A New Philosophy of History.
Craig, Lee A.
If you find the work of D. N. McCloskey on rhetoric and economics
interesting and challenging, and I confess that I do, then you will
probably consider A New Philosophy of History a valuable contribution to
the history of thought in the humanities. If, however, you find
McCloskey's work somewhat less than interesting, then you might
want to move on, because the essays in this volume, written by notable
historians, literary critics, and philosophers, grapple with many of the
same issues raised by McCloskey. Needless to say, these issues are not
typically covered in graduate training in economics. For example, the
essays are organized in four sections entitled "Rubrics of
Style," "Voice," "Argument," and
"Image" - not exactly the nouns found at the core of
today's leading debates among economists.
Although all of the essays are provocative, economists will probably
find the ones in the "Style" and "Argument" sections
more interesting, at least from a professional perspective, than those
in the "Voice" and "Images" sections. In the
"Style" section, for example, Nancy Partner offers a
refreshingly candid essay entitled "Historicity in an Age of
Reality-Fictions". She provides a list of "basic
literary" forms employed by traditional (Western) historians (and
economists for that matter); these forms include but are not limited to
the author as narrator, the substitution of information for inspiration,
the use of prose for extended narrative, and attention to causal
relations. She observes that these devices are not legacies of the
Enlightenment or the nineteenth-century intellectuals who supposedly
formalized scientific analysis, but rather come from Greek and Roman
antiquity. Importantly, Professor Partner includes incorporated fictions
(her emphasis) among these ancient bequests. She concludes that
collectively these devices produce an "appropriate protocol"
among historians, and in a democracy, violations of this protocol lead
dangerously to cynicism among the polity. One might add that violations
with ideological roots and political objectives are especially harmful
in this sense.
The "Argument" section contains two essays. One, Robert
Berkhofer's "A Point of View on Viewpoints in Historical
Practice," illustrates how easily critics of the
white-European-male history substitute their own color-continent-gender
history. To make his point, Professor Berkhofer quotes a number of
passages (some quite lengthy) from critiques of traditional
historiography. In one of these passages a critic accuses
unreconstructed traditionalists of "intellectual laziness."
Strong words. In fact these passages reveal more about academic politics
and turf wars than they do about history. Recognizing the flaws of
substituting one world view for another, Professor Berkhofer concludes
that multicultural history should embrace "polyvocality" which
represents multiple viewpoints from the past and the present. Maybe, but
this essay also reveals how difficult it is to reconstruct a text,
course, or discipline once it has been deconstructed.
The futility of that reconstruction is illustrated in the other
essay, "'Grand Narrative' and the Discipline of
History," in the "Argument" section. In it Allan Megill
makes a case for the application of "theory" in history,
though this is not theory in the formalized sense that economists use
the term. Theory here means a set of "levels of
conceptualization" that yield postulates, one of which is:
"Never assume that there is a single authorized historical method
or subject matter." Obeying this postulate, he goes on to state
that: "In a world that no longer believes in a single History,
historians can awaken universal interest only insofar as their work
addresses theoretical issues." One might conclude that a world with
no single history, is one with many histories, which might help explain
the proliferation in recent years of courses on racial, ethnic, and
gender history.
Some readers will be troubled by the notion, often implicit in these
essays, that the recognition that there is no single history, or
historical perspective, logically leads to the conclusion that there
must be arbitrarily many; however, given that the dean's resources
are finite, the History Department must still decide which histories to
include in the curriculum (and which faculty to hire). In the absence of
intellectual arguments addressing this issue, campus and departmental
politics will fill the vacuum. Unfortunately, nothing in the new
philosophy of history helps determine which history should be taught.
(On this point, it is worth noting that less than half of the authors of
the essays in this volume list as their academic residence a department
of history!)
For an economist, even one with formal training in history, perhaps
the most striking feature of these essays is how much intellectual
effort the authors put into exploring what it is exactly that they and
their colleagues do or should be doing. With the notable exception of
McCloskey, no major intellectual figures address similar issues in
contemporary economics. Your relief or consternation about this
observation will probably go a long way toward predicting your view of
this volume.
Finally, many prominent individuals have offered succinct philosophies of history. These include Voltaire, whose characterization
of history as "fables agreed upon" appeals to a late-twentieth
century sense of cynicism (though after reading these essays,
"fables disagreed upon" would be more like it). Emerson evoked
a less skeptical notion when he wrote, "There is properly no
history, only biography". Perhaps he was only thinking of history
that we once referred to as "a good read" (character, after
all, being the root of drama). Although Voltaire's glib cynicism
would no doubt carry him far in today's academy, I am afraid the
historian whom Emerson had in mind would be labeled a "naive
realist" and have a tough go of it. Indeed, the message of this
volume is: "There is no history, only discourse."
Lee A. Craig North Carolina State University
