Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge

By Georg G. Iggers

In this book, now published in 10 languages, a preeminent intellectual historian examines the profound changes in ideas about the nature of history and historiography. Georg G. Iggers traces the basic assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based, and describes how the newly emerging social sciences transformed historiography following World War II. The discipline's greatest challenge may have come in the last two decades, when postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject and questioned the very possibility of objective history. Iggers sees the contemporary discipline as a hybrid, moving away from a classical, macrohistorical approach toward microhistory, cultural history, and the history of everyday life. The new epilogue, by the author, examines the movement away from postmodernism towards new social science approaches that give greater attention to cultural factors and to the problems of globalization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780819573797

Book preview

Historiography in the Twentieth Century

Historiography in the

Twentieth Century

From Scientific Objectivity to the

Postmodern Challenge

WITH A NEW EPILOGUE BY THE AUTHOR

Georg G. Iggers

Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 1997 by Georg G. Iggers

Epilogue © 2005 by Georg G. Iggers

All rights reserved

An expanded English version of the book Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert. Ein kritischer Überblick im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, 1993). Published with permission of the German publisher Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen.

Originally produced in 1997 by Wesleyan/University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755.

Wesleyan University Press edition including a new epilogue by the author first produced in 2005.

Printed in the United States of America  5  4  3  2

Library of Congress Control Number 2004115137

ISBN–13: 978–0–8195–6766–6

ISBN–10: 0–8195–6766–3

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Iggers, Georg G.

[Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert. English]

Historiography in the twentieth century : from scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge / by Georg G. Iggers.

p.     cm.

An expanded English version of: Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert. © 1993.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–8195–5302–6 (cl : alk. paper).

ISBN 0–8195–6306–4 (pa : alk. paper).

1. Historiography—History—20th century. 2. History—Philosophy. 3. History—Methodology. I. Title.

D13.2.I3413     1997

For Wilma

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Classical Historicism as a Model for Historical Scholarship

Chapter 2. The Crisis of Classical Historicism

Chapter 3. Economic and Social History in Germany and the Beginnings of Historical Sociology

Chapter 4. American Traditions of Social History

Chapter 5. France: The Annales

Chapter 6. Critical Theory and Social History: Historical Social Science in the Federal Republic of Germany

Chapter 7. Marxist Historical Science from Historical Materialism to Critical Anthropology

Chapter 8. Lawrence Stone and The Revival of Narrative

Chapter 9. From Macro- to Microhistory: The History of Everyday Life

Chapter 10. The Linguistic Turn: The End of History as a Scholarly Discipline?

Chapter 11. From the Perspective of the 1990s

Concluding Remarks

Epilogue: A Retrospect at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Suggested Readings

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

A German version of this book was published in 1993 and in the meantime has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. The German text had its basis in a paper I delivered at a panel discussion in April 1990 at the Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium on Rationality and History, which dealt with the question of the postmodernist challenge to historical studies. The English version is not a translation of the German but in many ways a different book, the result of additional reading and discussions as well as the critical distance I have gained from the German text in the past three years.

Two observations: Although the book attempts a comparative examination of historical thought that is international in its scope, it restricts itself to languages I can read. Hence the focus is on Great Britain and North America, France and Belgium, German-speaking Central Europe and Italy, with occasional references to Polish and Russian works in translation. But even here, my choice of authors is by necessity highly selective, focusing mainly on historians who exemplify important trends in historical scholarship.

I am very grateful to the students and colleagues who during the past six years permitted me to test my theses and who commented on earlier versions of the manuscript. I am particularly thankful to the members of my seminar at the University of Leipzig who read and commented on a draft of the German manuscript during my guest semester there in the summer of 1992 and to a large number of colleagues and friends on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan who also read the manuscript and offered critical suggestions, including Werner Berthold, Gerald Diesener, Christoph Dipper, Wolfgang Ernst, Dagmar Friedrich, Akira Hayashima, Wolfgang Hardtwig, Frank Klaar, Wolfgang Küttler, Jonathan Knudsen, Iris Pilling, Lutz Raphael, Anne-Katrin Richter, Hans Schleier, Ulrich Schneckener, Fernando Sánchez Marcos, Christian Simon, B. Stråth, Rudolf von Thadden, Wiebke von Thadden, Edoardo Tortarolo, Johan van der Zande, and Peter Walther. I wish to thank Ottavia Niccoli for her useful suggestions on recent Italian social and cultural history. I found the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen a congenial and stimulating place to write the major portions of both the German and the English version. The Institute provided me not only access to an excellent library but also an opportunity to discuss the book with researchers there who read all or large portions of the book, including Hans-Erich Bödeker, Alf Lüdtke, Otto Gerhard Oexle, Jürgen Schlumbohm, and Rudolf Vierhaus. Conversations with Jörn Rüsen, who invited me to a number of colloquia at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Bielefeld, were also valuable. On the German side, Winfried Hellmann at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht was a superb editor who met with me repeatedly prior to the publication of the German text and offered trenchant criticisms. I am very thankful to Peter Burke who on very short notice read the English manuscript and made valuable suggestions, which I incorporated, and to Albert Cremer and Steffen Kaudelka at the Max Planck Institute and Patrice Veit of the Mission Historique Française en Allemagne for reading the English version of the Annales chapter. I would like to thank Karl Sieverling at the Max Planck Institute for his computer assistance. Charles Daniello at Lockwood Library at the State University often provided bibliographical information. I am thankful to my Buffalo assistant Song-Ho Ha for the superb secretarial and scholarly assistance he offered me. The State University of New York at Buffalo was very generous in arranging my teaching schedule to permit me maximum time for my research and writing. The Woodrow Wilson Center provided support for a larger project of which this book was a part, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation provided me with the means to spend two half-years in Germany. I am particularly thankful to my wife, Wilma, who carefully read every German and English version for style and logical consistency and prepared a draft translation into English.

G. G. I.

Göttingen

May 1996

Introduction

Over twenty years ago I published a small book about the state of historical studies in Europe at that time, in which I showed how the traditional forms of scholarship were replaced by newer forms of historical research in the social sciences.¹ Historians in all countries were largely in agreement that research as it had been practiced internationally since the beginning of historical studies as a professional discipline in the early nineteenth century corresponded neither to the social nor to the political conditions of the second half of the twentieth century nor to the demands of a modern science. Meanwhile ideas about history and historiography have again undergone a profound change. This volume should therefore not be seen as a continuation which, so to say, would bring my publication of 1975 up to date. Instead, it is mainly concerned with a select number of basic changes in the thinking and in the practice of historians today. Although there are many continuities with older forms of historical research and historical writing, a basic reorientation has taken place.

Increasingly in the last twenty years the assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based since the emergence of history as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century have been questioned. Many of these assumptions go back to the beginnings of a continuous tradition of Western historiography in Classical antiquity. What was new in the nineteenth century was the professionalization of historical studies and their concentration at universities and research centers. Central to the process of professionalization was the firm belief in the scientific status of history. The concept science was, to be sure, understood differently by historians than by natural scientists, who sought knowledge in the form of generalizations and abstract laws. For the historians history differed from nature because it dealt with meanings as they expressed themselves in the intentions of the men and women who made history and in the values and mores that gave societies cohesion. History dealt with concrete persons and concrete cultures in time. But the historians shared the optimism of the professionalized sciences generally that methodologically controlled research makes objective knowledge possible. For them as for other scientists truth consisted in the correspondence of knowledge to an objective reality that, for the historian, constituted the past as it had actually occurred.² The self-definition of history as a scientific discipline implied for the work of the historian a sharp division between scientific and literary discourse, between professional historians and amateurs. The historians overlooked the extent to which their research rested on assumptions about the course of history and the structure of society that predetermined the results of their research.

The transformation of history into an institutionalized discipline must not, however, lead us to overlook the continuities with older forms of historical writing. The historiography of the nineteenth century stood in a tradition that went back to the great historians of Classical Greek antiquity. They shared with Thucydides the distinction between myth and truth, and at the same time, despite their stress on the scientific and hence nonrhetorical character of historical writing, proceeded in the classical tradition of historical writing in presupposing that history is always written as a narrative. The problem with historical narrative, however, as Hayden White³ and other recent theorists of history have pointed out, is that, while it proceeds from empirically validated facts or events, it necessarily requires imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story. Therefore a fictional element enters into all historical discourse.

Hence the break between the scientific history of the nineteenth century and the older literary traditions of history was by no means as great as many nineteenth-century historians had assumed. Scientific historical discourse involved the literary imagination while the older literary tradition also sought truth in the reconstruction of a real past. The scientific orientation since Leopold von Ranke shared three basic assumptions with the literary tradition from Thucydides to Gibbon: (1) They accepted a correspondence theory of truth holding that history portrays people who really existed and actions that really took place. (2) They presupposed that human actions mirror the intentions of the actors and that it is the task of the historian to comprehend these intentions in order to construct a coherent historical story. (3) They operated with a one-dimensional, diachronical conception of time, in which later events follow earlier ones in a coherent sequence. These assumptions of reality, intentionality, and temporal sequence determined the structure of historical writing from Herodotus and Thucydides to Ranke, and from Ranke well into the twentieth century. Precisely these assumptions have gradually been questioned in recent historical thought.

I believe we can distinguish two very different orientations in historical thought in the twentieth century. The first dealt with the transformation of the kind of narrative, event-oriented history characteristic of professional historiography in the nineteenth century into social science-oriented forms of historical research and writing in the twentieth century. Fundamental assumptions of the traditional historiography were challenged, but the basic assumptions outlined above remained intact. The various kinds of social science-oriented history spanned the methodological and ideological spectrum from quantitative sociological and economic approaches and the structuralism of the Annales-School to Marxist class analysis. In different ways all these approaches sought to model historical research more closely after the natural sciences. While traditional historiography had focused on the agency of individuals and on elements of intentionality that defied reduction to abstract generalization, the new forms of social science-oriented history emphasized social structures and processes of social change. Nevertheless they shared two key notions with the older historiography. One was the affirmation that history dealt with a real subject matter to which the accounts formulated by historians must correspond. Admittedly this reality could not be grasped directly but, like all science, must be mediated by the concepts and mental constructs of historians who nonetheless still aimed at objective knowledge. The new social science approaches criticized the older historiography on several counts: They argued that it too narrowly focused on individuals, especially great men, and events as making up the subject matter of history and that it neglected the broader context in which these operated. In this sense social science approaches, whether Marxist, Parsonian, or Annalist, represented a democratization of history, an inclusion of broader segments of the population, and an extension of the historical perspective from politics to society. They objected to the older approaches, not because they were scientific but because they were not sufficiently so. They challenged one of the basic assumptions of this older approach, namely that history deals with particulars, not generalizations, that its aim is to understand, not to explain, and they maintained instead that all sciences, including history, must include causal explanations.

On a second point there was also agreement between the older tradition and the social science approaches. Both operated with a notion of unilinear time, with the conception that there was continuity and direction in history, that in fact there was such a thing as history in contrast to a multiplicity of histories. This conception of history took a different form in the older conventional historiography than in the later social science approaches. Ranke had rejected the notion of a philosophy of history that presupposed a scheme of universal history, but nevertheless presupposed that history possessed an inner coherence and development,⁴ and assigned a privileged position to the history of the West. Social science historians tended to believe that there at least the history of the modern age moved in a clear direction. While few would accept an idea of progress that endowed this direction with a beneficial character, most operated with a notion of modernization or progressive rationalization that endowed historical development with coherence. Here too the history of the modern Western world had a privileged status. The history of the world coincided with Westernization.

These assumptions have been increasingly challenged in philosophic thought since the late nineteenth century. It is, however, only in the last quarter century that the doubts this challenge has produced have seriously affected the work of historians. This reorientation of historical thought reflected fundamental changes in society and culture. In a sense the paradigm of professional historiography initiated by Ranke had already been out of tune with the social and political realities of the time when it became the standard for historical studies universally. Ranke was very much a child of the age of restoration that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era. His concept of the state rested on the political realities of pre-1848 Prussia, prior to the establishment of representative institutions and prior to industrialization with its social concomitants. Hence the emphasis on the primacy of politics relatively isolated from economic or social forces and the almost exclusive reliance on official documents of state. By the time in the late nineteenth century when this paradigm became the model for professional historiography in France,⁵ the United States,⁶ and elsewhere, the social and political conditions it presupposed had already been fundamentally transformed.

By the turn of the century, historians in France, Belgium, the United States, Scandinavia, and even Germany began to criticize the Rankean paradigm and to call for a history that accounted for social and economic factors.⁷ Such a history necessarily had to turn away from a concentration on events and individual leading personalities to focus on the social conditions in which these existed. Democratization and the emergence of a mass society also called for a historiography that took into account the role of broader segments of the population and the conditions under which they lived. Thus from different perspectives New Historians in the United States, the circle around Henri Berr in France and Henri Pirenne⁸ in Belgium, and Marxists generally in Continental Europe turned to their particular conceptions of social science as integral to the work of the historians. While conventional forms of political and diplomatic history dominated in the profession until well after 1945, increasing attention was given to social history. Particularly after 1945 the systematic social sciences began to play an increasingly important role in the work of historians. It is this transformation that my book of twenty years ago portrayed.

Yet the optimism regarding the nature and direction of the modern world on which social science history rested was profoundly shaken by fundamental changes in the structure of social existence in a late industrial world. Social science-oriented historians had conceived the modern world more dynamically than did the Rankean school. They envisaged continuous economic growth and the application of scientific rationality to the ordering of society as positive values that defined modern existence.

Already in the second half of the nineteenth century these assumptions regarding the course of history had been subjected to devastating criticism by Jacob Burckhardt⁹ and Friedrich Nietzsche.¹⁰ These pessimistic notes recurred in philosophic discussions and reflections on the state of modern culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but they did not seriously affect the thought of practicing historians until the 1960s. In many ways the 1960s were a turning point at which the consciousness of a crisis of modern society and culture, long in preparation, came to a head. Only then did the conditions created by World War II become obvious, among them the end of the colonial empires and a greater awareness that non-Western peoples also had a history.¹¹ Within the Western societies the older conceptions of a national consensus, reiterated in writings of the 1950s,¹² was replaced by a greater awareness of the diversities within the established nation states. Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1961)¹³ portrayed a very different picture of American society than the optimistic views held by historians such as Daniel Boorstin¹⁴ and sociologists such as Daniel Bell.¹⁵ But Marxist conceptions of class appeared inadequate in an environment that was increasingly aware of other divisions such as gender, race, ethnicity, and life style. The shift from an industrial to an information society further affected consciousness. For the first time there was an intense awareness of the negative sides of economic growth with its threat to a stable environment. The full impact of the Holocaust sank into public awareness, not immediately at the end of the World War II, but only at a distance when a new generation acquired a critical stance. The destructive qualities of the civilizing process increasingly moved into the center of awareness.

For the historian this transformation of consciousness had several consequences. It marked for many the end of a grand narrative.¹⁶ The West increasingly appeared as merely one among a number of civilizations, none of which could claim primacy. Similarly modernity lost its

Reviews for Historiography in the Twentieth Century

[johnclaydon · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Slightly above the level of worthless crap.