History’s unresolving tensions: reality and implications

ABSTRACT

A prominent but often neglected feature of historical representation is the presence within it of ‘tensions’ of a sort that cannot be resolved within the limits of historical representation itself. This unresolvability is most readily seen when historians aim to be cognitively responsible in their work and when they are sufficiently skilled and self-aware to be so. Its wider implications have been largely invisible. This article argues that historiography’s most fundamental unresolving tension derives from the opposition between Determinism and Contingency. It also argues that the project of ‘modern’ Western historiography is characterized by two further unresolving tensions, between Present and Past and between General and Particular. The article notes the emergence in Germany from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century of rival traditions of ‘dialectical’ and ‘nondialectical’ (nonresolving) historiography (identified by Ian Hunter). Reaching from history to practice, the article recommends that historians follow a nondialectical path, attending to history’s unresolving tensions rather than denying them, overlooking them or purporting to resolve them. Finally, it suggests some rules of thumb as indications and reminders of how this would be done.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory of history
• nondialectical historiography
• unresolving tension
• Leopold von Ranke
• Ian Hunter

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous readers of an earlier version of this article, who helped me see its defects. Kalle Pihlainen has been a patient and responsive editor. I also thank, for advice and warnings, Frank Ankersmit, Tom Butcher, Rita Felski, Bennett Gilbert, Ari Helo, Chris Lorenz and Erik Midelfort, as well as Derrick Wang for editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term ‘historiography’ has two common meanings: the researching and writing of history, and the study of that practice. In this article, I use the term in the first meaning.

2. The only exception is historiography that does not deal with change over time. While one might assume that all historiography does so, this assumption is debatable.

3. The Continuity/Discontinuity tension is prominent in Eelco Runia’s Moved by the Past (Runia 2014). In Runia’s use of the term, a ‘discontinuity’ is an apparent novum that might arise in human life, including in the historical past. The term also has another use, namely, to designate what arises in historiography when historians posit that such and such a historical episode has ‘ended’.

4. One instance of such a discussion is the carefully argued Auckland doctoral thesis of Alexander Maar (2015). For brief introductions to the subject, see Ben-Menahem (2009) and Soler (2015).

5. As Nathan Rotenstreich (1976) noted, Berlin held that ‘the danger is from two directions’, with the necessity side ‘obviating the reality of the human beings acting in history’, and the contingency side overlooking ‘the broad historical processes in which they play their part’.

6. I include under the rubric ‘narrative’ both accounts that are organized in a manifestly chronological way and those that are not, but that nonetheless highlight the characters, settings, actions and happenings that are at the core of all narratives.

7. Many scholars have asked: When did ‘modern’ historiography begin? This article pursues a different task – that of identifying the conceptual underpinnings of what became the historical discipline. The discipline manifestly emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. However, at least five excellent scholars have discovered ‘modern’ historiography as far back as the sixteenth century (Mali 2003; Fasolt 2004; Schiffman 2011; Phillips 2013; Landwehr 2014). Koselleck ([1979] 1985) found a transformation in conceptions of history and time occurring in 1750–1850, initiating ‘modern’ history. Other scholars have focused on the late-eighteenth-century ‘Göttingen school’ (Wesendonck 1876; Butterfield 1955; Reill 1975; de Melo Araújo 2012).

8. In 1792, Schiller published his History of the Thirty Years War, where he portrays a Germany ‘swarming with…little tyrants’, rampant with anarchy, disrespect of people’s rights, moral impurity, and impunity from punishment (Schiller 1792, 5. Buch, 424–25).

9. FRANTEXT includes 3000 texts (215 million words) from the twelfth through twentieth centuries (ARTFL 1982–). The one pre-1789 use of ancien régime occurs in a work published in 1787 by the classical scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce. The story is set in ancient Greece (This ‘hit’ is at chapter 75, p. 189; total hits in the search: 2338). Searched at https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/frantext0917/.

10. The reader will have noticed some wobbling between ‘universal’ and ‘general’ in this article. I follow my sources. Translators into English often render the German allgemein (general) as ‘universal’, which can be confusing, since philosophically informed readers may be tempted to understand universal in its technical sense, as denoting the properties that things have, such as ‘being red’, ‘being Canadian’, ‘being a human being’ and so on (Armstrong 1978 and, more briefly, Orilia and Swoyer 2017).

11. Women were excluded from the ranks of ‘professional’ historians, although not entirely from the writing of history (Smith 1984, 1998).

12. Given the surprising resilience of Meinecke’s Ranke-interpretation (it is a vampire that refuses to die), such a project is probably needed.

13. I do not mean by ‘“modern” historiography’ all histories produced in whatever period we choose to designate as ‘modern’. I mean, rather, historiography that conforms to a set of practices adopted and modified in the historical discipline as it has evolved since its emergence after the French Revolution.

14. The argument relies on evidence that is entirely ‘Western’. If the database were to be changed – for example, if Chinese historiography were brought into the picture – would the claims made here be modified? Would the common pursuit, historical knowledge, outweigh cultural and experiential difference?

15. Cf. Megill (2007 2–4, 41, 58–59, 109, 111, 154), on ‘unresolving’ ‘dialectic’ or ‘tension’ in historiography.

Additional information

Funding

Some of the work that went into this article took place during a month I spent in China in 2017, supported by the Fudan Fellow Program of the Fudan Institute of Advanced Study, Fudan University, Shanghai. In addition, University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences financially supported this study.

Notes on contributors

Allan Megill

Allan Megill is a professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago, 2007), Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and many articles in the history of European ideas and theory of history.