Saturday, March 12, 2005
Thoughts on history and "theory":
from
Objectivity is Not Neutrality - Thomas Haskell
When historians indulge their aversion to theory they have no choice but
to fall back on common sense. In doing so, they risk introducing a fatal anachronism into their work~- because the common sense they unreflectively rely on will almost certainly be that of their own times. One elementary prerequisite of historical understanding is an appreciation of the meaning events had for the actors of the past, and this entails imagination and a readiness on the part of the historian to suspend or bracket the common sense of his or her own era. The meaning historical actors attached to their acts and decisions will not always, or even usually, be the same as the meanings we formulate in retrospect from our own moment in time, but we cannot begin to understand. who they were and why they acted as they did until we have acknowledged differences between the presuppositions that prevailed in their time and the ones that prevail in ours.
To acknowledge this is not only to confess the historicity of common sense but also to admit the necessity of "theory,"- by which term I mean nothing more than a freewheeling recognition that events are interrelated in more ways than are .immediately apparent or carry the sanction of common usage. The theory wars that have laid waste to some fields of literary criticism these past two decades are something I would not wish on my worst enemies. But when historians disdain theory in the modest sense that I am recommending I believe they betray their calling as intellectuals. History need not be a flatfooted report from the archives that smugly prides itself on factual completeness and accuracy while remaining conceptually thin and unimaginative. The best history has always been that which combines empirical rigor with deep and adventurous thinking about the best way to conceptualize and frame the events being related. (p. 6)
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On the other hand, the moderate historicism that I admire (and that I think promises a safe haven for rights talk) must also be sharply distinguished from the more radical varieties of historicism that are commonly identified as Nietzchean. We historians can hardly help being attracted to the historicist end of the spectrum in this debate, but that need not prevent us from recognizing that historicism harbors within itself radical possibilities that are deeply antagonistic not only to ideas of natural rights but also to all hopes of expanding the sway of reason and moral order in the world. Friedrich Nietzsche saw with uncanny clarity just where the most extreme forms of historicism lead - not just away from Plato's universal Truth and timeless forms, which we can all do without, but beyond the very ideas of truth and falsehood, or good and evil, toward a heroic but brutal world in which nothing counts but will and the power to carry it out. Committed though I am to a moderate historicism, if forced to make a painful choice between the extremes of Nietzsche and Plato, it is Plato I would unhesitatingly choose. (p. 117)
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To say, as historicism does, that all our efforts to grapple mentally with the
world are shaped by a frame of reference, and that we do not have any rational basis for choosing between frames of reference, is to suggest that reason is indeed enslaved by (or at least confined within) the particular social and historical context in which it finds itself. And if that is the case, it is difficult to see how rights and the other insights proclaimed by reason can be anything more than mutable social conventions. They evidently cannot be natural or possess any other sort of ultimate foundation. They become, at best, merely agreed upon fictions and their value; if any, becomes merely instrumental, open to negotiation, subject to change. Under, a historicist dispensation, rights cannot be understood to possess the deep and certain epistemological basis that Strauss thought they needed if democracy was to thrive. (p. 121)
