What Is History?: and Other Essays

By Michael Oakeshott and Luke O'Sullivan

This highly readable new collection of thirty pieces by Michael Oakeshott, almost all of which are previously unpublished, covers every decade of his intellectual career, and adds significantly to his contributions to the philosophy of historical understanding and political philosophy, as well as to the philosophy of education and aesthetics. The essays were intended mostly for lectures or seminars, and are consequently in an informal style that will be accessible to new readers as well as to those already well acquainted with Oakeshott’s works. Early pieces include a long essay ‘On the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry, and Reality’, and Oakeshott’s comments on ‘The Cambridge School of Political Science’ through which he himself had passed as an undergraduate. The collection also reproduces a substantial wartime essay ‘On Peace with Germany’. There are two new essays on the philosophy of education, and the essay which gives the work its title, ‘What is History?’, is just one of over half a dozen discussions of the nature of historical knowledge. Oakeshott’s later sceptical, ‘hermeneutic’, thought is also well represented by pieces such as ‘What is Political Theory?’ and ‘The Emergence of the History of Thought.’ Reviews of books by English and European contemporaries such as Butterfield, Hayek, Voegelin, and Arendt also help to place him in context more clearly than before. The book will be indispensable for all Oakeshott’s readers, no matter which area of his thought concerns them most.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Oct 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781845403027

Book preview

Theory?’

History is a Fablei

History is a fable which men agree to believe.

Napoleon

All truth is a shadow, except final truth. But every truth is substance in its own place.

Izaac Pennington

There is a branch of study, which goes by the name of Historiography, which makes it its business to examine the methods of research employed by Historians, and in the end to deduce some general principles about the writing of history. In the world of science investigation of a sort was carried on for centuries before anyone thought fit to speculate upon the aim and scope of the ‘scientific method’—as it has come to be called. That is to say, the method was evolved in practice before men studied it for its own sake. And yet no one can deny that this study gave an impetus and an accuracy to the scientific method which formerly it lacked. History is in a similar case; except that its method has not as yet received that attention which for long has been given to science. Historiography is a comparatively young study, and consequently one looked upon with some suspicion by professional historians—especially in England. ‘Why can’t you write history, instead of writing about history?’ they ask, and are apt to be impatient of those, perhaps naïve, gentlemen who prefer to consider the question whether it is possible to write history at all.

But perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it at once, and say that it is a problem in historiography to which I wish to call your attention to-night. But do not alarm yourselves unnecessarily. This is a subject which, judged by what standard you like, is not without some use. [—a consideration, I must admit, which does not weigh very heavily with me.]ii A celebrated French historian has said that ‘the truth is, that, of all branches of study, history is without a doubt the one in which it is most necessary for students to have a clear consciousness of the methods they use.’[1] So, we shall not I hope be wasting our time in studying this subject. Historians have too long been content to say that they are scientists or artists or a mixture of both and leave the study of their method at that. But the fact is, and we shall return to this later, the method of history differs fundamentally from both that of science and that of art, and we shall only understand it properly when we call it ‘the historic method’ and study it independently of science and of art.

I cannot claim any great originality for what I have to say; men of considerable reputation have treated this subject—‘The meaning of Truth in History’—before; but, as the Greek sage has it, ‘What is right may well be said—even twice.’[2] I am aware, also, of the extreme difficult of listening to an abstract argument without any opportunity of studying the actual written word, so I shall endeavour to illustrate my arguments, abhor abstractions and cleave to facts as much as possible.

Let us turn, then, to our own subject. But first, What is History? And this I think we may answer in a manner which will admit of little controversy. History has two main elements—(i) Events in time, and (ii) the recollection of these events in the mind. Both of these are, I think, essential. There can, of course, be little doubt that events apart from the historian do exist. The Constitution of England evolved without the episcopal assistance of Stubbs; the Roman Empire declined and fell before Gibbon was thought of, and, in the same way, the Dutch Republic ‘rose’ and became independent without the necessary co-operation of John Lathrop Motley. But I think it is fair to say that these events are not historical events until they have been recollected in the mind of an historian. This double origin of history is admitted in the way in which we ordinarily speak of it. History, so far as we are concerned, is written history. But how is history written?

Not many years ago the two heads of the history school of the Sorbonne—M. Langlois and M. Seignobos—wrote a book with a view to instructing would-be historians in the rudiments of their science. The book concludes with some general considerations. ‘History,’ it says, ‘is only the utilization of documents. But it is a matter of chance whether documents are preserved or lost. Hence the predominant part played by chance, in the formation of history.’[3] ‘Conceivably,’ it continues, ‘a day may come, when, thanks to the organization of labour, all existing documents will have been discovered, emended, arranged, and all the facts established of which traces have not been destroyed. When that day comes history will be established.’[4] Now, the theory here put forward is that history is simply the recalling of past facts. The Historian is receptive only. He has no task of construction. Accuracy, given a mind reasonably acute, depends entirely upon documentary evidence. And, some day, all that is knowable of the past will be known. That this is a false and impossible view of the nature of history I wish to try and prove to-night.

History, we have seen, stands for both the past fact and the present record. The truth of the record depends entirely upon the truth of the past fact. That is to say that history can be a true record of actual fact only if it is possible for the human mind to observe and record facts in the manner in which they actually take place. Fact, then, is the basis of history. But how do we approach a fact?

The view that history is simply the recalling of a past event is untenable for two reasons. First, because we nowhere find facts in so simple a state as can warrant us to take them as the only truth. Conflicting facts arise; and we are forced to choose. History is necessarily a matter of selecting and rejecting, of weighing and balancing. Documents have very different values, and in order to advance at all history must be critical. But the second reason is far more fundamental. It is this. While facts are outward, permanent, and accessible to all men, to the human mind they involve judgments. All evidence rests in the end upon an inference. A bare fact, the simple sensation, cannot be recalled without a judgment. Impartiality in the sense of mere passivity is a thing for ever impossible. And not only do we as individuals observe facts differently from each other, but also each age, each civilization, has a point of view which it cannot discard try as it will. This difficulty does not assail us only when we are dealing with events which have taken place so long ago that all record of them is shrouded in obscurity; it is present also in the observation of things which happen before our eyes. Let me give a few illustrations of this point. What I am asking you to do is to observe the manner in which you come to know any new fact.

Here is a simple example. It is a fact of the experience of everyone that we cannot look for anything which we should not recognize if we saw it. Imagine a game of hunt-the-thimble played by people who had no idea of what a thimble looked like. Could it ever come to an end? In these circumstances it is easy to understand the saying of Robert Browning that ‘tis the taught already that profits by teaching.’[5] And the truth comes home to us of that remark by one of William De Morgan’s Characters—‘If you’d a knowed ‘em when you seed ‘em, you might have kep’ your eyes open and took note.’[6] Or take this confession of Walter Pater. ‘A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.’[7] I remember seeing the proud claim of an elementary schoolmaster, who had opened a library for his children, that the favourite reading of those between the ages of nine and twelve was Mr de Gibbins’ ‘Economic History of England.’ He did not seem to realize that it was possible to read a book without understanding a word of it, and that this is what children are extremely fond of doing. All of us have experienced that amazement, on rereading a book, at things we had missed on our first reading, from lack of understanding. And why did we fail to understand? The facts were there in black and white; is there anything required beyond an ability simply to read? Yes; the fact is that everything we read or observe depends for its meaning upon the present state of our knowledge, as much as upon the thing itself. Shakespeare has remarked that—

A jests prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never on the tongue

Of him that makes it.

And this is true of more than pleasantries. The prosperity of all that is ever said or written rests with the hearer or reader more than with the speaker or writer. The mind of the hearer gives colour, and form and life itself, to the word, shaping it into significance after its own fashion and interpreting it to its own experience.

Here is another instance. It comes from Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. Joseph Sedley is just back from India and Rebecca Sharp is desirous of appearing interested in that country. They sit down to dinner and Joseph is served with some Indian curry.

‘What is it?’ said she, turning an appealing look to Mr. Joseph. ‘Capital, said he. His mouth was full of it: his face quite red with the delightful exercise of gobbling. ‘Mother, it’s as good as my own curries in India.’ ‘Oh, I must try some, if it is an Indian dish,’ said Miss Rebecca. ‘I am sure everything must be good that comes from there.’ ‘Give Miss Sharp some curry, my dear,’ said Mr. Sedley, laughing. Rebecca had never tasted the dish before. ‘Do you find it as good as everything else from India?’ said Mr. Sedley. ‘Oh, excellent!’ said Rebecca, who was suffering tortures with the cayenne pepper. ‘Try a chili with it, Miss Sharp,’ said Joseph, really interested. ‘A chili,’ said Rebecca, gasping. ‘Oh yes!’ She thought a chili was something cool, as its name imported, and was served with some. ‘How fresh and green they look,’ she said, and put one into her mouth. It was hotter than the curry; flesh and blood could bear it no longer. She laid down her fork. ‘Water, for Heaven’s sake, water!’ she cried.iii

What I want to make clear is that even language itself is powerless to convey a meaning to those who do not already understand. Words have a meaning for us—or no meaning—in proportion to what we already know as well as in proportion to the ‘sense that they make’, as we say.

My meaning, I think, must by this time be fairly clear, but I cannot resist one more illustration. It is concerned with the matter of indexes in books. Putting aside those books which have no indexes, which I am always tempted to throw out of the window, we find many degrees of goodness and badness in indexes; and the best index—I talk of what is known as a subject index—is that which looks at a subject from every conceivable point of view, simply because our individual points of view differ so widely that an index which is of use to one man of a particular way of thinking and classifying his knowledge is perfectly useless to another man whose mind works differently. As an example of a peculiar type of mind in this matter we may take that of the man who compiled the index to some law reports in which if you looked up ‘Mind’ you were referred to page 300 and there found the entry ‘Mr Justice Darling said he had a good mind to commit the witness for contempt of court’!

But what is the outcome of all this? It is that each individual when presented with fact—whether in record or in actual life—looks at it in a different way, would describe it from a different point of view, would select different features for emphasis until it makes us dizzy to compare them all,—and even our comparison of them would be carried out under the auspices of our own point of view. Not only, then, does the historian labour under a point of view which is probably antagonistic to the point of view of his sources—be they documents or living witnesses; but also those who originally observed the event—the eye-witnesses—had themselves to incorporate this new experience with the present content of their minds before it had any meaning at all for them.

The situation is rather black. History is beginning to look a little like a fable. ‘But’, you may say, ‘you have given us plenty of examples, and yet none of them seem remotely connected with history.’ Well, it is only possible to give an historic example where an actual mistake has been exposed and remedied and I will confine myself to a single instance of this.

The Phoenicians sailed from the Red Sea into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in where they were on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year’s harvest. Then, having got their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right—to northward of them.iv

This voyage of the Phoenicians, so the commentators of Herodotus tell us, has been the subject of much controversy not only among classical scholars but also among the historians and geographers of a time more nearly contemporary with that of Herodotus himself. The arguments for and against the authenticity of the voyage are many, but strangely enough the one fact that has persuaded many scholars to accept it, is that about which Herodotus—though he records it—was so scornful. We now know that in sailing round Africa the travellers would as a matter of fact have the sun—not the sunrise—on their right hand, so long as they kept a more or less westward course. Herodotus did not know this. The state of his knowledge did not warrant him to accept the Phoenicians’ story. His point of view—the necessary point of view of scientific opinion of his day—prevented him from understanding a story which we know must have been substantially correct. Historians of to-day would not have recorded so unlikely a story, and had Herodotus been more scientifically minded we might never have had this instance. One age can believe—scientifically—what another age cannot; and this is a law altogether independent of the testimony of witnesses.

The Historian, then, comes to examine his documents in the light of his own knowledge, and from the point of view of his own day. For not only do individuals differ very widely in their point of view, but also ages and civilizations possess peculiar characteristics of which they cannot rid themselves. An age which reads or writes history for guidance in practical life will find in it something different from that which looks simply for edification, or for disinterested knowledge. Just as the tinned-fish King who admitted he read his Carlyle because he found there some ‘damned good adverts for sardines’—you will recall the picture in Punch—will find something other than he who seeks a philosophy of life from the same pages. As Goethe said—‘Every man hears only what he understands.’[8] To sum up the position we have reached. Try how we will we can never look at the past except through the spectacles of the present.

Our present knowledge gives us one view of the past, the knowledge of the next century will probably provide another. Truth in history does not depend entirely upon the mere accuracy of documentary evidence, but also upon the way in which that evidence is examined, the content of the mind which examines it. If, for instance, we would get at the Middle Ages as they really were, we must discard the experience of the last 500 years and put ourselves into the position of a man who is ignorant of all the discoveries and ideas which have taken place and grown up in that intervening period,—a thing impossible to achieve. Those past ages possessed an atmosphere and were ruled by ideas which we can now but dimly understand.[9] They are to our minds something foreign, something new, something we have not as yet experienced. True, we may understand them in part, but they can never be our ideas and we can never understand them apart from the ideas which are our own.

When all the facts have been collected and all the evidence weighed, ‘there still remains the ceaseless endeavour more and more thoroughly to apprehend the old material, the passion of the mind to be at home in its object, the longing to think the thing as it is in itself, and as all men have failed to think it before. With every fresh standing-ground gained by the growth of experience, with every rise of the spirit to a fuller life comes another view of the far-flung past from a higher and new level, and a fresh and corresponding change in the features of the object recognized.’[10] What is our usual method of getting to know something new, something of which we have no actual experience? If a man entirely ignorant of our civilization were to ask us to explain to him what a University is, how should we set about it? ‘There is only one way of knowing. It consists in finding a place for new phenomena within our system of experience.’[11] To explain a thing to an ignorant man it is necessary to start with something he knows already and build upon that. We should tell him that a University was like something which he already understood. To an East Ender we might say it was like his social club. ‘Oh’, he might answer, ‘a place where you can play billiards all day.’ And it would be necessary to explain in what respects it was like and in what respect it was unlike his club. And so on. It is the process of analogy; and the human mind knows no other. All new knowledge depends upon our ability to find in our present knowledge an analogy for the new phenomenon.

There is a trick of logic, which dates back to the Greek Sophists, by which it is possible to make it appear that many may never gain new knowledge.[12] This is the argument. True knowledge must be founded upon a true analogy in our own experience. But a true analogy is a complete one. And it is obvious that we cannot have a complete analogy without at the same time possessing the knowledge which it is our object to obtain. And so the circle is closed. This is equivalent to saying that ‘in order to work iron a hammer is needed, and in order to have a hammer it must be made, for which another hammer and other instruments are needed, for the making of which other things are needed; and in this manner anyone might vainly endeavour to prove that men have no power of working iron.’[13] The fact is a hammer has been made. We can come to know something of which we previously had no experience. But here the difference between Science and History is most fundamental. The Scientific method is the one by which we come to gain new knowledge. By experiment we gradually build up our knowledge, and advance from less true to more true—just as primitive man, by first using a stone to make a rudimentary hammer, and, in the course of generations, the rudimentary hammer to make a more refined tool, arrived in the end at the modern implement. For science there is an accumulative process in which every step is an advance; and our present knowledge is built upon the discoveries, superceded and again superceded, of past generations.

But this method is for ever barred to the historian. ‘The original fact of history is (i) an event which perishes as it arises. It dies and can never be recalled. It cannot repeat itself, and we are powerless to repeat it. And in addition (ii) we cannot prepare for it.’[14] It is forbidden us to put our cameras in place ready to record the event when it happens. There can never be a science of history. The Scientific method is forbidden to the historian. He cannot gradually build up his knowledge from a true to a truer analogy and at last to the fact itself, for the fact, the event perished when it happened and we start and finish our researches with only the evidence of observers and the differing testimony of witnesses, that is, with theory and not with fact. And each new discovery cannot, as in the case of science, be said to contribute to one advance in knowledge, for each discovery is but the reaction of the records of history upon a different personal experience, a mind with a different content, and is not more likely to correspond with the fact than any other, previous or to come.

This dilemma is not, as some may think, entirely divorced from the actual writing of history. Historians, at one time and another, have faced the problem and have given various solutions, of which two are outstanding. They may be called the scientific and the artistic solutions. The Historian as scientist is apt to reject these considerations. To him ‘History is the utilization of Documents.’ ‘When all the documents are known,’ these are the words of M. Langlois, ‘and have gone through the operations which fit them for use, the work of critical scholarship will be finished.’[15] We have already seen, I think, how this is merely a shirking of a very real dilemma. The Historian can call himself scientific in any true sense only if he ignores a large part of the essential nature of the thing with which he is dealing.

But the Poet–Historian offers another solution. ‘I know,’ he says, ‘that it is logically impossible for me to look at the past with an absolutely open mind, for me to throw off the ideas and stand point which rule the present. But surely I can arrive at what the past really was by an act of intuition.’ He faces the problem and produces a solution of a kind. But what is the value of the solution which he proposes? In the end it comes to this, that the poet-historian is banking on his own genius. ‘Men of genius get their knowledge of the world nobody knows how; Shakespeare, for instance, cannot have had personal experience of more than a fraction of what he wrote about. In fact genius is the power of getting knowledge with the least possible experience, and one of the greatest differences between men is the amount of experience they need of a thing in order to understand it.’[16] Let me give a couple of simple instances of what I mean. Keats was no great Greek scholar and yet it is generally admitted that few have captured the spirit of Greek Civilization so wholly as he. And again; any who have read Shorthouse’s novel John Inglesant will have been struck by the vividness of his descriptions of Italian scenery and life, and moreover those who know that country are struck by the extreme accuracy of these descriptions. And yet they were written by a man who never visited Italy. The best instance of an historian who avowedly, to a great extent, followed this method, is that afforded by Renan. This is what he says. ‘There are hardly any certain facts (détails) in history; nevertheless facts have always some significance. The genius of the historian consists in making a true whole from incidents (traits) which are only half-true.’[17]

It was his practice to question gently his documents and to win from them the truth—‘solliciter doucement les textes.’ Now, it seems to me a very different question to decide whether this method of writing history is valid. Croce compliments it by classing it among his ‘pseudo-histories’.[18] We may say with certainty that it is dangerous, but, for all that, it may be our only chance of really coming to know the past as it actually was. But still, I think we are warranted of being a little suspicious of it—especially if any alternative solution to the problem presents itself.

We have now considered those who regard history as a science and seek to apply the ‘scientific method’ to it, and those who look upon it as an art, making free use of their imaginative and intuitive faculties in their research. But what if there is an ‘historic method’ different alike from both that of science and that of art? One thing is certain; the problem of how to get to know the past is peculiar to history and if it has not already done so it is time it began to evolve a method of its own. And as a matter of fact there is material for the formation of such a method. The past, we have seen, ‘varies with the present and cannot do otherwise since it is always the present upon which it rests. The present is presupposed by it, and is its necessary preconception … There is no single history which is not so based, which does not derive its individual characters from the particular standpoint of the author’[19] and his age. It is only when the historian has become aware of these facts that he can become truly critical, and protect himself (so far as is possible) from the caprices of fiction. If he does this he must give up that hope, cherished by both the scientific and the artistic historians, of ever arriving at the absolute truth of the actual fact which took place, and must content himself with recording the past seen through the spectacles of the present. We know how much uninteresting has been recorded, and how many things which we should like to know are unrecorded. And this will always be so. We can never put ourselves in the position of men a century ahead, any more than we can ever understand men of an age gone by. Historical truth, then, is simply the truth about past events which satisfies our present state of knowledge. No deeper study of the past, after a time, will avail to reveal new facts, but the fresh experience of a future age will light up the past with a light which is not that of our own day, and will not be that of an age buried still further in the future. ‘Dead history revives, and past history again becomes present, as the development of life demands them’, says Croce. And again; ‘These revivals have altogether interior motives, and no wealth of documents or narratives can bring them about.’[20] M. Langlois and M. Seignobos dream of a time when the last historian shall lay down his pen, and blot the last page of the last history. ‘In the case of some ancient periods’, they tell us, ‘for which documents are rare, we can now see that in a generation or two it will be time to stop.’[21] Vain hope! History is not so easy a matter as that. When you once begin it is for ever impossible to end. In matters of history, as Loisy says, ‘le dernier mot de la verité restera toujours à dire.’

But having narrowed down the possibilities of history to this, we have not left the historian with any light task. His business is to read the past through the eyes of the present as accurately as possible. The real present to any man is his own personal experience, for, as we have seen, the testimony of others is not fact but theory; and so, if he is to have anything of value on which to base his recording of the past, it must be a personal, first-hand knowledge—a first-hand theory—of the present, its ideas, institutions, inventions, discoveries, of the whole sum of what we mean by civilization. A knowledge of this is not less necessary to the historian than an acquaintance of the records of the past, and an ability to gauge the value of different sources of information. Every man has his bias, his ‘pet theories’ and enthusiasms, but it is these which prevent him from grasping the present as it really is. The only sure foundation, in the present, on which to base a reading of the past, is a knowledge of the whole, a knowledge tested and examined and purified from all taint of national prejudice or social and economic bias. An historian must continually examine his own ideas, for if they be not as true as he can make them, an inaccuracy, which is not inherent in his subject, will creep into his work. If there is any true meaning for the term ‘Science’ when applied to history it is that we must be scientific in our treatment of the present, of our own ideas. Listen to the accusation of a great historian of the present