History and Theory 54 (February 2015), 45-68 © Wesleyan University 2015 ISSN: 0018-2656DOI: 10.1111/hith.10740

HISTORY AS PHILOSOPHY

JAMES CRACRAFT1

ABSTRACT

Historians have taken a beating in recent times from an array of critics troubled by our persistent unwillingness to properly theorize our work. This essay contends that their criticisms have generally failed to make headway among mainstream historians owing to a little noticed cognitive byproduct of our work that I call history as philosophy. In so doing I offer a novel defense of professional history as it has been understood and practiced in the Anglophone world over the last half-century or so while suggesting, in conclusion, that historians could not do other than they do without serious psychic and societal loss.

Keywords: R. G. Collingwood, historical thinking, mainstream history, William James, personal philosophy, pragmatism, history as humanity, history as social science, history as philosophy, historians’ memoirs, Gerda Lerner

This essay proposes that the professional practice of history results over time in the forging of a certain kind of personal philosophy. I emphasize at the outset that my focus is not on philosophy of history, whether substantive or critical, but on a somewhat surreptitious byproduct of historical work that most working historians rarely acknowledge, convinced as they seem to be that the practice of history is guided by nothing more than a distinctive methodology learned in graduate school. Nor have history’s various external critics evinced any awareness of the possibility that historians might take from their work as much or more of a philosophical (“ideological”) nature than they allegedly bring to it. But before proceeding, my use of the essay’s central terms, given the present climate of debate, should be clarified.

The “history” in question is the discipline of that name, more generally the profession as practiced with progressive refinements for the last century and a half or so in the English-speaking world. R. G. Collingwood called it “historians’ history,” or “a special kind of thinking concerned with a special kind of object,” namely, “the past” or, more exactly, “actions of human beings that have been done in the past.” I quote Collingwood up front because he was that rarest of birds, both a published historian (of Roman Britain) and a published philosopher of history: in short, somebody who thought long and hard about doing history and about its connections with philosophy. And in his marvelously erudite but accessible way Collingwood distinguished sharply

1. With sincere thanks to the editors of History and Theory and their anonymous readers for helpful critiques of earlier drafts of this essay.

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between “historical knowledge” and all other forms of knowing—mathematical, theological, sociological, biological, philosophical, and so on—a distinction I want to emphasize. But Collingwood’s overall purpose was to elaborate what he called “a complete philosophy conceived from a historical point of view,” a purpose, to repeat, that is definitely not mine. Collingwood also seems to have had in mind strictly academic historians like himself (historians based in colleges and universities), whereas I mean to include academically trained historians whose research and publication, using methods refined over a century and a half of Anglophone historical practice, are done outside of school. Public or popular historians, they are sometimes called, and they are often more widely read.2

I might also stress that the history in view is not the highly technical kind directed to fellow specialists but rather what might be termed mainstream political, social, and/or cultural history as published typically in books advertised and reviewed in the major historical journals and the serious mass media. Thus excluded are most monographs in historical demography, internalist or purely technical histories of science, technology, language, or ideas, art and architectural histories concerned solely with questions of style, archaeological studies of exclusively material remains, and the essentially quantitative economic or social or even political histories prone to using mathematical models and concerned to elicit or confirm nicely parsimonious explanations or even “laws” of human behavior (works driven by, for instance, modernization theory, rational choice theory, convergence or world systems theory, hegemony or power transition theory). This is not to deny the professional value of such work—far from it. Indeed, critical use of modernization theory, to take only one example, has been of considerable help to historians grappling with developments across the globe over the last two or three centuries and eager to dispense with traditional rationalist, secularist, and Eurocentric notions of what constitutes “modernity.” Nor could cultural historians, depending on their subject, achieve much of substance without the specialized work of archaeologists, art and architectural historians, anthropologists, or historians of science, technology, language, and ideas, among others. But this is to insist that, given its relatively narrow focus and use of technical rather than ordinary language, its propensity to subordinate persons to structures and to approximate as closely as possible the methods of natural science, the highly technical, abstract, internalist, and/or theoretically driven history in question, aimed at a coterie of specialists, does not engender, or engender as fully, the cluster of cognitive habits that in due course derives from the practice of mainstream history.3

2. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen [1946] (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xl, 2, 9; also Collingwood, The Principles of History, and Other Writings in the Philosophy of History, ed. W. H. Dray and W. J. Van der Dussen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 171. Collingwood readily acknowledged that in stressing the uniqueness of historical thinking he was pursuing a path blazed by Dilthey, Croce, and others in the late nineteenth century. For more on Collingwood, see History and Theory, Beiheft 29 (1990), a special issue devoted to “Reassessing Collingwood.”

3. For one historian’s critical encounter with modernization theory, and numerous further references, see my The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 12-20; similarly, my debt to art and architectural historians is plain in my The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago

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Further, by the term “philosophy” here I mean only the personal world outlook and set of moral values that we all come to hold over the course of our lives. Such a philosophy is the result of standing back a little from the passing concerns of everyday life to take an aphoristic overview embracing both value-commitments and beliefs about the general nature of things. Such a philosophy, though scarcely recognized by professional philosophers, provides ready mental guidance in coping with those everyday concerns, which may include memories that disturb and fears of the future along with issues to be dealt with here and now. Such a philosophy helps moderate our emotional responses to life’s challenges as well as our judgments of people and events especially in cases where we lack relevant expertise. William James put it this way, at the beginning of his famous lectures on pragmatism, addressing an audience of “common people”: “I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.” James hoped to persuade his listeners that unlike the highly technical philosophies expounded by his colleagues at Harvard, he offered one that could be readily adapted to their own way of thinking. Indeed pragmatism, as James explained it, has a good deal in common with that special kind of thinking we call history.4

In other words, just as pragmatism holds that personal experience is decisive in fashioning one’s ideas of the true and the good, so the development of the kind of personal philosophy peculiar to mainstream historians issues from the nature of their work itself. I reiterate: issues from that work rather than exists prior to it, since historians’ assumed prejudices and their eviscerating role in historical work have aroused in recent times a good deal of critical comment from the loosely affiliated theorists known collectively as postmodernists. True, their provocations helped deflate certain naive claims about the efficacy of historical methods and the scientific nature of historical knowledge that may once have been current among mainstream historians. Yet the most important advances in historical practice instantiated over the same stretch of time, particularly the huge expansion of subjects considered appropriate for historical inquiry, owed little to postmodernist theories as such. Again, I do not deny that some strains of postmodernism—or of postcolonial theory more lately, or of totalitarianism or Marxism or feminism back in the day, or of globalization at the present time—may have influenced some historians in their choice of topics or the design of their projects if not in setting their career goals. I claim only that external theories of any kind, models or paradigms, cannot control the procedures and outcomes of history properly

Press, 1988) and its companion, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For a thorough, multi-authored discussion of “Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity’,” see American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (January 2011), 631-751.

4. William James, Pragmatism: Popular Lectures on Philosophy, ed. Bryan Vescio [1907] (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), 1. It’s important to stress that James’s pragmatism is in view, not John Dewey’s let alone Richard Rorty’s—for an incisive discussion of which, in the context of “Historians’ Appeals to Philosophy,” see Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 37-41. For a nicely condensed exposition of Rorty on Dewey and pragmatism, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London and New York: Penguin, 1999), section II (23-90).

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so called, a point to which I’ll return. No, something else was driving the huge expansion of historical inquiry over the last few decades, something in part circumstantial but something also, in part, intrinsic to historical work.

In establishing women’s history as a central area of scholarship in the United States, for instance, the late Gerda Lerner was motivated (she said) by her own life experiences as an anti-fascist activist in 1930s Austria and as a female student in the overwhelmingly male academic world of 1960s New York, where, to her surprise, “history as a subject grabbed me and never let me go.” Before long, having “realized that what I wanted to do was to create and promote the history of women, I put all my energy, passion and talent into becoming a good historian.” And that meant, in her words, “learning the best of what traditional training had to offer. I did that; I loved it; and then I went on to challenge and change it”—to change it by becoming a distinguished historian of women, which entailed abandoning her previous commitment to Marxism.5

The turn to social history “from below” in the 1960s and 1970s, to take another prominent example, was inspired in one way or another by Marxism, by related developments in economics and sociology as well as in history (as represented notably by the Annales school in France and the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population in History), and by the arrival in British and American universities of students (historians-to-be) from diverse—hitherto under-represented—social backgrounds. Even the subsequent turn to a new kind of cultural history owed more to influences from anthropology and linguistics, as I can personally testify, than to any inducements from the increasingly diffuse chorus of postmodernist theorizing. Among outside influences on their work mentioned by fifteen mostly British practitioners of the “new social and cultural history” interviewed in 2002, Marx came up occasionally, as did the names of noted anthropologists; but generally it was contact with leading historians of their formative years that put these “eminent, innovative and influential” historians on their respective paths to success. By now, it may well be, the postmodernist challenge to the fundamental assumptions and values of professional history has run its course, its reprovals adaptively absorbed or simply rejected. In any case, we are primarily concerned here not with what historians think they are doing, or think they have accomplished, when practicing history, but with what they might have assimilated from the process of a personal philosophical nature.6

5. Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 365-373; also Lerner, Living with History/Making Social Change (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), passim. See, further, Linda K. Kerber and Alice Kessler-Harris, “Gerda Lerner (1920–2013): Pioneering Women’s Historian,” Perspectives on History: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 51, no. 4 (April 2013), 49-50.

6. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), 146-159, provides a sympathetic account of the ascent in American universities of the new social history; and see Clark, History, Theory, Text, chaps. 3-7 for an extended discussion of these developments. My own work in the new cultural history is best represented, to repeat, by my Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, cited above (n. 3), though conversations with anthropologists, linguists, and fellow historians influenced by them were as important in my professional development as any written texts cited there. A critical discussion of the concept itself of historiographical “turns” is in the American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 2012), 698-813. Interviews with the fifteen mostly British practitioners of the new social and cultural history referred to are in The New History: Confessions and Conversations, ed. M. L. G. Pollares-Burke (Cambridge, UK, and Malden,

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A last preliminary point concerns the more precise identity of the historians in question, who naturally are, as much as anybody else, creatures of their own time and place. They belong, like me, to an Anglophone generation or two trained in the 1960s and 1970s whose writings published since, usually as books, have achieved prominence in their fields if not also in related fields or disciplines and have even, in some academic cases, been widely read beyond academia (the domain normally of popular or public historians). Such a selection probably should include the relatively small number of translations into English of mainstream historical works—mainstream in substance and form—originally written in another language, since the successful publication of such works in English implies that their authors share the basic professional values of their native-English-speaking counterparts. The same may be said for published mainstream historical works written in English by historians for whom English is not their first or only native language. Language is, of course, never value-free—as all readers of historical works in other languages as well as translators thereof, indeed as all readers of this journal, surely know.

At any event, some such selection, or restriction, as I have delineated here, is necessary, as I could no more talk knowledgeably about all historians writing in all languages today or at any time in the past than I could be born again. It is precisely the thought processes of a personal philosophical nature emanating from sustained historical work carried out during the last half-century or so in the English-speaking world—a world at once historically conditioned and linguistically delimited—that I’m attempting to track, not the operations of some universal historical mind. And it’s my hope that among my readers at least some apprentice or mid-career historians along with some of my aging contemporaries, not to mention philosophers of history interested in actual historical practice, will find the exercise useful.

Two salient features of historical work (of the work of historians as just defined) are obviously important in advancing my proposal: its emphasis on context, on the economic, social, political, and/or cultural environment of past human actions as a necessary condition for understanding them; and its focus on collective, communal, or corporate human life as opposed to the life of a single person,

MA: Polity Press/Blackwell, 2002). On the postmodernist challenge in retrospect, see Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), and Evans, “From Historicism to Postmodernism,” History and Theory 41, no. 1 (2002), 79-87; Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); and Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), chap. 1 (Hunt is more urgently concerned in this book with the challenge to historians of would-be theories, or paradigms, of globalization: see especially chap. 2). Not that diehard postmodernists, as they might be called, have quietly left the field, as witness Keith Jenkins et al., Manifestos for History (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) or the ongoing publication of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory & Practice, where retiring editor Alun Munslow declares, in his farewell issue (vol. 17, no. 3 [March 2013]): “It is surely now a commonplace understanding . . . that apart from statements of justified belief history is a fictive enterprise” (294). I’ve left out of account here the more general discrediting of postmodernism advanced, for example, by the intellectual historian Richard Wolin, in his The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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the defining characteristic of biography (or of autobiography). History is above all the discipline of context, as has often been said; and history is always about the interactions of human beings in groups, not the acts of individuals on their own. Individuals frequently do take center stage in history, of course, but only because they are leaders, leading many other people, with consequences for all (the cross-over genre of historical biography); or because their well-documented ordinary lives otherwise shed light on larger historical developments (sometimes called microhistory). And from this habitual emphasis on context and this focus on human interaction, we may fairly surmise, historians will acquire in due course the habit of seeing the actions of people in their own life—in their own “lived history”—in some larger, often mitigating set of circumstances. Not for us the notion that what people say and do can be understood, let alone reasonably judged, in isolation from the social environment in which they spoke or otherwise acted.

This point leads to another familiar feature of historical thinking. As distinct from biology or physics or geology, history is, inescapably, a moral discipline. Historians cannot avoid making moral judgments in their work, if only implicitly, because their subjects are not insects or quarks or minerals but fellow human beings possessing in principle the same moral capacity that historians claim for themselves. Complete impartiality on the part of historians in recounting the actions of people in the past, or moral neutrality, is a delusion: neither they nor we act, or acted, in a moral vacuum. Eschewing any claim to scientific (or complete) objectivity in our work, in other words, as most mainstream historians seem to have done, automatically entails giving up any claim to complete moral impartiality.7

In fact, extraordinary cruelty, wanton negligence, patent hypocrisy, outright lying, mass murder: these and other demonstrably evil acts have been regularly identified, and at least implicitly condemned, by historians working in appropriate fields—those where the evidence of such is both plentiful and unambiguous. Thus the gross immorality of the Holocaust in 1940s Europe, to take an obvious case, has been amply demonstrated, as has that of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture in 1930s Russia and Ukraine. However, we still lack sufficient evidence to say with certainty that Socrates was unjustly condemned, that Peter the Great deliberately killed his son and heir Aleksei, or that Emperor Hirohito personally directed the Japanese armed forces in World War II. Examples of both historically well-documented iniquity and merely alleged or possible malfeasance could be multiplied endlessly.8

7. On the general point here, see further my “Implicit Morality,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (2004), 31-42, and other contributions to this special issue on “Historians and Ethics.”

8. A useful review of the historiography on Hirohito is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito (accessed October 7, 2014); the most detailed account of Peter and Aleksei is in Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and for Socrates, see the up-to-date survey by Debra Nails in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/ (accessed September 9, 2014). On the Soviet atrocities, see Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), and, more succinctly, Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed., 3 vols. [1961] (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985; also New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), is the basic documented history of the Holocaust, which has generated an enormous, at times contentious, interpretive literature.

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Moreover, the fact that human beings in all their humanity are the proper subject of history remains a decisive difference between it and any other “science,” or systematic search for empirically provable or probable answers to specific leading questions. This point is readily conceded by geologists or physicists or even biologists, but it is sometimes obscured for sociologists or economists or political scientists by the nature of their work, which focuses typically on human beings but as data points in a quest for general social, economic, or political patterns of behavior. Anyway, their work does not concentrate, like the work of historians, on the actions of certain social groups at certain times in the past with the sole purpose of determining, as much as the evidence allows, what they did, why they did it, and with what results. So what about economic historians, a prominent subgroup that has flourished in recent decades? If they proceed from current economic models and concentrate exclusively on the economic life of a given community in the past, it’s been cogently argued, they are working as economists, not historians.9 An analogous procedure is not characteristic, on the other hand, of the work of mainstream political or social or cultural historians, almost by definition—unless they too abstract from a particular human past only such data as yield narrowly political, social, or cultural conclusions in accordance with a preset model (a given society was “totalitarian” in structure, another was largely illiterate, a third preferred highly spiced food). This would make them primarily political scientists or sociologists or food writers with a historical slant, not historians as such.

Nor can metaphysical speculation be any part of the business of historians, as it is of theologians and some professional philosophers including some philosophers of history. Such thinkers contemplate past events for the purpose of adducing universal principles or general concepts—the very opposite of what historians do, which is to infer from the data they’ve gathered, it cannot be said too often, what happened at a particular time and place, why it happened (what the actors intended, what they thought they were doing), and with what specific results. They then leave it to their readers (as to themselves) to draw what life-lessons they may from the histories they’ve written—although they don’t think that explicitly drawing such lessons is any part of a historian’s business, either. Nor can they be happy with the often wildly incautious claims as to what “history shows” made by some of their fellow citizens, especially politicians: claims that only highlight the urgency of getting more people to read more history, and more carefully.

All of this is common knowledge among seasoned mainstream historians. But at this or some point in the discussion it will surely be asked, mindful of a common critique: what about the influence on historical thinking of the regular practice of narrative? Is history really just storytelling, and therefore similar or even equivalent in value to fiction? In reply it should be pointed out that if historical narrative shares some of the features of narrative in general, it is also quite different—different from the distinctive narrative styles of detective stories

9. See William H. Sewell, Jr., “A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (2010), 146-166; and Sewell, “What’s Wrong with Economic History?” History and Theory 51, no. 3 (2012), 466-476.

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(adopted, contentiously, by some microhistorians10), fairy tales, plays and operas, jokes, romances, feature films, comic strips, first-person accounts or even, but especially, historical fictions. Narrative considered as a rhetorical or literary device, or as an oral or visual art form, exists to persuade or entertain, to shock or edify, not just to reliably inform: politicians tell their stories to persuade us to vote for them, comedians hope to make us laugh, and writers of fiction and makers of feature films, like opera composers and romance novelists, even when they furnish historical “background,” aim to disturb or delight, ravish or titillate, inspire or edify—in any case, they are not primarily concerned, as are historians, to provide an accurate account of some past event or series of events, an account based on, and limited to, the known facts. Journalism as straightforward reporting, or the serious documentary film (think Ken Burns), offer the best parallel to the use by historians of narrative: the point of the story is to tell who did what, why, where, and when, and with what apparent or definite results. Purely historical narrative is often, therefore, rather dull, especially at its most scholarly. To be sure, narrative as both a rhetorical device aiming to persuade and as an art form aiming to please is often involved in writing history, which is why the discipline is sometimes said to be one of the humanities as well as a social science. But history, the product, is not simply a story like any other, as some of its detractors have maintained, moving, at their most extreme, from blurring the lines between history and narrative in general to asserting an anti-realist position regarding knowledge itself. In brief, historical as opposed to other kinds of narrative is conditioned by the other distinctive features of historical thinking that we are identifying here and from which it cannot be isolated without gross distortion.11

For us historians more exactly, narrative provides the logic linking what often seem at first glance disparate or unconnected events. For us, “narrative is an especially supple form of causal reasoning,” writes one close student of actual historical practice; historians, writes another, “arrange their narratives either to provide descriptive explanation of an historical subject, or to illustrate an interpretation of an historical subject.”12 Indeed, history—serious, professional history—is often a rather dry account of the discovery of new evidence (facts not adduced before by historians), of the aggregation of that new evidence with what was already known, and of reaching on that basis, however tentatively, newly revised conclusions about what happened and why. Collingwood had a good deal to say about how historians use evidence inferentially, arguing from something that is accessible to our observation—surviving written documents, physical objects, potentially the “whole perceptible world”—to that which is not accessible to our observation, namely past events. Collingwood called the procedure “inductive inference,” suggesting that it is a special kind of inference

10. See Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), Muir’s introduction (vii-xxviii).

11. For more on this point, see David Carr, “Narrative Explanation and Its Malcontents,” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (2008), 19-30. For a stubborn insistence that “history is a fictive enterprise,” see again Munslow, note 6 above.

12. Quoting Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Themes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 14; and C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 126.

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as befits a special kind of thinking even while remaining, it should be added, well within the accepted norms of reasonableness.13

But what needs highlighting now is the way in which historians routinely combine inference and narrative in reaching their conclusions. To take a familiar American case, the shots fired on April 12, 1861 by locally raised Confederate forces in Charleston, South Carolina at the Union Army’s Fort Sumter located out in the harbor, as duly dated and described on the basis of solid evidence, were the first to be fired in a demonstrable chain of events that came to be called the Civil War; hence the war is said to have begun then and there—just as the meeting four years later of the two top opposing generals at Appomattox courthouse, the one to surrender to the other, all as duly dated and described on the basis of solid evidence, is taken to mark the war’s end in uncontested victory for the Union side. From beginning to end, moreover, the war took an enormous toll in combat wounded and killed, and so had a proportionately enormous impact on civilian life both then and thereafter, again as historians have clearly shown.14 Neither narrative exposition nor inductive reasoning are unique to historical thinking, in short, but their routine combination in the service of factual demonstration, is. And it breeds in historians, I’d argue, a peculiarly cautious, fact-oriented, down-to-earth, step-by-step mode of what might be termed rational storytelling. No speculative leaps for us or fanciful embroidery, no filling in the gaps with educated guesses or airy “might-have-beens.”

An apparent exception to this bias against guessing is the use made by some historians of “counterfactual thought experiments.” This is a method of analysis invented by certain political scientists to show that by tweaking well-attested historical facts, radically different outcomes can be made plausible. Richard Ned Lebow, a political scientist specializing in international relations, argues that properly managed “counterfactual history” thus points to the large role of contingency in the unfolding of complex historical events, and thereby undermines “linear” explanations of such events and any predictions of future developments based on them. Drawing on the relevant work of historians (we note), Lebow offers counterfactual accounts of the outbreak and subsequent course of World War I to show the contingent nature of that war. He subjects the history of the Cold War to similar treatment. In this way he hopes to counter “the lengths to which policymakers and many of my colleagues will go to deny the contingency of key events that shape our world and how we think about it,” and thereby to improve “social science and its theory-building enterprise.” “The contingency of our world,” Lebow observes, “should be self-evident to any serious reader of history”—by which he must mean, of course, any serious reader of the work of professional historians. Indeed, historians are well aware of the play of the contingent in history, just as we are not professionally disposed

13. Collingwood, Idea of History, 246-258; see also, more recently, Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 3.

14. See James M. McPherson, Battle Ground of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), for an authoritative history of the war generally; and Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), for its impact on society.

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to advise government policymakers (except on purely historical projects); nor do we consider “theory-building” any part of our business. Nevertheless, some historians, particularly those devoted to “solving” the “major and most puzzling developments in world history,” have found useful the methods of counterfactual analysis particularly in avoiding the “retrospective determinism” of “hindsight bias,” surely an occupational temptation for us all. Mainstream historians are duly cautioned, even as we must resist the more extreme claims made regarding the value, “indeed the necessity,” of deploying such methods in the professional practice of history.15

The lineaments of history as philosophy begin to emerge. First, historians could not be historians without an implicit commitment to what in modern philosophy as well as in everyday life is called realism. This is simply the view, contested though it has been by assorted idealists, nihilists, subjectivists, structuralists, phenomenologists, hyperrealists, and Rorty-style pragmatists, among others, that physical objects exist independently of our more or less accurate perception of them—a view historians take a step further when they posit that the human past, or specific elements of it, exist independently of our memory of them and are more or less dimly perceptible through careful study of the physical traces or remains (the evidence) left by the people in action—the events—we wish to learn about. So we gather for inspection the residues of combat littering a bygone battlefield, the bills of lading found in an old factory, the records of quondam parliamentary debates, or the mosaic fragments lying amid the ancient debris, and begin to infer their larger import, adducing as we proceed any other documents we know to exist that appear relevant to our project—here, perhaps, the written instructions of army commanders, the machines preserved in an industrial museum, contemporary newspaper accounts of political events, or the inscriptions on a nearby tomb. Elements or aspects of past human actions thereby gradually become real. We call these retrieved elements or aspects of the past historical as opposed to present realities, and they are in due course to be accessed—discovered, read about—in the writings of historians. And from these writings in turn visual artists including cinematographers may create putatively “authentic” visual representations—pictures, movies, digital images, plastic mock-ups, sculptures in various materials—of elements or aspects of the past, just as fiction-writers may draw on them in creating historical fictions, mystery writers their mysteries, comedians their jokes, and so on. Architectural restorationists also use the writings of historians when restoring decrepit or otherwise altered older buildings to an approximation of their appearance at

15. Richard Ned Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), chaps. 1, 3, 4 (pp. 5, 7, 17, 18 for the words quoted); Unmasking the West: “What-If?” Scenarios that Rewrite World History, ed. Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). The latter is a collection of ten counterfactual histories of “the rise of the West” with introductory and concluding chapters by Tetlock and Parker (pp. 11, 17, 389 for the words quoted). On the role of “contingency and accident” in the outbreak of World War I, see the testimony of a leading historian of the conflict—Sean McMeekin, author of July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013)—in Historically Speaking 14, no. 3 (June 2013), 12-16.

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a given time, again demonstrating that the interest in good history, and its usefulness, extends well beyond the historical profession.

Second, historians in the professional, mainstream sense of the term employed here do not and could not fully subscribe to any form of historical determinism: to any view of the past that maintains that complex events like the Industrial Revolution, Napoleon’s rise to power, 1917 in Russia, the Great Depression, or the onset of the Internet had to happen in the way that they did and could not have happened otherwise. Whether it takes the form of geographical, economic, theological, or biological determinism, or of a certain kind of historicism (insisting that inexorable laws govern all historical processes and, therefore, future events), such an approach preemptively denies people in the past the more or less limited freedom of choice that people living today, including historians, routinely take for granted. Rigid historical determinism also automatically excludes the role of chance—of luck, the accidental, the unforeseen—in the unfolding of past events whether in the life of a nation or other social grouping or in that of individuals. The social-science advocates of counterfactual history cited above, thanks to their serious historical reading and discovery of “contingency,” seem to share this position. On the other hand, what we might call a semi-determinist stance often comes to inform a professional historian’s outlook—meaning, for instance, that the role of geography or of the economy in determining a given society’s overall development could be posited alongside that of personal agency in assessing the actions of people living within that larger geographical or economic environment (the importance of context). Also compatible with a properly historical outlook would be recognition of the role of genes or talent or intelligence or of birth order or childhood trauma among a host of uncontrollable factors in possibly or probably or demonstrably shaping, in some degree, the lives of people in the past.16

Professional mainstream historians similarly view with a jaundiced eye the various attempts made over the years to advance single-cause accounts of what were patently complex past events. Monocausal explanations of such events, as we call them, whether Marxist, feminist, postcolonialist, or other in nature, amount in fact to a kind of second-order determinism: since elements or forms of A (class exploitation, patriarchalism, colonialism) can be shown to have been present in a given past situation B, then A must have been the cause, or the main cause, of B (the Russian Revolution, the absence of women’s rights, internecine conflict). Historians rarely conclude that a complex past event—meaning one in which numerous people were demonstrably involved, where little or no direct evidence regarding intention or motive exists, and which issued in multiple outcomes—had a single, or even a main, identifiable cause, an experience that breeds in turn a habitual caution with respect to causality that seems now to be shared by some natural scientists as well as by the social scientists cited earlier. At any rate, a disposition in favor of multiple causation marks the professional

16. The interplay of outside factors and personal agency in shaping people’s lives is most readily apparent perhaps in serious historical biography: recent examples include Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Knopf, 2005) and Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: the Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006), both by professional (academic) historians.

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historian’s approach to the study of complex past events and hence, it must be, to major public issues of the day.17

I might also stress in this connection that although historians may choose to believe in an ultimately controlling Divine Providence, as some of us, perhaps many, claim to do, they do so not as historians but as religious believers—a factor that may in turn influence, as they should forthrightly acknowledge, their work. This question forms part of the larger issue, much in contention today, concerning the nature and propriety of the relation between religion and science. And as far as history goes, the issue appears to have been resolved over the last decade or two by professional historians who are also professed religious believers in favor of a systematic “separation of religious discourse from historical writing.” History as it is researched, written, and taught today, they’ve admitted, cannot go beyond itself and claim to validate religious belief if it is to retain its professional standing. An ancient “scripture” can be considered a work of divine revelation only by an act of faith, not of scholarship. The same must be said for the secular doctrine of progress, or the belief that history has moved and is moving in a definite desirable direction, which long held sway among Anglophone historians. Such a belief is also an act of faith, not a matter of demonstrable fact. Of course, professionally conducted history can and often does attest to the role of religion—or of nationalism, socialism, or any other ideological force—in molding people’s lives. But it does so normally in a deliberately noncommital way: noncommittal, that is, unless the ideology in question is patently immoral as in the case, say, of those justifying American slavery, the more extreme forms of European imperialism, or Adolf Hitler’s (the Nazi party’s) version of fascism.18

Third, historians are conditioned by their training and practice to react cautiously if not critically to the self-promoting stories and sure-fire answers they encounter in their personal lives. Granted, the ways in which historical thinking, or the informal philosophy underlying historical practice, might be applied by historians in real-life situations, are myriad. Yet it’s generally the case, in my observation, that historians habitually suspend judgment and consider carefully when they hear or read messages from the worlds of politics, corporate business, entertainment, or advertising: not necessarily true, they are prone to say, or not likely, until proven. Historians are naturally skeptical, in a word—not in the

17. For contingency in the natural sciences, see, for example, M. Paul Smith and David A. T. Harper, “Causes of the Cambrian Explosion,” Science Magazine 341, no. 6152 (September 20, 2013), 1355-1356, positing instead of a single or dominant developmental process at work in the evolution of animal life a number of such processes that in turn “sit within a series of cascading and nested feedback loops.”

18. On the compatibility of historical practice with religious belief, the work of Reformation historian Brad S. Gregory is instructive, as he makes clear his Roman Catholic bias in assessing past events—which readers may or may not share—while generally observing accepted professional-historical norms: see his The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)—helpfully reviewed, by Reformation historian Philip Benedict, in the American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (February 2013), 144-146. Similarly instructive are the disclaimers introducing Diarmaid MacCulloch’s massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 11-13. The broader issue here is discussed more fully in my “Faith in History,” Journal of the Historical Society 7, no. 1 (March 2007), 137-149, with numerous further references; for the expressly Christian historians quoted, see p. 141 and n. 6.

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formal philosophical sense of holding that certain knowledge of how things really are can never be had, but in the more mundane sense of suspending judgment while in the process of reaching certainty (or the nearest thing to it).

Impressive testimonials to this effect have been published by trained historians who have gone into public life. That training, testifies a corporate human resources executive, taught her that “if you wanted to understand something [in the field of human relations], you needed to take it apart, study its evolution, and examine how it worked.” Her doctoral work in history at a leading research university enabled her to “trace the seminal moments, the hidden actors, and the incremental shifts that translated into major changes in how race was understood and acted out in America,” and so equipped her better to manage race-related problems in today’s workplace. Another history PhD, who went on to become a senior staff member of the US House of Representatives, writes that throughout his career he was “a more acute observer” than the “lawyers and economists” who usually fill such positions “because of my background as a historian.” He found that the “analytic, critical thinking, and research skills that the training provides,” as well as the “store of knowledge” and “perspective in approaching problems” thus gained, “served me well” in the everyday work of Congressional politics; likewise the “understanding of society and its institutions” that the discipline inculcated along with a basic appreciation of the “relationships between competing forces and personalities,” and particularly the “relentless struggles between the powerful and the dispossessed.” Whatever else, here are two clear-cut documentations of an essentially skeptical outlook, imbibed through years of graduate study in history, as subsequently applied in actual working-world situations.19

And this aspect of history as everyday philosophy evokes, fourth, another feature of historical thinking worth noting here. As a dedicated student of the work of historians has pointed out, responding again to postmodernist provocations: “historians have long known about the fallibility of their knowledge.”20 Indeed, historians have become increasingly aware of the tentative, provisional, or only probable nature of our hard-won knowledge especially when it comes to causes, consequences, and motives. Professional historians today, whatever the claims to scientific certainty of some of their erstwhile colleagues, would never insist on the infallibility of their more general findings as distinct from provable facts. The Holocaust, like the American Civil War, happened, with demonstrable numbers of casualties produced by specific acts of violence; exactly why they happened—the scope of culpability—and with what more general results, remain matters of more or less convincing interpretation. To claim that all our findings are unerringly true would not only confound our own basic procedures; it would also undermine our prospects for further research and preclude advancing new or revised interpretations. By the same token, no professional historian today would insist dogmatically on some great “truth” or “grand narrative” revealed

19. See Camille Henderson, “Studying Change to Affect Change: A History PhD in Human Resources,” Perspectives on History 51, no. 7 (October 2013), 24-25; and John A. Lawrence, “A Historian on the Hill,” Perspectives on History 51, no. 6 (September 2013), 28-29.

20. Breisach, On the Future of History, 207.

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by his or her study of a certain segment of the human past, however large. A comparable “uncertainty” now also prevails in the natural sciences, apparently, where the static Newtonian world of yore has been supplanted by an “evolving, occasionally chaotic, precisely historical universe.”21

In sum, belief in the independent existence of complex social as well as natural worlds— independent of our perceptions of them—necessarily characterizes the underlying philosophy of professional historians, whose discipline requires them to believe in a past that exists independently of our memories of it. So, by the same logic, does an initial skepticism toward any and all truth claims advanced by interested parties together with a reluctance to accept as hard fact anything that cannot be shown to be such. Historians are by the nature of their business what philosophers would call common-sense realists—and not only when doing history but also, by necessity (maintaining basic psychic coherence, avoiding gross hypocrisy), in their approach to everyday life. They further posit, based on their intensive study of actions of people in the past, that human beings everywhere possess the ability, albeit in variously limited degrees, to do or not to do as they choose—a power, we know from living our own lives, that we similarly possess. It probably bears repeating that historians are well aware of the limitations on free will imposed in the past and present alike by physical realities or by society (law, custom), by conscience or by ambition, by economic necessity, by a welter of factors both internal and external. But we are still bound to believe that human beings everywhere possess, except in the most dire circumstances, a modicum of personal freedom and hence of moral responsibility.

This claim, fine as it may be in the abstract, raises a familiar, much debated, yet largely unresolved procedural problem for working historians, namely: what does judging the actions of people in the past, as we sometimes indisputably do, actually entail? And does this essential aspect of historical work give rise to a specific, and distinctive, moral code, one that is applicable to conduct now as well as to conduct then, at some point in the past? So far we’ve been discussing the more general outlook on life that historians acquire in the course of their training and work. But what about values?

At first glance, a position of moral relativism would seem to come naturally to historians: good was what people living in a particular time and place deemed to be good, bad was what they considered bad, and the same is true today: it all depends on circumstances. The first part of this proposition is surely correct: in rendering judgment on people’s actions in the past, historians routinely take into account, as best they can, the normative code of behavior subscribed to by the

21. As observed by historian John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 88-89. “Uncertainty” in the natural sciences seems traceable to Werner Heisenberg’s formulation (1927) of the “uncertainty principle” in quantum mechanics (our methods of observation affect—but we cannot be sure how—the behavior of the observed), which undermined the certainties (the observed have definite, definable properties) of classical physics. For a concise introduction to the radically historicized “new cosmology” and some of its moral and social implications, see Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); this book originated as the Yale Terry Lectures of 2009, and the authors are respectively a philosopher of science and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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society in question. Lending money at interest, called usury, was once considered immoral by people living in Christian Europe; polygyny is still, within specified boundaries, a morally acceptable practice in some Muslim societies; alcoholic inebriation has been condemned by many societies but judged appropriate, for ceremonial purposes, by others; and the morality of warfare has been subject to a wide range of interpretation across time and place. These are just a few conspicuous examples of the sometimes sharply different ethical standards adhered to by people in the past that historians come to know in the course of their work and so must take into account when appraising a given people’s actions.

But is this equivalent to saying that there are no universal standards of good and evil, right and wrong, to guide us in our work? The question obviously cannot be answered solely or even mainly on the ground of historical study as such; professional historians are not, as such, moral philosophers (or professional ethicists)—no more than are medical practitioners authorities, as such, on medical ethics or practicing lawyers, on legal ethics. So for clarity on this big question we might well turn to arguments made by two outsiders with relevant expertise. The first involves the concept of “value pluralism” as elaborated, most notably, by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin; and the second focuses on the existence across societies of a “minimalist set” of core or common human values as outlined, most helpfully for our present concerns, by the ethicist Sissela Bok. Both cases are advanced to some degree on tentative historical grounds and both, I’ll suggest, should be congenial to historians who’ve been in the trenches for any length of time and so have wrestled with the problem of moral judgment.

Berlin pointed out, drawing on the writings of a long line of European thinkers, that human beings historically have subscribed to ultimate moral values that are often incommensurate, a fact giving rise to sometimes mortal conflict between them or, to avoid conflict, their acceptance of some degree of tolerance. Examples of such incommensurate ultimate values include rating personal freedom higher than social order (or vice versa), valuing the rights of property above the rights of labor, choosing the authority of the Bible over that of science, ascribing transcendent value to national rather than regional or family identity, and professing absolute pacifism (war is never justified) instead of just-war theory (war is sometimes justified). Berlin went on to suggest that historians in particular must pass moral judgment, when judge they must, with this unavoidable fact in mind. Is this moral relativism? Not at all, said Berlin, who insisted that historians must at the same time exercise that “minimal degree” of moral judgment that is “necessarily involved” in viewing human beings not as “organisms in space” but as “creatures with purposes and motives.” Historians could no more ignore this function of their work, he implied, than they could violate with impunity their professional standards of conduct by falsifying evidence or engaging in plagiarism.22

Yet Berlin did not say how in practice historians were to combine their awareness of the plurality of often-incommensurate ultimate human values with

22. See my “A Berlin for Historians,” History and Theory 41, no. 3 (2002), 284, 291-292, 296; also Cracraft, “Implicit Morality,” 41-42.

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their exercise of the minimal moral judgment that is intrinsic to their work. Here is where Sissela Bok, drawing on the findings of a long list of ethicists, social and natural scientists, political and religious leaders, historians, general philosophers, linguists, literary writers, jurists, and others, comes in. Bok elicited from her sources a consensus to the effect that every known society, past or present, possesses a normative code of behavior that it takes seriously and that aims at avoiding harm and realizing some good. A “moral sense” is universal, she summarizes, and finds expression in a “minimalist set” of “certain basic values necessary to collective survival.” These “core” values, which “have had to be formulated in every society,” include positive duties of mutual care and reciprocity, negative injunctions regarding violence, deceit, and betrayal, and rudimentary norms for settling disputes. Ethically more advanced societies, in addition, have acknowledged the fundamental dignity and liberty of every member of the group or, at a still more advanced level, of every human being regardless of social class, religion, gender, or nation. A comparatively recent example of the latter is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Of course, violations of these norms, and reversions to more primitive standards, have been common across time and place, as historians, perhaps more than other students of human behavior, are aware: the Nazi doctrine of the supremacy of the Aryan race, or the Communist (Stalinist, Maoist) notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the American (or South African) theory of racial segregation, and the policies implemented in support of them, are familiar cases in point. Historians may also be more willing than others to accept that many human acts are morally ambiguous or even ambivalent—some bad as well as some good resulted, or vice versa, a conclusion we then duly record. But the case that at least “minimalist common values” have everywhere been found indispensable to human coexistence—are virtually coterminous with humanity itself—is compelling, as historians (of all people) should recognize.23

Common-sense approaches lead to the same conclusion. The contemporary philosopher Simon Blackburn has tackled the problem of moral relativism, particularly “postmodernist relativism” and its expression in a “general advocacy of toleration,” in several publications aimed, in the Jamesian tradition, at general readers as much as at professional philosophers. “I am unsympathetic to this [maximalist] degree of toleration,” Blackburn writes in one place, likening it to “the kind of open mindedness that comes when all one’s brains have fallen out.” He offers the example of education for women, which he favors, and then supposes that, not a Taliban, but “some weary postmodernist,” agrees, adding: “But that is just us.” The “just” here, Blackburn points out, insinuates that “this is somehow an optional attitude, that there is nothing wrong with people such as the Taliban who happen to whirl the other way.” Elsewhere he invites us, when “faced with different vocabularies and voices,” to “compare theirs with ours. If

23. Sissela Bok, Common Values (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), especially chaps 1-3 (pp. 13-19 for the words quoted). See also Cracraft, “Implicit Morality,” 40-41, with further references, especially to A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer [1991] (Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), chaps 1-12 (on ethical thinking, by a dozen moral philosophers, from ancient to modern times).

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they seem to have got something right which we have not, we learn from them. If we have something right which they have not, we may be able to teach them. If their attitudes are foul and frightful, we may have to be at war with them.” In other words, every society—and so every historian—needs “some sense of what is expected and what is out of line. For human beings, there is no living without standards of living.” Another leading philosopher, Hilary Putnam, frames the question this way: when an anthropologist, for example, can show that specific examples of right and wrong found in his fieldwork are relative to circumstances, this plainly does “not [show] that there is no right or wrong at all.” Some sort of moral sense—some sense of right versus wrong, good versus bad—is universal, in short, even if specific values may differ in tandem with the different circumstances that gave rise to them.24

Historians working today, building on their own moral values as “assimilated, validated, corroborated and verified” in accordance with their own life experiences (quoting William James again), can refer to a document like the UN’s Universal Declaration of 1948 and its supplements when seeking moral guidance in their work—just as they can turn, in purely professional matters, to the Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct published by the American Historical Association.25 They could also consider educating themselves to a higher level of moral awareness than that achieved through their own life experiences and perusal of the documents just mentioned, perhaps by consulting the more advanced work of the philosophers and ethicists cited above. But the point now is that in one or more of these ways historians can and do acquire the capacity, and in due course the obligation, to make the moral judgments necessitated by their work. They thus affirm their essential moral identity with the human beings they are studying as well as their duty to make clear, if only to themselves, the standards they are applying.

A last feature of historical thinking that needs to be mentioned here is commonly called “historical perspective”—not just “perspective,” by now a much battered term connoting, in current critical discourse, something close to prejudice, but precisely historical perspective. And by it I certainly don’t mean hindsight, or predicting the past on the basis of the present, as wags used to accuse official Communists (vulgar Marxists) of doing. Nor do I have “detachment” in mind, a stance often attributed to or claimed by historians, and unfortunately so, since it seems to imply moral indifference, which, as already argued, cannot be a position taken by any historian worthy of the name—any but the most narrowly

24. Simon Blackburn, “Postmodernist Relativism,” in Richard Rorty, vol. 4, ed. Alan Malachowski (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), 275; Blackburn, “Relativism,” in The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 49-50; Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22-23; Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 7 (p. 161). Rorty’s ultimate solution to the problem of moral relativism was to propose that, rather than try to resolve it, the term simply be “dropped from our philosophical vocabulary”: Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xiv.

25. James, Pragmatism, 88; and for the Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, see the AHA web site http://www.historians.org/Jobs & Professional Development/Statements and Standards of the Profession (accessed November 6, 2014). Blackburn, Being Good, Appendix, reprints the UN Declaration in toto (136-43); but note his criticisms of its ethical shortcomings, 103-107.

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focused or technically oriented. Having “historical perspective” usually signals rather an almost instinctive ability to cast unfolding events in a chronological, more broadly evolutionary, framework and to find rough analogs there that offer possibilities of prediction in the present. “This war ” occurring in such-and-such a place or “this political campaign” under way at the moment or “this social movement” of the day “reminds me of one in the past,” historians are often heard to say when attention turns to major current events; indeed, media types often call on historians for just this sort of perspective, with its accompanying hints of what might now happen next. Historians are rightly wary of trying to predict future developments on the basis of what they’ve learned about past human actions. But their distinctive ability to locate present events in a historical context and to suggest thereby what may now come to pass—their capacity to remind one and all of the reality of both historical change and historical continuity—is another cognitive habit that historians naturally acquire in the course of doing their work.

Overall, then, we historians, however unwittingly, derive a set of loosely related ideas about life from our ongoing practice of history. They include a realist outlook on the external world, present as well as past, along with an empiricist belief in its perceptibility, however limited in scope; a more or less well informed moral sense and habit of moral judgment, however sparingly exercised; a cautious, skeptical, fact-driven approach to establishing who is saying what, what happened, and why; a preference for narrative over purely logical forms of exposition coupled with a disposition in favor of multiple causality when assessing complex events; a sensitivity to the play of the contingent and the unforeseen in human affairs; and a way, finally, of putting the actions of people today, like those of people in the past, in a broader, socially interactive context of potentially operative factors as well as in the “long view” of history. Philosophy of history is not at issue here, or a new theory of history; nor is standard historical methodology (historiography in the applied sense) in question—even though it obviously operates in some close, symbiotic relationship with the special kind of thinking under review. Nor have we been talking about “lessons” drawn from history whether by historians themselves or by their readers, which can take a wide variety of forms—political, moral, religious, immediate, long-term, speculative, and/or practical: a potential and often welcome aftereffect, to be sure, of well-wrought history. What we have been talking about is a distinctive way of looking at everyday life that sooner or later emerges from the practice of history, something more than a methodology but also less than a full-blown philosopher’s philosophy.

Is this set of ideas unique in every respect to professional mainstream historians living and working in the Anglophone world of recent decades? Surely one or even several of these cognitive habits could have evolved from the professional practice of other social scientists, especially those whose work has taken a historical turn. I could not say for certain. I can say, based on my reading over the years of works in political science, anthropology, economics, and sociology, that none of them replicates in their entirety the conceptual structure (or overall design) and technical features (the methodology) of just about any work of mainstream professional history. I can also say that my search for memoirs or autobiographies by social scientists yielded remarkably meager results for our

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purposes here as compared with my findings for historians, an apparent anomaly to be explained perhaps by the fact that writing publishable mainstream history requires more literary flair than does publishing the research results, usually quite theoretical and/or quantitative, of the other social sciences. Mainstream history, it seems indisputable, reaches a much wider audience than do any of its social-scientific relatives or offshoots (think movies and television as well as books and the serious print media). In any case, the memoirs of the few senior economists and sociologists that I did find serve only to confirm the notion that historical thinking is unique among the thought processes of even the most closely related disciplines.

The two book-length memoirs by leading sociologists that I could locate, for example, are concerned mainly to relate how early life experiences inspired them to become specialists on the conditions that produced those experiences. In one case, growing up white in a mostly black and Hispanic inner-city housing project—“my childhood was like a social science experiment”—led Dalton Conley to study issues of socioeconomic and racial inequality. In the second case, bonding with his father and grandfather in the course of hunting and playing sports encouraged Michael Messner to focus on issues relating to guns, violence, and masculinity. In both cases, mastering the “sociological approach” was to learn to do disinterested empirical research and to think conceptually—or theoretically—rather than in personal terms about class, race, and gender, thereby to help their audiences better understand these complex social categories and such related problems as racial prejudice, social stratification, gun violence, and sexism. As Conley says, “on my non-teaching days at Yale I run mathematical models on my computer” in an attempt “to understand in some scientific way the leitmotif of race and class that has dominated my life.” More precisely, his models draw on a “data set” assembled from the results of an interview survey given to the same 5,000 inner-city families each year over three decades in order “to predict what conditions in 1969 led to educational success or economic security in the 1990s.”26

On this testimony, then, the sociological approach plainly involves belief in the reality of the social world and its perceptibility by empirical means, inferential thinking, and skepticism toward received or conventional opinion regarding the objects of research; and in these respects it parallels in varying degrees historical thinking. But the sociology at work here is plainly focused on current rather than past conditions. It also aspires to influence social policymaking, another big difference from history, and thus to promote social welfare. Sociologists as such do not bring historical perspective to bear on the problems of everyday life, something that the late Edward Shils, himself a renowned sociologist, much lamented (he termed it neglect by the social sciences of a society’s “temporal dimension”).27 Nor do they exhibit a well-developed sense of the role of

26. Dalton Conley, Honky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xi, 227 for the words quoted); Michael A. Messner, King of the Wild Suburb: a Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Guns (Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2011).

27. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), passim (p. 7 for the words quoted).

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contingency in human affairs, favoring rather “linear” explanations of social phenomena leading to clear-cut conclusions and related predictions—as political scientist Lebow, quoted earlier, complained. Nor are sociologists much taken up with questions of relative moral value, except to identify behaviors that are either socially harmful (deviant) or collectively beneficial. Nor do they normally tell stories in the practice of their discipline, the distinctive literary (or humanistic) aspect of history among the social sciences. Above all, it is the part played by theory in the work of sociology, whether “all-encompassing” theories of the “classical” type, “middle-range” theories of more recent vintage, or “relatively formalized structures of hypothesis and confirmations closely tied to empirical research,” that most distinguishes sociology (or anthropology or political science) from history, and so from historical thinking. History, by comparison, is decidedly not a theory-driven, contemporary problem-solving kind of social science.28

Similarly instructive is the memoir of University of Chicago economist George J. Stigler, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1982. His book is devoted mostly to boosting the accomplishments of the prominent “Chicago School” of economists and their “fundamental economic theory” that “rational economic behavior” underlies all human endeavor. Stigler credits his training as an economist with instilling in him “skepticism toward received beliefs and authoritative reputations” and a “great respect for, and modest skill in, empirical work” (a third outcome of his doctoral work, a “strong interest” in the history of economic thought, though later abandoned, was the apparent source, we note, of his vaunted skepticism). Again we may draw certain parallels with historical thinking. Yet the public policy orientation as well as the essentially theoretical nature of “economic science,” with its special “economic logic,” are plainly dominant here. “Of all the social scientists,” says this distinguished economist, “only economists possess a theoretical system to explain social behavior.” More,

Economists have a proprietary interest in subjects such as the gross national product, unemployment, and the financial markets. They assume ownership over problems such as whether a minority’s wages are being reduced by discrimination or whether a protective tariff reduces a nation’s income. Of course that doesn’t mean that they know all the answers, any more than medical science can answer all questions about illness. But it does mean that economists believe that their answers to traditional economic questions are at least as good as, and probably a lot better than, the answers given by any other group in society.

—which in turn probably explains why “today there are more economists in business and government than in colleges and universities.” Economic thinking, on this account, clearly is different from historical thinking, and by a wide margin.29

28. On the dominant role of theory in sociology, and for the bewildering variety of sociological theories in play over the last half-century or so, see Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3rd ed., ed. Craig Calhoun et al. (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1-24 and passim (a collection of thirty-nine excerpts from sociological works first published from 1958–2007, with editorial introductions by five sociology professors).

29. George F. Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist [1988] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): see 167, 26, 27, 195, 115, 191, 38 for the words quoted. As Harvard economist

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By contrast, numerous historians of the generation or two in question have published testimonials to the impact of their work on their personal values and beliefs in interviews with interested parties, in their historiographical essays, and in their autobiographies or memoirs. The case of Gerda Lerner was cited above. The modern European historian Eric Hobsbawm, to take another prominent representative, asserted late in life that “every historian” has “a private perch from which to survey the world.” His own perch, he avowed, was constructed of “a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler’s rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history,” and “especially” his undergraduate experience at the University of Cambridge, where Marx was uniquely “a master and an inspiration” to history students like himself. In the same collection of his lectures and papers, Hobsbawm further indicated that his perch had moved over the years from the dogmatic Marxist “starting point” of his youth to a more “plural” form of Marxism and eventually into the “mainstream of history”—an evolution motivated, we can readily infer, as much or more by his strenuous program of historical research and publication as by anything else (like disillusionment with the actions of the Soviet Union). E. P. Thompson, he of the famed The Making of the English Working Class (1963), also testified late in life to undergoing a similar evolution in outlook owing to his long hard work as a historian. It’s notable that in all three cases—Lerner, Hobsbawm, Thompson—their youthful embrace of Marxism, of what seemed to them (as to many others) the most exciting, plausible, or otherwise attractive ideology of the time, was progressively weakened, or complicated, by their ongoing practice of history.30

Other veteran historians have similarly indicated how doing history affected their outlook on life. Responding to an interviewer late in her career, Natalie Zemon Davis, a leading specialist in the early modern European field, allowed that her youthful interest in Marx had provided “helpful insight,” to be sure; but then “I’ve always had pretty much respect for what my research found.” Moreover, she came to realize that doing history over time could prove personally rewarding, “through the perspective it gives you, through the vantage points from which you can begin to look at and understand the present, through the wisdom or the patience that it gives you and through a comforting hope in the possibility of change.” In introducing a collection of his review essays, Gordon Wood, well-known historian of the American Revolution, refers to a “historical sense” that

N. Gregory Mankiw writes: “The field of economics offers a lens through which to view the world. For those who buy into it and pursue it as a career, it provides a foundation of a personal and political philosophy. It forever sets you apart—for better or worse—from mere muggles.” Mankiw does not elaborate, except to assert that possession of this common philosophy does not prevent economists from assuming “differing political [party] affiliations” (Mankiw, “Politics Aside, A Common Bond,” New York Times June 30, 2013, BU4). It might be noted that over 70 percent of a random sample of 2,500 history PhDs earned between 1998 and 2009 were employed in colleges and universities, and only about 7 percent in government and business: Perspectives on History 51, no. 9 (December 2013), 11-12.

30. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 229, 157, 169-170; E. P. Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: The New Press, 1994), Preface (especially 9-10). The evolution of Hobsbawm’s Marxism, from his youthful partisanship to his later commitment to “the supremacy of evidence,” is reviewed, somewhat ruefully, in Theodore Koditschek, “How to Change History,” History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013), 433-450.

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accrues from doing history, the achievement of which “does not mean simply to possess information about the past. It means to have a different consciousness, to have incorporated in our minds a mode of understanding that profoundly influences the way we look at the world.” Wood says this special mode of understanding breeds prudence and caution, an appreciation of complexity, and awareness of “the limitations of life.” Both leading historians thus gloss, at least in part, what we’ve been saying here.31

Jeremy Popkin studied the memoirs or autobiographies of no fewer than three hundred fellow historians published mostly since 1980, and with, for our purposes, equally affirmative results. The decision to study history is portrayed in these documents, Popkin found, “as a defining choice,” one guided by university mentors and role models and “involving not just the selection of an occupation, but also the adoption of an attitude toward the world.” In other words, Popkin summarizes, they were attracted to history owing to its “engagement with reality” and provision of a “basis for certainty independent of [any more formal] ideology and more stable than the individual ego.” Grist again for our mill. So too a collection of autobiographical essays by fifteen leading historians of the American South. One of them (Dan T. Carter), typically, recalls that it was his graduate history teachers who “strongly influenced” not only his choice of career but also its course, as they “were above all committed to the importance of careful historical research and documentation as well as balance and fairness in their findings.” The editor of this collection was surprised to discover how similar in outlook this socially “very diverse” group of white Southerners turned out to be on political and especially racial questions, a value system, termed “liberalism,” he ascribes to their work as historians. The memoirs of twenty American historians who did research in Russia during the Cold War, their editors propose, show “more strategic thinking, flexibility, tenacity, inventiveness, and sheer daring than the image of the historian typically suggests.” But other than that situationally induced dimension of their practice, their memoirs also indicate, it was business as usual for this group of historians. As one of them put it, “I tell my doctoral students that a historian must be an archaeologist, a rabbi, a lawyer, and a poet,” a unique combination of skills enabling us to “dig up the sources, read with deep commitment, marshal evidence, and write it all up in style.” In doing history over the years, recalled another, she came to see that the purpose of her career was not to have the last word on some important matter but rather “to explore interpretive possibilities—to master a body of sources and present empirical information through the prism of an informed analytical perspective.”32

What these many memoirs and autobiographies clearly demonstrate is that historians come to their discipline for a variety of personal reasons, initially

31. Natalie Zemon Davis in Pollares-Burke, The New History, 55; Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 14.

32. Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 69, 74, 76, 138, 278; Shapers of Southern History, ed. John B. Boles (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 128-129, ix; Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), xix, 71 (quoting Richard Stites), 175 (Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter).

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attracted perhaps by a particular book or teacher or film or undergraduate course but often, and more seriously, in an effort to frame personal life-experiences especially of a political or social kind (political persecution, social marginalization, professional ostracization) or to begin understanding major public developments of their own time (the civil rights movement, the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict, social-class tensions, the dislocations of the economy). Sometimes, owing to these experiences or interests, they arrive in the discipline already committed ideologically—to a variant of Marxism, perhaps, or of Christianity, to a national or ethnic cause, to forms of class or gender or sexual politics, and so on. But then the discipline takes over. And gradually thereafter, if they are to become successful professional historians, their prior ideological commitments are not necessarily either abandoned or maintained (and they may change) but rather are submerged in that special kind of thinking called history. They are indeed programmed by the cumulative experiences of their training and then practice as historians to think historically, a “mode of understanding” that goes beyond methodology to become, however discreetly, however informally, the kind of personal philosophy referred to above by William James. That is what the memoirs of successful mainstream historians tell us, in so many words.

One other point needs raising. The peculiar world outlook described here is not assembled all at once, complete and thereafter dominant: historians are no more than other people mental and moral automatons, seeing humanity in fixed terms and reflexively tossing off judgments in tune with a fixed moral code. We, too, learn by living—which certainly includes our work-life, where doing original historical research, reading widely in the work of our fellow historians, writing our own history books and articles, submitting the latter for pre-publication evaluation and post-publication review, and teaching university students (or lecturing to more general audiences) constitute for us nothing if not an intense learning experience. Nor could the kind of personal philosophy described here be uniform in all respects among historians. Beyond the general lineaments described above, all historians will develop their personal philosophies, and put them to use, in their own way. Moreover, just as doing history is a never-ending process—I may have completed one project but another instantly looms—doing history and developing the distinctive outlook on life that goes with it are, under conditions favorable to the work, an ongoing, interactive, mutually reinforcing process. Put otherwise, the lineaments described here can be seen as among the rudiments of a viable personal philosophy, as decisively influential factors in the formation of one, or as gradual accretions thereto, accretions that might affirm as much as shape. They cannot be seen as comprising, on their own, a complete philosophy of life; anyway, it is not one that professional philosophers would recognize.

Be that as it may, their possession of the professional-personal philosophy adduced here, however meager by professional philosophical standards, surely helps to explain why working historians today have remained largely unmoved by the sirens of theory who would lure them to their airy abodes, there to reduce their work to intermittently useful data sets or worse, to fiction if not pointless rigmarole. History as philosophy, like a kind of firewall, stands in the way.

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Habits of mind die hard; professions—intellectually respectable ways of making a decent living—are not launched and pursued heedlessly. On the contrary, diligent historical work sooner or later gives rise, among other things, to a distinctive personal philosophy: to a habitual outlook on life that in its overall prudence, in a word, may well be at odds, particularly in matters of public concern, with the world views of contemporaries. Berlin thought this special outlook disclosed itself in a singular capacity for sound judgment combined with “sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physicist,” and lacking which one could be “a physicist of genius, but not even a mediocre historian.”33 However described or characterized, we’ve been talking about a way of looking at the world that both derives from our work as historians and sustains us while doing it, to our own benefit and, all considered, to society’s as well. As Gerda Lerner, creator of women’s history, discovered, practicing history is “deeply rooted in personal psychic need and in the human striving for community.” It is “not a dispensable intellectual luxury,” but a “social necessity.”34

University of Illinois, Chicago (Emeritus)

33. Cracraft, “Berlin,” 295-296.34. Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,

1991), 116-118.