the historian’s craft

The grim esoterism, in which even the best of us sometimes fall, the preponderance, in our current writing, of those dreary textbooks which bad teaching-concepts have put in place of true synthesis, the curious modesty which, as soon as we are outside the study, seems to forbid us to expose the honest groping of our methods before a profane public – all these bad habits, derived from an accumulation of contradictory prejudices, compromise the essential nobility of our cause. They conspire to surrender the mass of defenseless readers to the false brilliance of a bogus history, in which lack of seriousness, picturesque rubbish, and political prejudices are supposed to be redeemed by shameless self-assurance…. A misunderstanding between historical inquiry, such as it is or hopes to be, and the reading public unquestionably does exist. The great debate about footnotes is not the least significant ground upon which the two parties are engaged in their absurd duel.

For a great many scholars, the lower margin of the page exerts a fascination bordering upon mania. It is surely absurd to overcrowd these margins, as they do, with bibliographical references which might largely have been spared by a list drawn up at the beginning of the volume; and worse still, through sheer laziness, to relegate to them long explanations whose proper place was indicated in the main body of the text, so that the most useful part of these works must be looked for in the cellar. But when certain readers complain that a single note, strutting along by itself at the foot of the page, makes their heads swim, or when certain publishers claim that their customers, doubtless less hypersensitive in reality than they would have us believe, are tortured by the mere sight of a page thus disfigured, these aesthetes merely prove their imperviousness to the most elementary maxims of an intellectual ethic. For, apart from the free play of imagination, we have no right to make any assertion which cannot be verified and a historian who in using a document indicates the sources as briefly as possible (that is, the means of finding it again) is only obeying a universal rule of honesty. Corrupted by dogma and myth, current opinion, even when it is least hostile to enlightenment, has lost the very taste for verification. On that day when, having first taken care not to discourage it with useless pedantry, we shall succeed in persuading the public to measure the value of a science in proportion to its willingness to make refutation easy, the forces of reason will achieve one of their most smashing victories. Our humble notes, our finicky little references, currently lampooned by many who do not understand them, are working toward that day.

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (87-8; emphasis added)

As part of my ongoing attempt to get a better perspective on the history of history – or rather, the history of the practice of history – I recently read Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft (written during the 1940s, and translated into English in 1953). As I am neither a medievalist nor a historian of France I don’t know how Bloch’s research is currently regarded in those fields, but I have to say that as both a description of, and a guide to, how historians actually go about their work much of what Bloch says in this book still seems quite relevant today.

This is not to say that he was, as the saying goes, “ahead of his time”; indeed, at one point in the book he even explains why it is a mistake to say that any historical figure was not of that figure’s particular place and time. (Besides, Bloch’s faith in progress and the “forces of reason” quoted above clearly marks him as a man of his time.) But it does show that many of the ongoing debates about history and its various crises – too specialized! too disconnected from the public! too empirical! not empirical enough! – that are often treated as recent (usually meaning post-1950s) developments have actually been going on for a much longer period of time. The fact that many of us (myself included) have often forgotten about, or perhaps never even knew of, the earlier rounds of these debates does not mean that they never happened, or that they are no longer relevant today.

Take, for example, the problem of the division between professional, academic history, and the history most popular with the reading public. Considering the fact that Bloch was writing in France in the 1940s, does it really make sense to blame the current unpopularity – from a sales standpoint – of academic history in the US solely on recent changes in academic history writing? Are we really facing some kind of unprecedented situation here? Certainly some of the historians of the 1950s gained wider readerships than those now, but can we really be certain that that situation was the norm, rather than an exception?

On a related note, the question of epistemology and history was the cause of quite a discussion/debate/”furore” (follow the links and the links’ links to get the full picture) among history bloggers over the last couple of weeks. Often these debates over how historians can “truly” “know” (quotation marks required) anything of the past are cast as the result of the great theoretical advances of the past half-century or so. Before then, supposedly, historians unquestioningly applied naive empiricist methods to their research and were quite content simply to try to know the past as it actually was/happened, wie es eigentlich gewesen (German quotation required – but don’t we need the auxiliary “sein” for this to make sense gramatically?).

Bloch, however, does engage this issue (along with related questions) quite clearly in his book. His discussions of historical criticism and historical analysis are still worth reading today. While his conclusions can certainly be debated, and likely would not satisfy many philosophers, theorists, and perhaps even some historians, the fact is that he – like many historians of the past century – was not at all ignorant of the problems of attaining historical knowledge.

He also did not lack a sense of humor. Consider this passage about the problem of “certainty”:

To what extent, however, are we justified in mouthing this glorious word “certainty”? Mabillon, long ago, admitted that the criticism of charters could not attain ‘metaphysical’ certainty. He was quite right. It is only for the sake of simplification that we sometimes speak of evidence rather than of probabilities. But we are more aware today than in Mabillon’s time, that that convention is not peculiar to us. It is not ‘impossible,’ in the absolute sense of the term, that the Donation of Constantine is authentic, or – according to the whim of some scholars – that the Germania of Tacitus is a forgery. Nor is it, in the same sense, ‘impossible’ that a monkey might accidentally reconstruct either the Donation or the Germania, letter for letter, simply by striking the keys of a typewriter at random. ‘The impossible physical event,’ Cournot has said, ‘is nothing but an event whose probability is infinitely small.’ So far as it finds certainty only by estimating the probable and the improbable, historical criticism is like most other sciences of reality, except that it undoubtedly deals with a more subtle gradation of degrees. (133)

Now of course someone could step in here and argue that Bloch cannot justifiably, in a metaphysical sense, talk about degrees of probability any more than he can talk about absolute certainty: that point can be debated. But the broader accusation that gets thrown around – not always, but often enough to become annoying – that historians have been, until recently, largely ignorant of these kinds of problems simply does not match up with how many historians have gone about their work.

As Bloch writes:

“For there is one precaution which the ordinary detractors of history seem not to have heeded. Their words lack neither eloquence nor wit, but they have, for the most part, neglected to ask themselves exactly what it is they are discussing. The picture which they have formed for themselves of our studies has not been drawn in the workshop. It savors rather of the debating platform than of the study. Above all, it is out of date.” (11-12)

expertise on academic life

[Note: The timestamp is approximate. I do not remember the original date for this post, only that I wrote it in December.]

Like Timothy Burke and many other bloggers, I have found myself growing quite frustrated with the participants (including, or perhaps especially, myself) in the debate over intellectual diversity in the academy. While I still may write a longer post on the subject as it relates to the discipline of history, I simply do not have the time or energy to do so right now. However, I would like to highlight one of Burke’s main conclusions: that many of us are simply not asking the right questions. He writes,

“The question is how to reconstruct the everyday working of scholarly business, to open up the ways in which we legitimate, value and authenticate scholarly work, to change the entire infrastructure of publication, presentation and pedagogy. Academics have to change their internal standards along these lines, but people outside academia also have to work to rethink when and where they need and are willing to respect the advice of experts. More than a few of the current round of complaints from conservatives outside academia contain a general disregard for the entire idea of expertise or scholarly knowledge. This general reconstruction of knowledge and its architecture is the real business, and it can only be tackled well with a scrupulous disinterest in scoring partisan points, with an understanding that the forces which produce a liberal groupthink among academics could easily be reversed in partisan terms without disturbing the more fundamental and difficult issues at hand.”

Implicit in this critique is one of the thornier questions underlying the whole debate: is this one of those areas where we must rely on and respect the advice of experts? A “yes” answer would mean confining much of the debate to academics and admnisitrators, and would only intensify the accusations of elitism and insider groupthink characteristic of so many criticisms of academia. But a “no” answer carries with it the risk of devaluing academic scholarship and expertise in general, and suggests that professional organizations and academic institutions are incapable of policing and disciplining themselves.

This also raises a second, perhaps more troubling, question: Are there experts on the subject of academia? Certainly there is no shortage of academics, but how many of them have made the academic world itself the subject of their research and scholarship? I can think of people who have written on the history of the social sciences, on higher education in general, on historiography, on general trends and fashions in their respective fields – I can think of numerous guides to choosing a college, or getting through a Ph.D. program, or on how to make it to tenure, or how to get published – and I can think of people who have written memoirs or exposes of the professorial world – but I cannot think of any comprehensive examination of academia as a whole. (Or is this just a reflection of my own thin reading, and a marker of my ignorance?)

All of this leads me to wonder: do academics willfully avoid applying the full power of their skills and abilities to their own lives and works? Does the institutional organization of academic life actively discourage the study of the institutional organization of academic life? Sadly, I think the answer is yes: anyone who digs too deeply into tenure fights and peer review practices runs the risk of inflaming (or creating anew) powerful interpersonal conflicts – but that does not mean it is not worth the attempt. Unfortunately, all indications are that those without tenure who write on these topics will not stay long in the academy, while senior observers often find themselves estranged from their own profession – that is, if they have not done so already.

As a graduate student with an (unhealthy?) interest in such topics – but whose dissertation and research will not touch upon them – I suppose I am getting a head start: I already feel estranged.

election exclusive: interview with Francis Parkman

While I have nothing but praise for PBS’s decision to ask historians to comment on the Presidential campaign I must point out that their coverage does suffer from one, albeit minor, limitation: in choosing to speak only with current (i.e. living) historians they have unintentionally slanted their coverage towards the recent past.

So, in order to get a longer-range perspective on the election, I decided to inquire into the views of a man some have called the greatest American historian of his century, a man who was not only an expert on earlier periods of American history but who actually had personal life experience in the 19th century. I speak, of course, of Francis Parkman. Known primarily for his work on the Oregon Trail and his multi-volume account of the conflict between France and England in North America, Mr. Parkman has also authored articles on contemporary politics for such eminent journals as the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. His replies to a few brief questions are presented below:

No Great Matter: First of all, Mr. Parkman, I would like to thank you for your time. I know you haven’t appeared anywhere outside of the spiritualist media for over a century. Now before we get into politics, I’d like you to comment – as an historian – on a recent remark about history coming from within the Bush administration that has been the subject of no small amount of coverage lately. As you may not have caught the remark in the papers I will repeat it in full:

”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Senior Adviser to George W. Bush, quoted in the New York Times Magazine, 17 Oct 2004

As a man who has given much thought to the influence of individuals in history, what do you think of this view?

Francis Parkman:

The history of the progress of mankind is the history of its leading minds. The masses, left to themselves, are hardly capable of progress, except material progress, and even that imperfectly. Through the long course of history, a few men, to be counted by scores or by tens, have planted in the world the germs of a growth whose beneficent vitality has extended itself through all succeeding ages; and any one of these men outweighs in value to mankind myriads of nobles, citizens, and peasants, who have fought or toiled in their generation, and then rotted into oblivion.

NGM: Turning now to politics, let’s start with foreign policy, as most commentators see it as the key issue of this election. What do you think about the idea that the United States must be willing not only to acknowledge, but to embrace the idea that it is an empire?

FP:

There are those who call on imperialism to help us; but, supposing this heroic cure to be possible, we should rue the day that brought us to it. Our emperor would be nothing but a demagogue on a throne, forced to conciliate the masses by giving efficacy to their worst desires.

NGM: That’s a rather pessimistic view. Do you give no credence to the argument that our institutions, along with our system of checks and balances, will be able to prevent the worst abuses of power from taking place in the domestic arena – no matter how poorly our officials may govern?

FP:

The irrepressible optimist, who discovers in every disease of the state a blessing in disguise, will say that eminent abilities are unnecessary in democracies. We commend him to a short study of the recent doings of Congress, and, if this cannot dispel his illusion, his case is beyond hope.

NGM: In that case, do you consider yourself among those who see few positive prospects for our future? Do you find yourself worrying that we could be heading towards some kind of decline or fall?

FP:

There are prophets of evil who see in the disorders that involve us the precursors of speedy ruin; but complete disruption and anarchy are, we may hope, still far off, thanks to an immense vitality and an inherited conservative strength. The immediate question is this: Is the nation in the way of keeping its lofty promise, realizing its sublime possibilities, advancing the best interests of humanity, and helping to ennoble and not vulgarize the world? Who dares answer that it is?

NGM: Certainly those are important questions many people are asking – though their answers may differ from yours, of course. After all many consider this to be one of the most important moments in our history. Just look at the intensity of this campaign season. Do you see in the increase in voter registrations a sign of a reinvigoration of our political system?

FP:

There is an illusion, or a superstition, among us respecting the ballot. The means are confounded with the end. Good government is the end, and the ballot is worthless except so far as it helps to reach this end. Any reasonable man would willingly renounce his privilege of dropping a piece of paper into a box, provided that good government were assured to him and his descendants.

NGM: You don’t mean to say that you entertain doubts about the democratic process, do you?

FP:

…universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing. Still we are told it is an inalienable right. Suppose for an instant that it were so, wild as the supposition is. The community has rights as well as the individual, and it has also duties. It is both its right and its duty to provide good government for itself, and, the moment the vote of any person or class of persons becomes an obstacle to its doing so, this person or class forfeits the right to vote; for, where the rights of a part clash with the rights of the
whole, the former must give way.

NGM: Well, I’m not sure we want to go down that path – and in any case we seem to be running out of time here. But I have one more question. What do you say to recent charges that you, and your predecessor George Bancroft, engaged in plagiarism while composing your histories?

Mr. Parkman declined to comment.

(Disclaimer: This interview is for entertainment purposes only. Readers interested in reading Parkman’s views in context – should refer to this article from 1878. Note further that the views expressed therein are for historical purposes only. Any resemblance to opinions held, whether secretly or openly, by people living today is purely coincidental.)