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History as Orientation: Rüsen on Historical Culture and NarrationGeschichte im Kulturprozeß by Jörn Rüsen; History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientationby Jörn RüsenReview by: David CarrHistory and Theory, Vol. 45, No. 2 (May, 2006), pp. 229-243Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3874107 .

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History and Theory 45 (May 2006), 229-243 ? Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

REVIEW ESSAYS

HISTORY AS ORIENTATION:

RUSEN ON HISTORICAL CULTURE AND NARRATION

GESCHICHTE IM KULTURPROZEB. By Jmn Riisen. Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 2002.

Pp. x, 298.

HISTORY: NARRATION, INTERPRETATION, ORIENTATION. By Jim Rtisen. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Pp. x, 222

In the English-speaking world since the mid-twentieth century, the philosophy of

history has been conceived in close parallel to the philosophy of science: each was a critical reflection on knowledge, in the one case our knowledge of nature, in the other case our knowledge of the human past. But what is meant by "our"

knowledge here? In the case of natural science it is clearly the knowledge pos- sessed by the experts and expressed in the latest scientific theories. It is under-

stood, of course, that such theories are never definitive, but they represent the

paradigm or model of knowledge. Since most of us have a very limited under-

standing of such theories, and even less of the research that produces them, it is

perhaps odd to call this "our" knowledge; but here the scientists are standing in for the rest of us. And so it is with history: "our" knowledge of the past is embodied in what the professional historians tell us. We find them easier to understand, perhaps, than the physicists, and we recognize that their accounts, like those of natural science, are always subject to further review. But what they say represents "our" knowledge of the past, even though "we"-the rest of us--do not ourselves participate in their research. This conception of historical knowledge is taken for granted both by those philosophers who seek to show how such knowl-

edge is possible and those skeptics who doubt or deny its possibility. This long-entrenched epistemological approach to historical knowledge, how-

ever, lends itself to a certain abstractness. Something is lost if philosophical reflection limits itself to the knowledge of the past we owe to the professional historians. The past figures in our lives in ways that far exceed the results of historical research. We deal with and interpret the past prior to and independently of our professionally warranted knowledge of it: it pervades our shared experience and our sense of ourselves; it guides the ways we envisage the future and for- mulate social goals. It is embedded, in other words, in our culture. Even if our professional knowledge influences this broader, cultural sense of the past, it is also shaped by it. Terminologically, we can distinguish between the "historical studies" that are carried out by our professional discipline and the broader historical awareness that is embedded in our culture. A genuine understanding of historical studies will have to take account of how they relate to and emerge from



230 DAVID CARR

historical awareness. One aspect of this is itself historical: that is, historical studies in our modem sense have emerged historically out of a broader and older tradition. But there is more to it than this, since historical studies continue to exist

side-by-side with, and in relation to, the historical awareness that is part of present-day culture. A concrete understanding of historical knowledge, then, will

place it in its cultural and historical context. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Jmrn Riisen's reflections on histo-

ry is that they aim at concreteness in this sense. Historical knowledge must be understood in its cultural context, and that context is in turn historical. As he puts it, history "is more than only a matter of historical studies. It is an essential cultural factor in everybody's life" (H, 1).1 "History occurs in a process of culture, which it also thematizes. It is, so to speak, a part of itself' (G, 1). Riisen has written extensively on the emergence of modem history, and of the accompanying reflections on history, in the classics of the nineteenth-century German tradition,2 and this background furnishes him with the context for approaching a number of

systematic questions about the nature and scope of historical knowledge. In the two collections of essays under review, one in English and one in German, systematic considerations and historical background are combined with remarkable coherence. What Rilsen has to say offers a powerful corrective to the abstractness of both the analytic approach to historical knowledge and the postmodern assault on its validity.

These collected essays cover a variety of topics, and I shall not try to comment on all of them. What I hope to do instead is to articulate in a systematic way the

theory that lies behind them. This theory is nowhere stated in explicit terms, but it emerges in the course of the author's treatment of different topics. I shall begin with some central systematic concepts, and then show how these concepts merge with a historical account of the beginnings of modern historical studies. In the second half of my essay I shall turn to Riisen's employment of these systematic and historical accounts in dealing with recent challenges to historical knowledge, in particular those issuing from postmodern theorists.

Riisen employs a number of key concepts. The first is what he calls historical culture-defined as the "totality of discourses in which a society understands itself and its future by interpreting its past." These will include, but must not be limited to, professional historical studies. This culture must be analyzed in a broad, transdisciplinary fashion in order to measure the place, status, and function of historical studies within it (G, 3).

1. "H" stands for History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation, and "G" for Geschichte im Kulturprozef3.

2. To mention only a few of Riisen's important works: Konfigurationen des Historismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993); Historische Orientierung (Cologne: Bihlau 1994); Zeit und Sinn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990); Geschichte des Historismus (with Friedrich Jaeger) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992). The author notes that History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation "is a completely revised version of my 'Studies in Metahistory,' which was published in 1993 in the Series of the Human Sciences Research Council at Pretoria" (H, ix). A few essays appear in both volumes under review, though sometimes the English versions differ in some detail from the German.



RUSEN ON HISTORICAL CULTURE AND NARRATION 231

The second is the concept of orientation-a powerful and suggestive notion that Riisen has used extensively in his writings as a clue to understanding the

place of history in our lives generally. Just as we orient ourselves in space, in order to know where we are in our surroundings, so we orient ourselves in time, to know where we have come from and where we are going. Since we don't hold still but move around in space, sometimes we get lost and need to re-orient ourselves. And so it is in time, according to Rtisen. Orientation is the term used to describe the function of historical culture in the broadest sense, and professional history contributes to this in its own way. A key question concerns the peculiar nature of the role played by historical studies in orientation.

A third key concept is that of narration. Riisen uses this concept very broadly. If history generally is "time which has gained sense and meaning" (H, 2), it is by means of narration that this acquisition occurs. "Narratives create the field where

history lives its cultural life in the minds of the people, telling them who they are and what the temporal change of themselves and their world is about" (H, 2).

I shall begin with the third of these concepts, considering Riisen's treatment of the concept of narrative. Then we shall see how this concept relates to the other two, orientation and historical culture; and we shall also get an idea of how his

systematic considerations merge with and complement his historical reflections. In the first three essays in History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation,

Riisen proposes a fourfold typology of narration: traditional, exemplary, critical, and genetic. He also calls these types of "narrative competence" or of "historical consciousness" (H, 26f.). Let us examine them in turn.

Traditional narratives simply express and articulate the continuity between

present social reality and the past from which it comes. Riisen mentions as exam-

ples "stories which tell about the origin and genealogy of rulers, in order to legit- imate their domination; within religious communities, stories of their foundation; stories which are told at the occasion of centennials and other jubilees" (H, 13). And he adds this revealing example: "in Boston you can even walk a traditional narrative following the Freedom Trail painted as a red line on the sidewalk" (H, 13). Traditional narratives "define the 'togetherness' of social groups or whole societies in the terms of maintenance of a sense of common origin" (H, 30). Such narratives define historical identity and self-understanding, and they have a

decidedly moral implication as well: morality is defined as tradition, that is, what is valued is what contributes to the stability and continuity of the tradition.

Change is important only to the extent that it reflects changeless values. Though Riisen states that certain historical works can be classified as traditional narratives, for the most part here he is concerned with forms of discourse and practice that lie outside professional history.

Exemplary narratives go beyond the moral values embodied in tradition by applying them through exemplification. They "concretize abstract rules and principles, telling stories which demonstrate the validity of the rules and principles in single cases" (H, 13). Here history is viewed "as a past recollected with a mes- sage or lesson for the present, as didactic: historia magistra vitae is a time-hon- ored apothegm in the Western historiographical tradition" (H, 30).



232 DAVID CARR

Critical narratives introduce negativity into the picture: they raise questions about the validity of traditional narratives and by implication about the values

they reflect and the soundness of the lessons derived from them. Critical narratives are "based on people's ability to say no to traditions, rules and principles that have been handed down to them" (H, 14). In various ways, such critical

thinking undermines traditional morality. "Its contribution to moral values lies in its critique of values" (H, 32). It injects elements of "critical argument" into moral reasoning. It points to cultural relativity in values, and reveals "temporal conditioning factors," contrasting these with the specious universality of supposedly timeless validity. It "confronts claims for validity with evidence based on temporal change." In its most extreme form it presents itself as a critique of

morality in general, as found in Marx's critique of bourgeois values or Nietzsche's genealogy of morals (H, 32).

Genetic narratives emerge as the integration of the critical with the traditional and the exemplary. If the critical stage pitted temporal change against the supposedly timeless and constant values of the tradition, the genetic stage recognizes that value inheres in temporal change itself, and it usually expresses this by appealing to the form of progress. Change is not only accepted, it becomes essential. Personal and social identities are both marked by a process of self-definition (the German idea of Bildung). "Temporal change sheds its threatening aspect, instead becoming the path on which options are opened up for human activity to create a new world" (H, 33).

By presenting these four modes of narration or "narrative competence" as a

typology, Riisen obviously believes that they represent a systematic breakdown based on conceptual differences. The implication is that these types could exist at any time and that the connections among them would be preserved. And indeed, we can easily think of all four as co-existing in the present day. Traditional narratives are still part of popular culture and political rhetoric; we still look to the heroes of the past for moral lessons; and as long as these prac- tices exist, critics will come along to debunk them. The more sober assessments of our historians will reflect the attempt to integrate the three previous modes. In

any given historical text, as Riisen suggests, there may be elements of all four

types (H, 15), and the typology allows us to identify and separate them, in order better to understand the text.

Riisen believes, however, that his typology is more than merely static and con-

ceptual. There is a logical progression, he says, "from the traditional to the exem-

plary, and from the exemplary to the genetical narrative. Critical narrative serves as the necessary catalyst in this transformation" (H, 15). This enables him to pro- pose no less than a theory of the "ontogenetic development of historical consciousness" (H, 34). The traditional form can exist on its own and is not dependent on the others. The exemplary type is an offshoot of the traditional, as we have seen, and thus depends on it as a presupposition. Critical narrative is dependent on the presence of already existing traditional and exemplary forms, for it is against these that its critique is directed. And the genetic form, as Riisen con- ceives it, is a synthesis of the critical, the traditional, and the exemplary.




This ontogenetic theory gives a temporal sense to the logical order, and thus

provides the basis, as might be expected, for an account of the history of historical consciousness and of historiography, a periodization of historical thinking. Above all, the pivotal or catalytic critical type of narration offers the key to

understanding the transition from premodern to modem historical thinking at the turn of the nineteenth century in Europe. Koselleck has written about this period as the abandonment of the historia magistra vitae model of historical writing, showing how it was connected with a new conception of historical time, especially the future. In the Enlightenment the historical future comes under human control and prediction, and is no longer a matter merely of prophecy, hope, or

aspiration.3 Rtisen's emphasis is on the methods developed by modern historians for dealing with the past. It is the concept of method that ushers in historical

thinking in the modern sense. Geschichte im Kulturprozef3 begins with three essays that thematize the begin-

nings of modern history in nineteenth-century Europe. The introduction of methodical considerations into the writing of history is what lends it its status as

Wissenschaft. But this in turn leads to a conception of historical reality that can be contrasted with the "religious meaning" of the historical process. Here reli-

gion, and in particular the Christian religion, occupies the place of the "traditional narrative" in Riisen's fourfold classification. The Christian story, from cre- ation and the fall through incarnation and redemption, provides European socie-

ty with a profound account of the continuity between present and past, gives it a sense of identity through time and in contrast to outsiders, and lends itself to moral exemplars in the figure of Christ and the lives of saints and martyrs. It is

against this powerful, unifying story that the skeptical doubts of the Enlight- enment thinkers are raised, and it is no accident that the concept of historical method finds some of its earliest manifestations in biblical text-critique and hermeneutics, the search for the historical Jesus, and the historical examination of the early church. Our knowledge of the important events of the past is recog- nized as deriving from sources that can be compared and subjected to critical

analysis. The past becomes an object of research, something whose surface

meaning is not taken for granted, something whose truth must be uncovered by a cognitive procedure.

In the process, however, the past itself, and with it the sacred writings, are robbed of their properly religious sense. They suffer from what Weber later called disenchantment, losing their traditional role in forming the identity and moral cohesion of society. Thus the development of historical knowledge plays a crucial role in the dawn of modernity, with all its great accomplishments and all its problems. But history also offers itself, in various ways, as the solution to the very problem it has created. In the place of religious faith it proposes faith in the progress of mankind.

This is what Riisen calls genetic narrative, as manifested in the nineteenth century. While it is already present in the thinkers of the late Enlightenment, such as

3. Reinhard Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, transl. K. Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 21ff.



234 DAVID CARR

Kant, its most elaborate form is Hegel's philosophy of history, which explicitly attempts to fuse rational progress with the religious tradition. Hegel's work can be seen as a rear-guard effort, even an act of desperation, trying to reunite what the Enlightenment had taken apart. The salvation story is now embodied in his-

tory itself, complete with political redemption and a new theodicy. "Religious transcendence, which in Christianity had already temporalized and finitized itself, becomes the inner spiritual coherence of the temporal changes in man and his world" (G, 33). Trimmed of its religious trappings and outfitted with the aura of social science, the belief in historical salvation survives in Comptean posi- tivism and in Marx's historical materialism.

The major representatives of the new historical profession, notably Leopold von Ranke, are less than enthusiastic about these philosophies of history. The latter appear to betray the sober and critical restraint that is the essence of the new

history. Idealistic constructions like Hegel's are "extra-scientific, metaphysical speculations" and are seen as "incompatible with the progress of knowledge through research, indeed as threatening such research" (G, 33). At the same time the historians cannot give up the conviction that history "makes sense" at some level; indeed this conviction seems to animate and motivate their work. But what sort of sense-making is this? It is this question that leads Riisen into the thorny terrain about which he has already written extensively, that of the metahistorical reflections of the so-called "historical school" that go under the general name of Historismus.

This term is notoriously broad, and Riisen has done more than anyone to chart its ambiguous course throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Central

figures such as Ranke and Droysen obviously yearn, as does Hegel, for a connection between their historical researches and their religious beliefs. Ranke considered research as a kind of rational religious observance (Gottesdienst)-the same thing Hegel had said about speculative thinking. Droysen went even further, as quoted by Riisen: "Our belief gives us the consolation that we are borne

by God's hand, that it guides our destinies, large and small. And the science

[Wissenschaft] of history has no higher task than that of justifying this belief; for that reason it is science" (G, 35). But in the end the drive for historical knowl-

edge outran these yearnings and acquired a life of its own. As such, such knowl-

edge was neither dependent on religious belief nor did it serve the purpose of

supporting religious belief. Indeed, it gave rise to a current of thought that both

put itself in place of religious belief and ultimately undermined it. Though the term Historismus has been used in many ways, Riisen believes that it can be

employed meaningfully to characterize this current or form of thought that lay behind the practice of the new historical discipline of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany. As he said in his Geschichte des Historismus, there is a distinctive "manner of confronting the human past which is typical of the historical sciences since the turn of the nineteenth century" and which constitutes a "specifically modern form of historical thinking."4 It is both a view of human nature and a scientific paradigm.

4. Riisen, Geschichte des Historismus, 7.




Before we look in more detail at Historismus and the problems it raises, let us sum up what we have covered so far. Rtisen's fourfold classification or typology of narrative (traditional, exemplary, critical, and genetic), reinterpreted as a "logical progression," has provided the basis for a historical account of the transition from premodern to modem historical writing and thinking. We should perhaps be cautious about finding a "logical" progression within a historical development, even the development of historical thought itself, since this suggests a temptation that led to some of the more notorious schemes of the classical philosophers of

history. This may be another version of the fallacy that what did happen had to

happen. But Riisen makes a convincing case. He has given us an account that is both systematic and historical of the emergence and the success of the historical

profession in the nineteenth century. We can now see a connection between this account of historical narration and

the other two key concepts we mentioned at the outset: historical culture and orientation. If the former is a society's awareness of the past in the broadest sense, the emergence of historical science in the nineteenth century represents Europe's way of articulating its historical culture in a systematic and focused way. And if historical culture is society's way of orienting itself in time, the emergence of

modem history responds to the need for reorientation arising out of the immense

changes wrought by the revolutions and wars of the turn of the nineteenth cen-

tury. As Riisen puts it, the difference between past and future looms so large that "human life-praxis can only be culturally oriented by conceptions of time that thematize transformation and change as such. Temporal change is no longer sub- dued by historical meaning (either by powerful belief in traditions or in empiri- cally confirmed rules of conduct); instead, change itself produces meaning" (G, 55). The result is a triumph for historical knowledge and research, and the estab- lishment of a professional discipline that persists to the present day.

The problem with Historismus, understood in this sense, is that it contains ten- sions and contradictions that threaten its coherence from the outset. There is a

deep connection, as we shall see, between these problems of Historismus, which

begin to make themselves felt at the end of the nineteenth century, and the controversies surrounding historical knowledge in our own day, many of them asso- ciated with the term "postmodem." These controversies form the heart of

Riisen's systematic investigations, for which his historical account of the emer-

gence of Historismus has prepared the way. Consider the following elements of classical Historismus. First, it is convinced

of the thoroughly historical character of human nature and of all human endeav- ors. History thus comes to replace reason or religion as the key to understanding humanity. Riisen quotes Ernst Troeltsch's well-known, retrospective characteri- zation of Historismus as the "thoroughgoing historicization of all our thinking about man, his culture and his values" (G, 47f.). Second, "historical science" has now emerged as the mode of access to humanity so understood. This new science



236 DAVID CARR

stands in the same relation to its predecessors as the new physics to alchemy or the new medicine to the folk remedies of the past. It has its own methods for

assuring its objectivity and securing its results as knowledge rather than mere

opinion. Riisen characterizes this move, in Husserlian fashion, as the separation of science from the lifeworld (G, 46). At the same time, fully aware of the difference between human and natural sciences, historians base their knowledge not on observation and experiment but on understanding and interpretation. Finally, the new science of history believes it finds evidence of development in the large- scale course of historical events, which comes close to the reaffirmation of the notion of progress.

The crucial systematic question is whether these aspects of Historismus can

peacefully coexist. In keeping with the thesis of historicization, each historical

epoch will be thoroughly self-contained and must be understood strictly in its own terms. The past is utterly different from the present. How then can the past, in its radical otherness, be understood by the science of the present? How can we understand those whose life is governed by historically different cultures and values? How can we compare different epochs historically in order to discern a progression of any kind? And what if the science of history, on which we base all our claims and of which we are so proud, itself turns out to be just an expression of our culture and values, a product of our historical epoch, reducing everything we say about the past to something merely constructed in the present? In this manner the new objective science of history seems implicitly to undermine its own objectivity.

It is no wonder that Edmund Husserl, writing in 1910, spoke of Historizismus in the same breath with Weltanschauungsphilosophie ("world-view philosophy") as one of the great threats to the perennial ideal of "Philosophy as rigorous science."5 It is probably significant that Husserl uses Historizismus rather than Historismus, and thinks of it, in parallel to his terms Psychologismus and

Anthropologismus, not as the mere practice of the discipline in question, but as a

philosophical doctrine based on it.6 His target above all is Dilthey, whom he identifies, rightly or wrongly, with Weltanschauungsphilosophie and hence with historical relativism. But there is no doubt that Historismus, as described by Riisen, is implicated in Husserl's attack. It is, indeed, more than just the practice of history; when Riisen describes it as "a specifically modern form of historical

thinking" he has in mind something as broad as a Weltanschauung. While Husserl clearly distinguishes between history as such and Historizismus, he believes that views like the "thoroughgoing historicization of all our thinking," which accompany the great flourishing of historical knowledge in the nineteenth

century, lead to the paradox that historical knowledge itself, and the values of science and objectivity, become thoroughly historicized along with everything else. Thus the idea that history, or science in general, or indeed philosophy, could rise above its own circumstances and gain access to a realm of objective truth, seems to be undermined in advance.

5. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965), 49ff.

6. See Riisen's interesting discussion of the terms Historismus and Historizismus at the beginning of his Geschichte des Historismus, 4f.



ROSEN ON HISTORICAL CULTURE AND NARRATION 237

Husserl's critique of Historizismus can be seen as an early manifestation of a

long series of controversies about historical knowledge that continued through the twentieth century. The postmodern critique of more recent years is only the latest version. On the one hand the historical profession has spread far and wide from its origins in nineteenth-century Germany and has continued to go about its busi- ness with a certain degree of self-confidence, or at least institutional stability. It has its home, after all, in the modern "research university," which is itself another of the important cultural exports of nineteenth-century Germany. On the other hand, the status of historical knowledge has been questioned from all sides, and this has engaged historians themselves no less than culture-critics and philosophers. It has also had its influence on developments in the practice of history.

The reproach of "idealism" and "subjectivism" was a perennial problem for historians who based their claims on Verstehen. The attempt to make history more objective appeared very early on, in the attempt of the early positivists to base historical knowledge on "social science," conceived as a kind of "physics of society." Marxist history shares this same motivation and scientistic commitment; the Annales school, and related moves toward social and economic histo-

ry, can be seen in the same light. But apart from certain practicing historians, few have been convinced, at least at the theoretical level, by these attempts to think of history as a rigorously objective science. There was a brief attempt by the neo-

positivistic philosophers of the analytic school, starting with Carl G. Hempel in the 1940s, to get rid of Verstehen by conceiving of historical explanation on the model of causal-scientific explanation. Like the reductionist "unity-of-science" movement of which it was a part, this attempt soon succumbed to severe criti- cism, in part because its logical approach seemed to have little to do with historians' actual practice. And since that practice continued to be based at least in part on Verstehen, the claim of history to be a Wissenschaft, which was at the heart of the new history, has remained suspect.

Another aspect of historicist thinking, the at least implicit belief in human

progress, has also not fared well. Here historical developments, rather than theoretical problems, played the greatest role. It was in Germany, where Historismus had begun and flourished, that the concept of progress came in for its most intense and critical scrutiny, especially after World War I. Talk of the "crisis of Historismus" (Troeltsch, Meineke, Heussi) derived at least in part from the fact that Germany itself was suffering a national crisis and confusion brought on by the defeats, economic upheavals, and perceived national humiliations caused by the war. After World War II, of course, it was the revelations of the Holocaust, together with the experience of the war itself, that made belief in

progress almost universally unacceptable, and not just in Germany. Here it could be argued that while the development of the historical profession, and the practice of research and writing, had been wedded to the idea of progress, they did not depend on this idea for their own validity and could carry on without it. What is undermined, however, as Riisen is keenly aware, is the capacity of historical knowledge to provide orientation and a sense of identity to those who have lost both to the great upheavals of the mid-twentieth century. If history could perform



238 DAVID CARR

this service at the beginning of the nineteenth century, making historical sense of the great changes that were underway, it seemed powerless to succeed in the

postwar world. As Riisen puts it, "history is a narrative raft floating on the natural stream of time" which serves to orient human action and suffering "in practical life and in the inner life of the human self. Vessels of this sort, as they have been constructed and used in our historical culture (and in the modern period it was more like a steamship than a raft), are no longer seaworthy" (G, 76). It is

impossible to conceive of a relation of before and after whose idea of temporal flow "would give the Holocaust a convincing historical meaning" (G, 76).

Against the background of these successive blows to the confidence of Historismus in the early and the middle twentieth century, the attacks of the late twentieth century, under the broad heading of the postmodern critique, appear as a coup de grace. It is these attacks that occupy the major part of Rtisen's systematic writing in these volumes. While it is not quite correct that he offers a

defense of history against the postmodern critique, he certainly offers an elaborate and insightful response to it, one that takes seriously, but not uncritically, its

many-sided complexity. Those who wish to dismiss "postmodernism" in advance often cite its irritat-

ing ambiguity and breadth. A concept that seems to mean everything may in the end mean nothing. Nevertheless it deserves to be examined, as a historian of ideas like Riisen must recognize. It is in some respects like Historismus itself: it is a broad and powerful current of thought that has had wide-ranging influence even though it contains contradictions and cannot be reduced to a series of neat

propositions. Perhaps the point of departure and most enduring accomplishment of post-

modernism is its attempt to thematize modernity or the modern in a way that takes a distance from this phenomenon and calls into question its major features rather than endorsing or subscribing to them. Modernity has existed as an

unquestioned set of values and attitudes in Western culture at least since the

Enlightenment and up to the present day, and the only way to question it was to be premodern, primitive, reactionary, hopelessly behind the times. It is by stak-

ing out a position outside and beyond the modem that the postmodernists acquire their name, even though the details of their own position (that is, the standpoint from which they launch their critique) remain to be worked out.

Historismus offers itself as a prime target of the postmodern critique. With its double commitment to the Enlightenment idea of progress and to the role of

Wissenschaft as the agent of progress, it can be seen as the high point and cul- mination of modernity. It is humanistic in essence, since "humanity" takes over the role of God and serves as the instrument of its own salvation. Human beings do this not as individuals but on the broad stage of history. Born and raised in Europe at the time of Europe's exuberant expansion and colonialism, the idea of Historismus is implicitly committed to the superior position of Europe in relation to the rest of the world. Thus it reveals itself as a congeries of beliefs and attitudes that have become seriously suspect in the course of the twentieth century.




While these suspicions had already been raised in general terms, as we have seen, they are given a decisive new twist by the postmodern critique.

What the latter adds to this general picture derives from what has been called the "linguistic turn" in philosophy and in culture studies generally. It began as parallel but unrelated developments in analytic and continental philosophy: late Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle on the one side, Heidegger and Gadamer on the other. Language is the medium of knowledge, of our access to reality, to being itself. If you want to understand these things, look to the language in which they are expressed. In spite of this common insight at the origin, the two sides went distinctly separate ways: for late analytic philosophy, language was seen more and more as an instrument for human practice; for continental philosophy, especially after the structuralist revolution, human practice seemed more and more the passive instrument of language, now conceived as an autonomous realm of its own.

History enters the picture in explicit terms when philosophers and other theorists draw attention to its narrative character. Analytic philosophers like Arthur Danto and Louis Mink initiated this process in the 1960s. Still pursuing the old question of whether history can qualify as a science, and of how it compares to the natural sciences, they discover that history essentially tells stories about the past, and that the construction of stories follows rules that are very different from the rules for constructing scientific theories. This means that the best way to understand history is not to compare it to empirical science but to view it as a literary genre. For the thinkers of the modern historicist tradition and for many practicing, professional historians, this was like uncovering an old family scan- dal that has for years been successfully hushed up. Since the rise of the new history in the nineteenth century, its narrative aspect had been ignored altogether or relegated to the secondary role of how one "writes up" the results of a scientific investigation. But now narrative, under serious investigation by literary theorists, was found to embody complex structures and to represent a sophisticated conceptual framework for dealing with experience. Hayden White's tour de force of 1973, Metahistory, was a pivotal work that applied the ideas of literary theorists such as Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye to some of the classical nineteenth- century historians such as Ranke and Michelet. They were portrayed as unknow- ingly following tacit rules for storytelling, which lie embedded in our culture.

The problem with terms like "narrative" and "storytelling" is that they suggest an activity that is more at home in the realm of fiction than fact, an activity guid- ed by aesthetic rather than scientific criteria. History begins to look like an inquiry wedded to means that are ill-suited to and maybe even incompatible with its supposed aim, which is to tell the truth about the past. Historical "Wissen- schaft" appears as "a hermaphrodite, a dubious figure which synthesizes scientific rationality and literary textuality" (G, 127). Hayden White and others waste no time giving examples of historiography that is more concerned with telling a good story than telling the truth. Under the influence of Barthes and later Foucault, White portrays history as pretending to be value-neutral while in real-



240 DAVID CARR

ity pushing its Eurocentric moral and political view of the world in the interests of power and manipulation.

In view of the account that Riisen has given us about the fortunes and fate of the study of history, these developments appear as a sad denouement. Presenting itself in the nineteenth century as the triumph of scientific knowledge over a dubious and disreputable past as a mere literary genre, the study of history seems

now, in the end, to have reverted to its original self, its scientific pretensions deflated and unmasked. Or so the postmodern critique would have us believe.

History has nothing left but its essentially premodern role, that is, what Rilsen, in his original classification, called "traditional narrative." It is just one of soci-

ety's ways of remembering its past, preserving continuity with the present, and

establishing and asserting its identity. The line between popular commemoration and historical "science" disappears.

Rilsen recounts these developments as the expert historian of ideas that he is, but he wants to treat the postmodern critique as a contemporary issue for debate. His response is very balanced, as one might expect. He subscribes to some

aspects of the postmodern interpretation of historical knowledge. For one thing, as we have seen, his theory has taken narrative as its central focus. Historical

thinking, or even more broadly, historical culture, accomplishes its work of orientation by producing narratives, and it is these that Rusen has classified in the fourfold scheme that runs from "traditional" to "genetical." This emphasis on narrative is by no means uncontroversial, and many voices have been raised

against it. As we have seen, attempts to render history more scientific, from pos- itivism to the Annales school and beyond-including Foucault-have argued that history can divest itself of its narrative, "literary" aspect and ascend to genuine knowledge of the past. It is possible to view not just recent social history but some of the great classics of older history-Carcopino, Huizinga, even Burckhardt-as non-narrative histories. "Real" history, "serious" history, on this

view, is not narrative at all.

Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur have both argued, though in different ways, that such apparently non-narrative history still has an implicit and hidden narrative structure,7 and Riisen apparently shares their view, though he doesn't argue for it here. In any case, as the example of Ricoeur shows, one can be a "narra- tivist" in the broad sense without sharing the postmodern slant. The latter view is not just that all history is narrative, but that, because of this, history must relin-

quish all claims to objectivity and any pretense to telling the truth about the past. This is the view that Riisen opposes vigorously.

A key concept in the postmodern critique is that of fiction. In historical writ-

ing, according to the postmodern view, any claim that goes beyond the assertion

of bare facts, any attempt to relate them to one another, interpret their signifi- cance, or trace them to underlying patterns is supposedly a product of the author's imagination and thus has the status of fiction. It is thereby to be understood as "creative," "poetic," and essentially aesthetic in character, placing his-

7. Hayden White, "The Structure of Historical Narrative," Clio 1 (1972), 5-19; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, transl. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), I, 206ff.




tory beyond reason and into the category of imaginative literature. Riisen cor-

rectly points out the dubious assumptions on which this theory rests. It is possible "only under the unquestioned presupposition of a positivistic epistemology" (G, 115). Scientists and historians of the nineteenth century may have fervently desired cognitive access to some factum brutum, unmediated by any interpretive framework or intention. But the idea had already been challenged by Kant and has long been regarded as questionable at best. Moreover, only on this assump- tion does the alleged contrast between "fact" and "fiction" make sense. Not all

interpretation is arbitrary; some interpretations are more appropriate than others, more capable than others of dealing with a wide range of phenomena. The task of "making sense" of the events of the past may indeed require the use of the

imagination. But not everything envisaged by the imagination is imaginary in the sense of fictional.

Fiction is the deliberate invention of imaginary persons, actions, and events, primarily by telling stories about them. But not all stories are fictional in this sense. History is only one form in which we try to tell true stories. Memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, anecdotes, medical case histories, and court testimonies are other such forms. Narrative and objectivity are not in principle opposed, as the postmodern critique implies, and Riisen argues that the two con-

cepts can coexist. The stories we tell are not arbitrary but are constrained by our

experience, by our sources, by our sense of human nature and psychology, by our notions of what is possible. Most important, narratives are submitted for review to the others who make up our community and who share these notions with us. The others serve as check and constraint on our claims, assuring that they will not be accepted if they are arbitrary or "subjective." In the context of history, the

scholarly community shares commonly accepted "criteria for the consistence and coherence of historical narration" (G, 118). Objectivity can thus be interpreted as

intersubjectivity and as such can be seen as a feature of narrative. None of these constraints or checks can ever assure or guarantee the objectivity of any given narrative. But their importance and their role in historical knowledge undermine the claim that narratives are "merely aesthetic" and thus subjective and arbitrary.

These reflections on narrative and objectivity provide Riisen with the occasion for some further remarks on the topic of orientation, which, as we've seen, is a central concept in his whole approach. The idea of history as orienting the indi- vidual and the community in time might seem best suited to the premodern, and

perhaps the postmodern, conceptions of history, but not to the modem idea of historical knowledge. Orientation is after all a practical notion, well suited to those "traditional" and "exemplary" narratives that reinforce communal identity and values, and then apply those values to everyday life. The postmodern con-

ception, too, with its emphasis on the aesthetic, memorial, and political function of history, fits well with the idea of orientation. Modern, "scientific," history, by contrast, seems to renounce the orienting role as its premier article of faith. Riisen introduces Ranke's much quoted words, which are often treated as the epi- graph and motto for the modernist view of history: "History has been accorded the role of judging the past in order to provide the contemporary world with use-



242 DAVID CARR

ful instruction for future years. The present study renounces such high offices: it wants only to show how it really was [zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen]" (G, 100). Ranke's false modesty communicates his ill-disguised contempt for any history that seeks a practical, orienting role.

Yet this opposition between objectivity and orientation is ill-conceived. If we consider the idea of spatial orientation from which this metaphor is derived, we can easily see that the two go hand in hand. Seeking our bearings in the spatial environment, we need to know our surroundings as they really are, not as we wish they were. Imaginary landscapes are of no use whatever in getting us from here to there. To aid in spatial orientation, we use maps because they give us a

bird's-eye perspective, allowing us to overcome the limits of our earthbound view. As Riisen shows, Ranke and his fellow historians had a strong sense that their new scientific discipline could play an analogous role, allowing us to sur- mount our limited perspective and gain access to the reality of history. Under- stood in this way, it could serve the cultural orientation of practical life, especially in politics. Thus even for Ranke, "politics, as action directed toward the future, appears as the other side of historical knowledge directed toward the past" (G, 107). Ranke objected not to action based on genuine historical knowledge, but to history that has the limited goal of having practical results. Such history will inevitably be of limited scale, too small in its vision to achieve the bird's-

eye perspective he sought. As we might expect, Riisen does not simply endorse Ranke's optimistic claims

for the practical value of historical knowledge. But a deeper understanding of those claims contributes to his broad response to the postmodern challenge. He wants to keep narrative at the center of his reflections on history without accept- ing the implications put forward by the postmodern critics. Considering history as a species of the genus "storytelling" permits him to see professional or aca- demic history, historical knowledge proper, as part of the larger phenomenon he calls historical culture, that is, stories about the past running from popular legend and folk representation to political rhetoric. But he argues against the implication that the narrative understanding of history places it in an exclusively aesthetic domain and deprives it of any capacity for objectivity. Considered as an inter-

subjective enterprise with agreed-upon rules and methods, and as a self-critical

process without arrogant pretensions, history can validly claim to tell us the truth about the past and serve society's need for orientation.

There is a further aspect of the postmodern critique to which Riisen is especially sensitive, and this is the reproach of Eurocentrism. As we've seen, his systematic reflections on history are always intertwined with a deeply informed historical account of the emergence of the modem discipline in nineteenth-century Germany. But as we noted at the beginning of this essay, Rtisen's attention to modern historical knowledge never loses sight of its relation to the broader background of historical culture. Under the rubric of historical culture, he devotes some of his essays to intercultural differences, problems of national identity and xenophobia, and possibilities for communication between cultures. He is partic- ularly interested in how to understand the historical culture of other societies in




a way that is not itself ethnocentric, that is, in such a way that does not impose the investigator's idea of history on what is investigated. Among the notions Western scholars are likely to take for granted in examining other cultures are the

sharp distinction between history and the work of poetic imagination; the focus on written, as opposed to oral, culture; and the link between history and the state

(G, 235f.). Like the postmodern critics, he sees these as Eurocentric prejudices that impose our own concepts on the rest of the world and lead us to overlook

many of the ways that historical awareness is embodied in non-Western cultures. He offers his own typology of historical narration-traditional, exemplary, criti-

cal, and genetic-as one that can succeed in the realm of intercultural comparison (G, 255).

This may be regarded as questionable, given the degree to which this typology is tailored, as we've seen, to the origins of modern history in the West. In general Riisen's attempt to rise above prejudice, especially in the long essay "Theoretical Approaches to an Intercultural Comparison of Historiography," is rather abstract and shares in the usual difficulties of trying to establish a presup- positionless standpoint. Rather than trying to defend one's position in advance

against all criticisms, it is better to plunge ahead, armed with a sympathetic and self-critical attitude, and do one's best in being open to the other and the strange.

This is an attitude that Jrnm Riisen has in abundance, and it is very much in evidence, along with his deep historical knowledge and his systematic clarity, in these collected essays. They touch on many more topics than I have been able to cover in this account. For example, other essays deal with human rights, mod- ernization, and "Holocaust Memory and German Identity." Here I have tried to focus on the theoretical and historical unity that underlies these essays, as

expressed in some of Riisen's basic concepts and his account of their embodi- ment in the history and development of ideas.

DAVID CARR

Emory University



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