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ABSTRACT
This article does three things. First, it briefly presents some relevant depictions of the (general) historian by past and present scholars, whilst also touching on the contested role of theory in historians’ practice. Second, it illustrates a few distinct images by which the practice of the intellectual historian has been characterised. It thus argues that these images, which chiefly draw on recent work by Stefan Collini (1947-), provide a specific identity of/for intellectual history as a discipline that should be engaged in attention to audience, essayistic style and cultural criticism. Third, by focusing on the characterisation of the intellectual historian as someone trained in painterly observation put forward by the historian of ideas Duncan Forbes (1922–1994), the last section of the present paper points out some important similarities between Collini and Forbes. In so doing, this contribution also says something tentative about the status of the discipline, its value as well as its future.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Forbes, “Aesthetic Thoughts on Doing the History of Ideas,” (this article was published posthumously under John W. Burrow’s care).
2 See James, “The House of Fiction,” 50.
3 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 4, 3–4 fn. 6. This image derives from Michel de Certeau’s notion of history-writing as discourse about the dead. In filling the gap between past and present, we (historians) attend, according to Paul Zumthor,
to the discourse of some invisible other that speaks to us from some deathbed, of which the exact location is unknown. We strive to hear the echo of a voice which, somewhere, probes, knocks against the world’s silences, begins again, is stifled (cited in ibid., pp. 14–5).
4 See Cuttica, “Anti-Methodology Par Excellence.”
5 Cobb, A Second Identity. Essays on France and French History, 47. See also Burrow, “A Front-line Historian.”
6 Cobb, Tour de France, 175–8.
7 Cobb, The Streets of Paris, 8–9.
8 Cobb, Second, 45.
9 Cobb, Tour, 183.
10 For a classic example, see Trevelyan, “History and Literature”; for a contemporary instance, see White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism.
11 Heald, ed., My Dear Hugh, Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others, 52.
12 Cobb, Second, 43. See also ibid., 47.
13 Anderson, “The Force of the Anomaly,” 6.
14 Ibid., 6.
15 See Evans, In Defence of History.
16 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 107, 113.
17 According to Richard Posner, public intellectuals address issues of general interest (versus specialisation), reaching a wide audience not by being descriptive but by articulating a political and ideological agenda (see Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, passim). ‘Accessible scholarship’ does not make one a ‘public intellectual’ (ibid., p. 21). On the different types and styles of public intellectual, see ibid., pp. 36, 40, respectively.
18 See e.g. Jones, Ostberg, and Randeraad, eds., Contemporary History on Trial: Europe Since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian. For a well-known example of a historian acting as chief expert-adviser in a court case, see Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial.
19 By embracing public history, historians risk having their work manipulated and misused by politicians or misunderstood and contested by local communities unhappy with their findings. On a larger scale shaped by social media, they might be targeted for expressing ideas judged at odds with the fashions of the day or the dominating ideological trends – as with the French historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, following his definition of slavery as a crime against humanity rather than as genocide (see Stevens, “Public Policy and the Public Historian,” 137, 136).
20 See Doing Things with Intellectual History: An Interview with Martin van Gelderen, by B. K. Olesen, J. Gerlings, K. Havu, D. Knegt, M. La Mela, and T. Ø. Wittendorff, http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2013/1/Gelderen. For Waldron’s work, see e.g. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality; Williams and Waldron, eds., Toleration and its Limits; Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs.
21 See Tosh, “Public History, Civic Engagement and the Historical Profession in Britain.”
22 Jordanova, “What’s in a Name? Historians and Theory,” 1460.
23 For the historian of ancient Rome Paul Veyne, history is indeed concrete, whereas theoretical reflections on it are ‘the dead part of a historical work’. To theorise on history ‘is not very interesting: it is a mere academic exercise or a sophisticated ritual’. History does not have a ‘structure’ or a ‘method’: in fact, Veyne trenchantly asserts, ‘all theory in this field is stillborn’ (Veyne, Comment on Écrit l'Histoire, 144).
24 Jenkins, At the Limits of History, 19.
25 Jordanova, “What’s,” 1461. See also ibid., 1469.
26 Ibid., 1463.
27 In light of the journal History and Theory’s 1960 foundation, this attitude seems untoward.
28 Jordanova, “What’s,” 1465. See also ibid., 1477. These discussions are nothing new, of course, and can be found elsewhere. In Germany, one would certainly think of Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik.
29 See e.g. White and Manuel, Theories of History; LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts”; LaCapra and Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History; Whatmore and Young, eds., Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History; McMahon and Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History; Whatmore and Young, eds., A Companion to Intellectual History.
30 See A. Lange, “Postscript. The Slide-Show Epiphanies of the Architectural Historian Vincent Scully,” The New Yorker, December 5 2017, Accessed June 1, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-slide-show-epiphanies-of-the-architectural-historian-vincent-scully.
31 Whereas I have examined in detail Collini’s methodological approach in Cuttica, “The Intellectual Historian as Critic”, here I deal mainly with his most recent scholarly contributions, where a stronger push towards criticism is the keynote (especially, the interplay between cultural/literary criticism and intellectual history).
32 Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination. History in English Criticism, 210. For one (well-known) criticism of – especially, scientific – methods based on ‘a theology of creation’, see Latour, Petite Réflexion sur le Culte Moderne des Dieux Faitiches, 37 (my translation). Applied to the relation between the historian and his/her object of study (e.g. a text), Latour’s reasoning – the text is autonomous from its interpreter – seems to imply that the historian investigating the past does not shape it.
33 See Cuttica, “Eavesdropper on the Past: John W. Burrow (1935–Citation2009), Intellectual History and its Future.”
34 Burrow, “Intellectual History in English Academic Life,” 22–3.
35 On the last two, see the rest of this essay.
36 For mirror versus window novelists, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/02/has-fiction-lost-its-edge-american-psycho-bret-easton-ellis-leila-slimani, accessed on 10 May 2019.
37 On the preceding points, see Cuttica, “What Type of Historian?”; Cuttica, “Intellectual History”; Cuttica, “Intellectual History in the Modern University,” 36–47.
38 One prominent instance of this is Isaiah Berlin’s work: see e.g. Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas.
39 On the ‘the essayist as a firefighter’, see J. Franzen, “Is it Too Late to Save the World?,” The Guardian, 5 November 2017, Accessed May 10, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/04/jonathan-franzen-too-late-to-save-world-donald-trump-environment.
40 Collini, “‘Vexing the thoughtless’: T.S. Eliot’s Early Criticism,” 345.
41 Ibid., 345.
42 Ibid., 345.
43 See Collini, Nostalgic, 185.
44 Ibid., 17.
45 Ibid., 23.
46 Ibid., 24.
47 Ibid., 76.
48 See e.g. Collini, Nostalgic, 63, 73. See also Cuttica, “Collini,” passim.
49 S. Collini, “The Reminder-General,” The Nation, June 9, 2008, 17–22, 17.
50 Collini’s hermeneutical practice agrees with Lionel Trilling’s insistence on the ‘pastness’ of a work of literature as fundamental to fully apprehend it (see Trilling, “The Sense of the Past,” esp. 184–5, 186).
51 See e.g. Collini, “The Reminder-General,” 22. See also Collini, What Are Universities For?.
52 See Collini, Nostalgic, 117, 119. In order to stress the contingency of thought, Collini constantly reminds his readers that the historical life of a writing changes across centuries and milieus (see Cuttica, “Collini,” e.g. 259, 260).
53 Collini, Nostalgic, 143.
54 Collini, “Unreasoning Vigour,” 16.
55 This perspective accords also with Leavis’ maxim that ‘it is good for the writer [historian] to be “forced to address a wider public, to speak to everybody in the language of all”’ (Collini, Nostalgic, 53).
56 Collini, Arnold, 80.
57 See Collini, “Escuchar a escondidas entre los arbustos; historia intelectual y critica literaria”. I quote from the English version of the paper, which Stefan Collini kindly sent me.
58 Collini, What, 84. Collini’s proposal is here set against ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ (see ibid., 83).
59 Ibid., 195.
60 The use of this term instead of ‘intellectual historian’ indicates an older generation’s terminology.
61 Despite attempting to situate Collini’s and Forbes’ works in relation to alternative traditions of history-writing, my primary focus is not on assessing the degree to which their claims and arguments intersect with previous methodological discourses or with approaches elsewhere than in history. Rather, my goal is to explicate the striking affinities between these two intellectual historians and to point out what differentiates them from other historiographical perspectives on the past.
62 See. Burrow, “Duncan Forbes and the History of Ideas: an Introduction to ‘Aesthetic Thoughts on Doing the History of Ideas’.”
63 Ibid., 98.
64 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 101.
65 Burrow, “Forbes,” 99.
66 Ibid., 99.
67 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 106, 113. This image refers to the painter Joan Eardley (Forbes sometimes misspelt it ‘Eardly’). It also calls to mind the traditional representation of J. M. W. Turner’s work.
68 Ibid., 102.
69 Ibid., 102–3. See ibid., 105 for the idea that trained ‘intensive’ seeing (‘reading texts, following arguments’) is an essential component of the historian of ideas’ methodological toolbox. Forbes argued for the – implausible – letting go ‘of the world’ in which the historian lives his/her ‘daily life’ (ibid., 109). The nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater held similar ideas with regard to ‘the freedom of the individual’ to judge artworks unencumbered from the surrounding ‘pressures of the world’ (see Hartley, “Intellectual History and the History of Art,” p. 77). Ernst Gombrich, instead, considered the experience of ‘seeing’ as inevitably constituted by artistic values and cultural factors. He regarded knowing and seeing as intertwined, so that the painter’s isolation is not an option: what the observer sees in the world cannot do without what he/she knows already about it (see ibid., 82). Gombrich asked though very similar questions to Forbes’: as Lucy Hartley explains, he asked ‘to what extent’ painters – whom Gombrich identified with ‘translators rather than transcribers of the world’ – ‘simply depict what they see in nature’ (ibid., 81; see also ibid., 82). Daston and Galison, Objectivity discusses the virtue languages of objectivity in nineteenth-century science, with equal relevance for history. Objectivity as a matter of trained intuitive eyesight might be regarded as a product of one of those nineteenth-century discourses. I thank Henning Trüper for pointing this book out to me.
70 Collini, “Eavesdropping in the shrubbery,” 169 (p. 3 in the English version).
71 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 112. This is what Forbes defined as ‘synoptical’ look, namely the opposite of ‘using abridgements which are importations’ (ibid., 112). On the value of ‘portraiture scholarship’ for historical understanding, see Lorenz, “Art History and Intellectual History,” 224ff.
72 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 104.
73 A keyword in the Forbesian vocabulary is ‘illustration’ (see ibid., 101).
74 Ibid., 106. These opposite images tend to be older. For instance, Marc Bloch argued that abstraction and imagination are part and parcel of the historical experience of interpreting the past (Bloch, Apologie pour l’Histoire ou Métier d’Historien, 124). Separating natural sciences and history, Bloch remarked that the former abandoned any interest in the ‘observer [‘contemplateur’]’ of reality (e.g. a ‘landscape’) with the aim of analysing only the objects observed. This is so because the natural sciences dismiss as ‘arbitrary’ the ‘relations we weave between things’. History, however, has to do with something different: ‘human consciences’. These – with their ‘contaminations, even confusion of which they are the ground’ – form ‘reality’ (ibid., 126). For Bloch, ‘plasticity’ is the only way through which history can ‘adapt […] its classifications to “the very outlines of reality”’ (ibid., 153).
75 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 106.
76 Ibid., 106.
77 Ibid., 107. Following Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘clue paradigm’, the detective-historian draws on intuition (see Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” 21). The intuitive dimension presents a quicker epistemological pace compared to the slower one of the painter. It can also be added that the detective-historian – as, for instance, per Cobb’s job description – operates in a way that is dependent on the archival dimension of historical research (a modality shaped by reliance on fragmentary evidence), which is not the case with the vagabond-artist-historian.
78 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 103.
79 Collini, “Author’s Response,” 399–400.
80 Collini, English Pasts. Essays in History and Culture, 264.
81 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 103. Here, a legitimate criticism could be that the field has nowadays become rather guild-entrenched, given the proliferation of societies, institutes and, above all, journals especially dedicated to intellectual history (see e.g. Cuttica, “Intellectual History,” passim).
82 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 109 (italics in the original). Forbes repeated this idea throughout (see ibid., 109 fn. 4, 110, 111).
83 Burrow, “Forbes,” 97–8.
84 Collini, “From Non-Fiction Prose to ‘Cultural Criticism’,” 26. See also Collini, “General Introduction,” 9–10. On the hybridity of intellectual history, see Collini, “The Identity of Intellectual History,” 13.
85 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 109.
86 The scholarly debate about whether subjective experiences matter is nothing new. Here, Forbes’ observation needs to be situated within a contextualist approach whereby intellectual history studies wrong, obsolete, absurd (to modern interpreters) ideas because they did matter to those who are the object of its investigation. For a similar point, see e.g. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, 299. For just one (opposite) instance of a historian for whom historical scholarship ‘seeks nothing but the truth’, see Veyne, Comment, 24. According to Veyne, ‘facts have thus a natural organisation, which the historian finds ready and made, once he has chosen his object of study, and which is unchangeable: the effort of historical work is precisely to try to find [‘retrouver’] such an organisation’ (ibid., 45). On Veyne’s account, ‘facts do not exist in isolation, but they present some objective connections’ (ibid., 46; my translations).
87 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 110. This is, in part, reminiscent of what an eighteenth-century theorist of history, J. M. Chladenius, wrote about the ‘seeing-points’ of historians who use telescopes that run backwards over their shoulder, thus also looking forward with one eye. Obviously, this also illustrates the longevity of perspectivist topoi in historical theory. I owe this reference to Henning Trüper.
88 Ibid., 112. It is true though that intellectual historians have not always carried out this work.
89 Ibid., 110.
90 Ibid., 113.
91 Ibid., 102.
92 Ibid., 104.
93 Ibid., 105.
94 Ibid., 102.
95 This characterisation of historical research as a leisurely activity might be seen as the product of a bygone (Oxbridge) academic era, reflecting the ‘lingering amateur ideology’ of a substantial portion of British historical writing. This does not signify though that Forbes was all in for the necessarily ‘un-professional’ approach of the historian of ideas (after all, the latter’s ‘innocent eye’ must be ‘a disciplined eye’: ibid., 102). On the contrary, he pitted the look of ‘the lay observer who does not see’ against that of the painter to whose model the professional practitioner of intellectual history should aspire (Forbes lamented ‘the lack of such [painterly] professionalism in the history of ideas’ (ibid., 102; see also ibid., 103)). Just as ‘the painter has to be trained to see’, so the intellectual historian needs to be trained to observe intensively in order to sharpen his/her interpretations (ibid., 105, 109).
96 Ibid., 107.
97 Ibid., 108.
98 Ibid., 109.
99 He approvingly referred to William Blake’s dictum that ‘[t]o generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is alone the distinction of merit. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess’ (ibid., 105 fn. 2).
100 Collini, “Identity,” 13. ‘Quiddity’ here does not mean ‘the inherent nature or essence of someone or something’ (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/quiddity, accessed on 1 June 2019), but it refers to a distinctive characteristic, a peculiarity, of something. Attention to the ‘quiddity’ of historical objects explains Collini’s lukewarmness towards ‘global intellectual history’ – although he recognises some of its ‘benefits’ (e.g. avoidance of the ‘parochial’): see Collini, Nostalgic, 209.
101 Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 108–9.
102 Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, vii. There is no acknowledged nod towards Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”
103 See Collini, “Identity,” passim. Forbes spoke of ‘total immersion’ as a result of painterly (Eardley, again) staring at something hard, without ‘a priori knowledge’ (Forbes, “Aesthetic,” 113).
104 Collini, “What’s Not to Like?”. This approach neglects ‘the nuanced understanding of actual historical change in a specific time and place’, which represents the core ‘of what is of interest to a literary or intellectual historian’ (ibid., 11). According to Collini, ‘comparative historical sociology’ takes a problematic ‘aerial view’ of historical societies/contexts, generating thus a ‘relentless sociological reductivism’ where empirical details are subjugated to a constraining conceptual framework (ibid., 12).
105 Forbes, Hume, viii.
106 Ibid., viii.
107 Stating character virtues as the foundation for historical thinking has a long tradition. Much work has been done on the ‘personae’ of the historian as compounds of virtues considered to be constitutive of proper method – whether Forbes’ is an instantiation of that tradition is not possible to say. For a recent contribution to these themes, see Paul, ed., How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000.
108 Forbes, Hume, ix.
109 Ibid., x.
110 Collini, “‘Discipline History’ and ‘Intellectual History’,” 391.
111 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, “Prologue. The Governing Science,” 4–5.
112 Collini, “Discipline History,” 391. Thus, Collini argues, ‘the political thinking of previous generations’ might be ‘disfigured by the preoccupations of discipline history’ (ibid., 394). The latter illustrates the disruptive and scholarly ‘counter-productive’ ‘ghetto mentality’ that entails, amongst other things, a narrow approach to one’s ‘sources’ (ibid., 395, 396).
113 Forbes, Hume, 126.
114 See ibid., e.g. 129–30.
115 Collini, “Identity,” 13, 14.
116 Forbes, Hume, 308.
117 Ibid., 309.
118 Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History, 11.
119 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, “Prologue,” 5.
120 See e.g. Collini, “Dream of the Seventh Dominion.”
121 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, “Prologue,” 5–6. It should be made clear that the phrases quoted in the text are by ‘Burrinchini’ (Collini, Winch, and Burrow) – i.e. a closely related (Sussex) ‘author’, but not quite identical.
122 Are historians better ‘futurists’ because they are trained to analyse multi-causal systems of data? See Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, passim. In the 1920s, Marc Bloch argued for the legitimacy of ‘historical forecast’ pursued – scientifically, not prophetically – by historians (see Schöttler, “After the Deluge: The Impact of the Two World Wars on the Historical Work of Henri Pirenne and Marc Bloch.” 420–2; see also ibid., 419).
123 Collini, That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect, esp. 67, where Collini defends the value of critical scrutiny vis-à-vis ‘vulnerable’ and ‘disadvantaged’ groups as an antidote against the risk of being – sometimes too liberally – condescending towards the ideas held amongst minorities.
124 On this pressing question, see e.g. Cohen and Mandler, “The History Manifesto. A Critique,” 537.
125 I think of institutions in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia.
126 In this regard, the list could be extended to include work on climate change.
127 See Cuttica, “Intellectual History,” 260.
128 Leavis, “James as a Critic,” xvii.
129 Burrow, Memories Migrating. An Autobiography, 215.
130 See Cuttica, “Collini,” 272.