has its casualties as well as its victories, This is an exceedingly complicated question, because we have no measure which enables us to balance the greater good of some against the sacrifices of others: yet some such balance must be struck. It is not exclusively a problem of Ristory. In ordinary life we are more often involved than we sometimes care to admit in the necessity of preferring the lesser evil, or of doing evil that good may come.
The cost of conservation falls just as heavily on the underprivileged as the cost of innova- tion on those who are deprived of their privileges. The thesis that the good of some justifies the sufferings of others is implicit in all government, and is just as much a conservative as a radical doctrine, Dr Johnson robustly invoked the argument of the lesser evil to justify the maintenance of existing inequalities.
Let us take the story of the industrialization of Great Britain between, say, about and He will probably say that abuses occurred in the working of the system, and that some employers were more ruthless than others, and will dwell with some unction on the gradual growth of a humanitarian conscience once the system has become established.
But he will assume, again prob- ably without saying it, that measures of coercion and exploita- tion, at any rate in the first stages, were an unavoidable part of the cost of industrialization. This example is of particular interest to me, because I hope soon in my history of Soviet Russia to approach the problem of the collectivization of the peasant as a part of the cost of industrialization; and I know well that if, following the example of historians of the British industrial revolution, I 1.
Boswell, Life of Doctor Johnson, Everyman ed. This hhas the meri of candours Burckhardt Judgements on History and His torians, p.
After all, itis said, modern India is the child of British rule; and modern China is the pro- duct of nineteenth-century western imperialism, crossed with the influence of the Russian revolution.
Unfortunately it was not the Chinese workers who laboured in the western-owned factories in the! We are born into society, we are born into history.
No moment occurs when we are offered a ticket of admission with the option to accept or reject it. But does not the fact that the historian, unlike the scientist, becomes involved by the nature of his material in thes issues of I do not think that it does.
But, even so, these abstractions play in the study of historical morality much the same role as mathematical and logical formulas in physical science. They are indispensable categories of thought; but they are devoid of meaning or appli- cation till specific content is put into them.
If you prefer a different metaphor, the moral precepts which we apply in his- tory or in everyday life are like cheques on a bank: they have a printed and a written part. The way in which we fill in the cheque from time to time is a matter of history. The process by which specific historical content is given to abstract moral conceptions is a historical process; indeed, our moral judgements are made within a conceptual framework which is itself the creation of history.
The favourite form of contemporary international controversy on moral issues is a debate on rival claims to free- dom and democracy. The conceptions are abstract and universal. But the content put into them has varied throughout history, from time to time and from place to place; any practical issue of their application can beunderstood and debated onlyinhhistorical terms.
The attempt at once breaks down. It may, of course, be true that planners often behave irrationally, and therefore foolishly. Both sides inevitably read into such a standard the specific content appropriate to their own historical conditions and aspirations. It is not that short- comings occut in the application of the standard, or defects in the standard itself, Itis that the attempt to erect such a standard is unhistorical and contradicts the very essence of history.
History is movement; and movement implies comparison. The emergence of a par- ticular value or ideal at a given time or place is explained by historical conditions of place and time. The practical content of hypothetical absolutes like equality, liberty, justice, or natural law varies from period to period, or from continent to continent, Every group has its own values, which are rooted in history.
Every group protects itself against the intrusion of alien and inconvenient values, which it brands by opprobrious epithets as bourgeois and capitalist, or undemocratic and totalitarian, or, more crudely still, as un-English andun-American, Theabstract standard or value, divorced from society and divorced from history, is as much an illusion as the abstract individual.
The serious historian is the one who recognizes the historically- conditioned character of all values, not the one who claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history. The beliefs which wehold and the standards of judgement which we set up are part of history, and are as much subject to historical investigation as. It is significant that the arguments for exclusion come not from scientists anxious to exclude historians from their select company, but from histor- ians and philosophers anxious to vindicate the status of history asa branch of humane letters, The dispute reflects the prejudice ofthe old division between the humanities and science, in which the humanities were supposed to represent the broad culture of HISTORY, SCIENCE, AND MORALITY 85 the ruling class, and science the skills ofthe technicians who served it.
T isa blind alleyinto which we have been led by muddled thinking. History 2s an academic discipline in this university is sometimes thought of as a catch-all for those who find classics too difficult and science too serious. One impression which T hope fo conve in these lectures is that history is a far more: dine bie a ic it ious as any science. Some historian and more of those who write about history without being The presuppositions and the methods ofthe physicist, the geologist, the psychologist, and the historian differ widely in detail; nor do I wish to commit myselfto the proposition that, in order to be more scientific, the historian must follow more closely the methods of physical science.
But historian and physical scientist are united in the fandamental purpose of seeking to explain, and in the funda- mental procedure of question and answer.
I do not know, and have never wanted to know, why this happens if pressed, I should probably attribute it to a propensity in milk to boil over, which is true enough but explains nothing. But then I am not a natural scientist. In the same way, one can read, or even write, about the events of the past without wanting to know why they happened, or be content to say that the Second World War occurred because Hitler wanted war, which is true enough but explains nothing.
But one should not then commit the solecism of calling oneself a student of history or a historian. He found few disciples in the ancient world: even Thucydides has been accused of having no clear conception of causation. M, Comnford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, passim. Sometimes the causes and the laws were thought of in mechanical, sometimes in biological, terms, sometimes as metaphysical, sometimes as economic, sometimes as psychological.
Though some of these distinctions are in some degree valid, it may be 1. De esprit des lois, Preface and ch. The true historian, confronted with this list of causes of his own com- piling, would feel a professional compulsion to reduce it to order, to establish some hierarchy of causes which would fix 1.
Memorials of Alfred Marshall, ed. Pigou , P- This is his interpretation of his theme; the historian is known by the causes which he invokes. Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman empire to the triumph of barbarism and religion. This is no less true of his- tory. But the historian, in virtue of his urge to understand the past, is simultaneously 1.
But the fact remains that the historian must work through the simpli- fication, as wellas through the multiplication, of causes. History, like science, advances through this dual and apparently con- tradictory process.
First I must say a word or two about how they come to be here, Professor Karl Popper, who in the s in Vienna wrote a weighty work on the new look in science recently translated into English under the title The Logic of Scientific Enquiry , pub- lished in English during the war two books of a more popular character: The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism2 They were written under the strong emotional influence of the reaction against Hegel, who was treated, to- gether with Plato, as the spiritual ancestor of Nazism, and against the rather shallow Marxism which was the intellectual climate of the British Left in the s.
The Poverty of Historicism was first published in book form in , but consists of articles originally published in and Historical Inevitability. He dropped the attack on Plato, perhaps out of some lingering respect for that ancient pillar ofthe Oxford Establishment!
Otherwise not much has changed. But Sir Isaiah Berlin is a deservedly Popular and widely-read writer. During the past five or six years, almost everyone in this country or in the United States, who has written an article about history, or even a serious review of ahistorical work, has cocked a knowing snook at Hegel and Marx and determinism, and pointed out the absurdity of 1, The attack on Plato as the first Fascist originated, however, in ities of broadcasts by aa Oxford mu, RH.
Crosman, Plato Today Constant insistence on the definition of terms is pedantic. As he admits The Poverty of Historiciom, p. In his writing, historicism covers both doctrines which assimilate history to science, and doctrines which sharply differentiate the two.
D'Arcy, The Sense of History! Secular and Sacred , p. Itis perhaps unfair to hold Sir Isaiah responsible for his disciples. Even when he talks nonsense, he earns our indulgence by talking it in an engaging and attractive way.
The disciples repeat the nonsense, and fail to make it attractive, In any case, there is nothing new in all this. No- body in ordinary life believes or can believe this.
The axiom that everything has a cause is a condition of our capacity to under- 1. Popper, The Open Society 2nd ed. Everyday life would be impossible unless one assumed that human behaviour was determined by causes which are in principle ascertainable. Once upon a time some people thought it blasphemous to inquire into the causes of natural phenomena, since these were obviously governed by the divine will. Let us see how we handle this problem in everyday life. As you go about your daily affairs, you are in the habit of meeting Smith.
You greet him with an amiable, but pointless, remark about the weather, or about the state of college or university business; he replies with an equally amiable and pointless remark about the weather or the state of business. But supposing. Would you shrug your shou! I suspect that you would not. He must have been having more trouble with his wife.
The Iogical dilemma about free will and determinism does not arise in real life. Itis not that some human actions are free and others determined. The fact is that all human actions are both free and determined, according to the point of view from which one con- siders them. Whether to hold him responsible in this particular case is a matter for your practical judgement.
But, if you do, this docs not mean that you regard his action as having no cause: cause and moral responsi- bility are different categories. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Embracing change: futures inquiry as applied history. Abstract Most futures research is the work of social, managerial and natural scientists and specialists in technology assessment. Historians are conspicuous by their absence. When they do contribute, … Expand.
History's Moral Turn. History is in the midst of experiencing a "moral turn. Understanding moral issues … Expand. Introductory survey: On the limits of modern history. When Lord Acton was planning The Cambridge Modern History in he wrote of the venture: It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the greatest number, the fullness of the … Expand.
It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for Voltaire's deliberate focus on … Expand. Introduction: The Philosophy of Historiography. This book studies our knowledge of history, its nature, historical development, epistemic limits, and scope.
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