Indian Council of Historical Research
Southern Regional Centre, Bangalore
Lecture Series - 3
"History Under Siege: Three Defining Influences on Historiography in the 20th Century"
P. P. Sudhakaran
Former Professor of History and Zonal Dy. Director (Rtd.), Collegiate Education, Govt. of Kerala.
Historiography – the technique as well as the philosophy of History – had the most turbulent period in its entire history during the 20th century when it came under a veritable siege from three clearly discernible quarters: first from the ‘New Science’ of Quantum Mechanics, Relativity Theory and Uncertainty Principle, next from the Philosophy of Deconstruction of Derrida and Company, and last from Francis Fukuyama, a Political Scientist based in the US.
The previous century had ended on a note of heightened excitement about History being ‘a science, no less, no more’ that was about to produce ‘Ultimate History’. The 20th century, in contrast, ended seeing History chastened, sobered and less ambitious. In that sense, the siege was a blessing in disguise.
Problem with definitions.
Before going into the details of the ‘siege’, it may be worthwhile to digress a little so as to dispel the feeling, if any, that History as a discipline has the same degree of rigour as, say, Physics. It is obviously one of the oldest and most extensively written subjects among all branches of literature. Yet, it never had a cover-all definition that is cogent and universal. What we have, instead, is a surfeit of definitions, none of which is definitive. This is a cause as well as a symptom of the problem that is History.
Defining History is hazardous. Notwithstanding the hazard, it had always been a preoccupation or a pastime with historians. It became a passion after the natural sciences made spectacular progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and gave currency to the belief that definition was the true measure of a subject’s respectability.
A definition, unlike the curate’s egg, ought to be good in all parts. But, even the most serious among the definitions of History are tentative and partial. Quite a few of them are only witticism, which, as Voltaire has remarked, prove nothing. The rest are abstruse, cynical or silly. Then there are the potshots taken by the likes of Henry Ford, which incidentally get more publicity only to confound the confusion.1 History simply does not have a definition yet.
Why is defining History such a big problem? Definitions are attempted when the subject defined becomes somewhat stable. If the subject does not conform to the definition, either the definition is wrong or the subject is unfit for a definition. Is History stable and fit? Too many definitions and none of them satisfactory prove that it is not. Describing it indulgently as ‘protean’ only endorses this fact, though on the sly. As matters stand now, the more we define History, less sure we become about the History we knew. History, like life itself, which it is supposed to retrospect and relate, invites only to elude.
Has ‘history’ become a weasel word through over-definition? Or, as in the case of subatomic particles at the micro level, is there an uncertainty principle of sorts operating in the case of History at the macro level, making it impossible to reconcile knowledge in History with knowledge about History? Definitions can take care of only one thing at a time; they cannot cope with, say, the process and the content at the same time. History has both, and definitions that try to explain the process miss out on the content, and vice versa.2 This can be the ‘uncertainty principle’, if one may call it so, that seems to work against defining History.
To these factors of indeterminacy, the other variables of (a): historian as a hopelessly involved interlocutor and (b): language as an impossibly ‘private’ tool of communication may have to be added. No wonder then, that the search for a correct definition of History is as proverbially futile as the one for the elusive black cat. Any definition of History is doomed to be skewed. History simply will not have a definition.
Should one still dwell on the problem of defining History? Not for hazarding another definition, certainly. Definitions need a place to stand to define, but History is in a state of acute flux, perhaps, ever since the expression ‘Philosophy of History’ came into vogue.3 It inspires, now more than ever before, extremes of awe and ridicule at the same time - hopefully, the truth may not be ‘in between’!
How did this change from supreme complacency at the end of the nineteenth century to morbid self-doubt by the end of the twentieth century come about? Any attempt to answer this question will lead directly to some defining influences on Historiography, especially its Philosophy, in the last century, to a siege staggered in three stages.
The New Science.
The first of the three stages of this siege began quite benignly as an attempt to update the ‘science’ of History to keep it abreast of other sciences. It was occasioned by some revolutionary happenings in Mathematics and Physics in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
After History came under the influence of the Newtonian system of science, absolutely sure of knowing the past absolutely and predicting the future accurately, there was all-round excitement that History would be the key to shaping the future of humanity. Those who thought that there could be and should be a unified methodology for all branches of knowledge hoped that the right method would help History also to become another science!4
The ‘past’ as immutable, fossilized truth was an article of faith with them, which had appeared to satisfy every requirement for a universal definition of History and had spawned a spate of new definitions. The causal link was assumed to run through the whole gamut of human history from the primordial past to the end of the world. Most surprisingly, even those who viewed History as a product of the dialectic, of ideas or matter or whatever, had looked for the dynamics only in the present and the future and assumed the past as having ‘happened’ and, therefore, final. Their disdain was only about the unscientific ways of discovering and explaining it, about the methodology of History.
These smug assumptions were given a thorough shake up by the new theories of Quantum and Indeterminacy, especially the latter. The Quantum Mechanics enunciated by Max Planck, Satyendra Nath Bose, Paul Dirac and a host of others between 1900 and 1928, the Relativity Theory proposed by Albert Einstein first in 1905 and developed later, and the Principle of Indeterminacy formulated in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg challenged the Newtonian way of explaining the external world, the ‘world’ History was also concerned about. The habit of the historians of looking at the past as an object waiting out there only to be discovered through correct methodology, what Collingwood described as ‘naïve realism’,5 was now shown to be passé, and the faith in the ‘law of causation’ was proved to be dogmatic. However, the New Science left the ‘past as reality’ in tact as a problem for History to probe and dispute.
The Principle of Indeterminacy formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 relating to subatomic particles, such as an electron, proposed that “the more precisely the position is determined, less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa”. Though both position and velocity are attributes of a particle, their simultaneous determination with accuracy was shown to be impossible. A basic assumption of physics since Newton has been that a ‘real world’ existed independently of us, the attributes of which could be determined accurately with the right tools. Heisenberg now argued that the orbit of a subatomic particle, the “path”, did not exist in nature unless and until we observe it. This seemingly simple formula, also known as the Uncertainty Principle, had profound implications for such fundamental notions as causality and substantivity, immediately in Theoretical Physics and eventually in far-flung disciplines like History.
The notion of simple causality in nature, that every determinate cause is followed by the resulting effect, meant in “classical physics” that the future motion of a particle could be predicted or "determined" accurately from a knowledge of its present position and momentum and all of the forces acting upon it. The Uncertainty Principle denied this because one cannot know precisely both the position and the momentum of a particle at a given instant, and so, its future cannot be determined. One can, therefore, suggest only a range of possibilities for the future motion of a particle and not calculate the precise future motion. This shattered the very foundation of Newtonian positivism.
In the course of examining the development of philosophical ideas since Descartes in his book Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg explained the unsuitability of Cartesian “metaphysical realism” and Newton’s “dogmatic realism” to explain the ‘res extensa’, the external world. About ‘practical realism’, in contrast, he said it “has always been and always will be an essential part of natural science”. Explaining ‘objectivation’ of a statement as the assumption that its content does not depend on the conditions under which it can be verified’, he pointed out that “the largest part of our experience in daily life consists of such statements” that are unverifiable. He also argued that “the law of causality”, which we know has been the mainstay of historical determinism of every brand and shade, “is ‘a priori’ and is not derived from experience”.6 Simply put, one can make statements about the Past that are causally connected and logically sound, but still meaningless.
Applied to History,7 this meant that its basic assumption of a cause – effect continuum, call it dialectics or dynamics or evolution or whatever, which was supposed to connect the past with the future through the present and give history content and continuity at the same time, was invalid; and that the ‘realism’ the historians assumed could make every statement about the material world ‘objectivated’, which had been the credo of philosophers like Hippolyte Taine and Karl Marx, was ‘dogmatic’.
Though the methodology of natural sciences as applied to History had given it initially a terrific boost, in the long run it proved to be catastrophic. It gave rigour to the methodology of History, but now, under the siege of the New Science, the understanding of the subject appeared to become chaotic. In course of time, every question relating to History began to produce startlingly contradictory answers. Even the most basic assumptions of yore, such as that History dealt with the Past, that the Past was beyond manipulations, and that through diligent research one could discover the ‘true Past’, ceased to be basic any more. A number of inconvenient questions were now raised and conflicting answers given.
If History was to be concerned about the past, why should historians indulge in predictions? If the past was beyond manipulation, why should there be a controversy as to whether History is ‘construction’ or ‘reconstruction’?8 If correct methodology will lead to ‘true’ History, why should there be different ‘interpretations’ of the past? When the whole universe was being experienced and explained ‘relatively’, how could history alone be objective and absolute? A rigid application of the method of natural sciences as the only norm for ‘discovering’ historical truths was thus found to be self-annihilatory.
The search for a unified methodology for every branch of knowledge was thus laid to rest once and for all. History was forced to reconsider its dogma, which led, on the one hand, to the parting of ways of natural sciences and ‘human sciences’, and, on the other, to the realization that nothing about its nature was settled yet. The search for the ‘true’ nature of History was started all over again. However, the New Science left the ‘past as reality’ in tact as a problem for History to probe and dispute.
Of the various theories of History that tried to fill the space thus thrown open, pragmatic relativism appeared to hold the ground for some time; but for some time only. Its best-known exponent was R.G.Collingwood
Deconstruction.
Collingwood, who shifted historian’s concern from establishing facts as irrevocable truths to offering interpretations, was actually continuing the line of positive subjectivism that avoided the extreme of solipsism and was manifest in the philosophy of Croce. This approach appeared to have reached its logical culmination in Carr’s What is History?9 which proposed to settle most of the knotty questions about history. But, this too was not to be. Even before Carr had delivered his G.M.Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge in 1961, the rumblings of an ominous assault on History were already audible.
In this second stage, which was more devastating compared to the previous one, the two most basic axioms of History were questioned: the assumption of the past as a referent and the use of the narrative as a tool for ‘recovering and representing’ truth. This onslaught, incidentally, began not within History or against History. Investigations by Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and others into the problem of human existence, and by Ludwig Wittgenstein and others into the nature of linguistic meaning as a function of the uses to which expressions are put was made history-specific by Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others through their philosophy of ‘Deconstruction’ in the sixties of the last century.10
If the earlier attempts at fine honing the methodology of History were made for History, this time it was against History. It was plain destruction, though was condescendingly called ‘Deconstruction’, a term that was first used in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by a cousin of Herman Goring in the early thirties of the last century. Its high priest, Jacques Derrida, was not a historian but a philosopher of language; and none of the new questions raised by Deconstruction was from within history or directly about History but about the nature of language, knowledge, and ‘reality’. In general, Deconstruction is a philosophy of meaning; of the ways writers, texts and readers construct meaning. History, being a form of literature, would thus be in the firing line of the Deconstructionists whenever they chose.
Earlier, Heidegger had spoken about "the end of philosophy" by which he had meant the end of philosophy that was rooted in metaphysics, meaning thereby also the ‘end of history’ as perceived in the philosophic tradition. Derrida now enlarged on it, sometimes endorsing and sometimes rejecting the existentialist – phenomenologist positions. While doing so, Derrida also asked as to what would there be to say after the end of philosophy. Heidegger had used the word ‘destruktion’ to mean the history of the inquiry into history, which invariably would lead to an admission that there was nothing other than the present to discover and explain. Derrida mercifully did not deny history, but denied unmediated knowledge of reality.
The direct effect of all this was the demolition of almost everything that was sacrosanct to conventional history. By questioning the very concept of a ‘past’ existing independent of the historian’s imagining and mediation, the Deconstructionists made out that arguing about the truth of the past, the referent, was like arguing about the existence of god; what we really do have are only the various representations of the past, just like the various manifestations of our belief in god. In that case, historical writings, as texts, would be real, but not the past that is written about. More disconcerting was their questioning of a fixed meaning for the text. What good is there then in producing an account of the past if the very text thus produced is only a tentative construct that conveys different meanings at different readings?
There are so many more levels to this tentativeness in the deconstructionist conception of reality that the referent historians profess to discover will recede further and further into the realm of the unknowable, making the whole exercise farcical. History as a text is thus to be seen as just a form of literature, and as such, like music, drama or poetry, never meant to be true to anything that ever happened. Its interest lies in the present and for the present, having nothing to do with any ‘actuality’ of the past. The sum total effect of all this was that History could never be the same after the deconstructionist discourses of Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida, to mention only a few. A world neatly arranged in a rigid subject-object relationship/dichotomy that had already been given a dizzying spin by Quantum Mechanics and Indeterminacy Principle earlier was now literally blown off its axis.
In retrospect, one might agree that the deconstructionists have done their demolition job extremely well, but left the debris scattered. They did not provide any blueprint for an alternative, for they were not concerned about History as such; they were marauders from mainly literature and philosophy. But the shock treatment they gave History was so traumatic that serious historical writing will never again be as complacent as it was before, so much so that attempts are being made, among others, to reconcile the deconstructionist position with conventional historical practice.11 For example, Alun Munslow recently suggested that History could be freed from the burden of discovering the past as such, and instead, it could begin to understand the past through the ‘representations of the past’ in the form of narratives that may serve as a ‘textual model for the past’.12 This was what Ambrose Bierce had done to the Cartesian dictum: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum!
The End of History?
This takes us to the last of the three influences, which visited History about a decade ago, in the summer of 1989, in the form of a barely fifteen page essay, ‘The End of History?’.13 In that Fukuyama wrote:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing
of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as
such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. (Para 5.)
He said he was convinced after watching the “flow of events over the past decade or so” that “something very fundamental” had happened in world history. He saw in it not ‘the end of ideology’ or the ‘convergence between capitalism and socialism’ but an ultimate ”unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism”. (Para 1.) He followed it up in 1992 with a book on the same theme, The End of History and the Last Man,14 in which he clarified that his use of the word ‘history’ was not in the conventional sense of “occurrence of events” but as a “single, coherent, evolutionary process … taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times”.15 Then followed a torrent of essays, books, interviews and speeches, which engaged history less and less and social engineering more and more.16
As to his debut essay: when it appeared first, coincidentally in the year the Berlin Wall was brought down, it did make a big splash. Undoubtedly it was a clever piece of sophistry. Quite a few historians and others, famous and not so famous, reacted vociferously to it, and Fukuyama became a minor celebrity overnight.17 A thesis about history with the trappings of a profound theory, claiming to reject Marx and resurrect the ‘real’ Hegel, was appearing after a long philosophical drought overshadowed by deconstructive negativism.
This was but only a superficial reason for the excitement it generated. There was a convergence of a number of momentous happenings in the closing years of the eighties of the 20th century, like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the emergence of the US as the lone super power and the success of market economy and its endorsement even by Communist countries like China. To the question these events threw up, ‘What next?’, Fukuyama was offering an answer: The world was entering its final state of political equilibrium; no more catalysts of change, no more cataclysms for History to engage itself with; thanks to liberal democracy, History would die soon if not already dead!
There could have been other reasons as well, like the millennial title of the essay that suited the anxieties of the West about the coming millennium, and the fear of the apocalypse concealed in usages in the text, such as ”end of progress”, “endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “final form of human government”.
But what provoked the historians particularly could have been something else. By design or by accident, Fukuyama had touched a raw nerve in the historian’s psyche by posing the question: If History was going to be redundant, what use continuing as its votaries? He also stoked once again the popular disdain, courtesy the Henry Fords, that history was nothing but bunkum. The dilemma the historians found themselves in was really acute. Praising the thesis would discredit their whole tribe, while condemning it would ring hollow without sound counter-arguments. Even those who declared that they ‘did not believe a word of it’ felt like salvaging their own relevance by praising Fukuyama as a ‘brilliant’ theorist!18.
Forget the incongruity of the double speak for the time being. Forget also the soundness or otherwise of Fukuyama’s arguments. Was he writing ‘The End of History?’ as an esoteric exercise in historical prophesying? One can very well guess that it was not. At the time of writing it, he was working in the Department of Political Science of the RAND Corporation. RAND is an American ‘think tank’ set up in 1945 to offer research and analysis to the US military. It wields immense influence on the US government and has very high stakes in all its policies, domestic as well as foreign. Coming from a RAND employee connected with the State Department’s policy planning, ‘The End of History?’ could not have been innocent. It was, in fact, a thanksgiving for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a celebration of “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea” of liberal democracy, and a caveat camouflaged as philosophy for a permanent, US centered, unipolar, world order. His arguments, as can be seen from the contradictions and ambivalences in his seminal thesis, and more of contradictions and ambivalences and also revisions in his later writings, were inspired by considerations that were clearly ahistorical.
The original arguments of Fukuyama for the ‘end of history’ prognostication, in a nutshell, were the following:
1. Freedom is the goal of human existence.
2. Mankind has already tried all conceivable socio-political systems from monarchy to totalitarianism, and all except liberal democracy has been found wanting as an efficient vehicle for freedom.
3. The ideal of liberal democracy has triumphed over all conceivable challenges including fascism and communism, and is already functioning successfully in western democracies, especially the US.
4. Since the ideal governs the material world, search for a higher system ends here, for, liberal democracy is the highest of them all.
5. This end of the search is not the ‘end of ideology’ but a fulfillment of the search for the ideal.
6. Hereafter, there will be “neither art, nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history” and only a boring repetition of events that will not call forth “daring, courage, imagination and idealism” but only “economic calculation”.
7. History, thus starved of its usual grist, will die a natural death.
In 1989, when he published his seminal article, he had appeared convinced about the course history had taken as the only course it could have taken, leading inevitably towards liberal democracy.
In 1992, in The End of History and the Last Man, which was an enlargement of the earlier article, he claimed that he was returning to a very old question, namely, “Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy?” The answer was again a confident “yes”, but about the “end” as well as the “last man” he newly introduced in the book, he was less certain.19
This is his thesis in a nutshell:
There is such a thing as a “Universal History of mankind”, which had been evolving through the ages under the dynamics of dialectics. The dialectics was more of the Hegelian kind than of the Marxian. The evolution was neither direction-less nor open-ended. “Modern natural science” as a “regulator mechanism” is giving it both direction and cumulative progress. This mechanism has recently unleashed on a global scale a new “economic modernization”. Through “global markets” and a “universal consumer culture”, it is making all those countries that have come under its influence “increasingly resemble one another.”
But, “man is not simply an economic animal”; he craves “recognition”. A society characterized by “universal and reciprocal recognition” alone, among human social institutions, “is better able to satisfy this longing”. “Recognition” is not just about the status of wealth; it “ultimately arises out of thymos, the part of the soul that demands recognition”, and involves “culture, religion, work, nationalism, and war.” These, and the pride they generate, are irrational; but, for “democracy to work, citizens need to develop an irrational pride in their own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville called the ‘art of associating,’, which rests on prideful attachment to small communities.” In international relations, it might replace the “irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal”, and dissuade States from waging wars. That will herald the ‘end of history’ and the emergence of the “last man”.
In the fifth and final part of the book, in the light of the writings of Alexander Kojeve (“Hegel’s great interpreter”) and Friedrich Nietzsche, he examines the prospects of the “last men” in a world after the “end of history” - whether the dehumanized ‘last men’ would return to the state of the “bestial” ‘first men’.20
In the course of the exposition of this thesis, he speaks also about the self-evident truths of ‘Nature and Nature’s laws’, about freedom as the life-breath of human existence and liberal democracy as its most efficient guarantor, and about the US as the model repository and champion of liberal democracy.
Like his faith in the self-evident truths about ‘Nature and Nature’s Laws’, his faith in ‘freedom as the life-breath of human existence, and liberal democracy as its most efficient guarantor’ are purely private and are better left alone. The US as the model repository and champion of liberal democracy too is a matter of prejudice better left alone. But his view that ‘it is possible to speak of historical progress only if one knows where mankind is going’ is patently wrong on both the counts of progress in history and progress of History. ‘Progress towards’ is a hope; ‘progress from’ alone is the fact. Fixing a goal for future progress is arbitrary and outside History’s programme. The measure of progress is not in the unknown future with which History has little to do, but with the knowable past, however problematic that would be. Just as Fukuyama fixed capriciously an end for human progress, he fixed an end for History also.21
What Fukuyama has said about Hegel as a seer needing a new reading, Marx as an unsavory contrast for his failed prophecy of a communist utopia, and Nietzsche and his ‘accurate’ anticipation of the ‘post-history man’ in his depiction of the “last man”, “the most despicable man”, unable even to “despise himself”,22 are not directly connected with his preconception about the end of History. But, his proclivity, as in the case of the ‘Whig historian’ about whom Butterfield had warned, to draw a singular line of causation to produce a scheme of universal history converging in the present, whether it be through dialectics or through evolution, is a dogma one should be wary of. The danger is in his self-complacent claim that “all of the really big questions have already been answered” in the unfolding of the universal scheme. The fact is that he is as much a victim of the strangle hold of monistic reductions as he is its perpetrator.
One thing good about Fukuyama was that he kept on writing prolifically to elaborate his thesis, and kept on revising and ‘correcting’ himself until he began to doubt and reject his own original thesis.23 Within a dozen years after the first prophecy, he made another about a “recommencement of history” occasioned by biotechnological revolution or genetic engineering. In ‘Second Thoughts: The Last Man in a Bottle’, (National Interest, Summer 1999) he scripted his antithesis thus:
The open-ended character of modern natural science suggests that within the next couple of generations we will have knowledge and technologies that will allow us to accomplish what social engineers of the past failed to do. At that point, we will have definitively finished human History because we will have abolished human beings as such. And then, a new, posthuman history will begin.
If there cannot be an end of science, how can there be an end of History? If man as a species is going to evolve further in all unknown ways, how can one predict what he will do then?
And in 2002, he finally admitted that conceiving history the way he had done earlier was as “simply an intellectual tool”, that evidence of a purposeful progression of history towards liberal democracy was “provisionally inconclusive”, and that the biotechnological manipulation of human beings may well "move us into a 'posthuman' stage of history" by changing human nature in ways that erode the foundations of the putative convergent political order. (Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York).
So far so good. The only thing he really needed was a sufficiently long rope to hang himself, which he did honestly!24
Future of History.
Though it was not his intention, Fukuyama’s fulminations, did a world of good to History. It shook History out of its deconstruction-induced grogginess and resurrected interest in a conventional, commonsense-based approach; and, more significantly, it led to a reassurance about the future of History.
To sum up: There is no need to be apologetic about History not being as ‘precise’ as Physics, or about what History is not able to prove conclusively. Neither is there any need to define History universally before setting out on a search to know what happened in the past so long as all agree that there was a past. If History is just another form of literature, what is the difference between History and romance? Between, say, Hobsbawm, a reflective and articulate historian, and Harry Potter, a dumb creature of fantasy? Unlike fiction, History has one inalienable responsibility: that of searching for establishable facts, or referents, as distinct from fiction. Results may not be uniform or comprehensive, but the purpose is clear and singular. The distinction between “historical statements based on evidence and subject to evidence and those which are not”, as Hobsbawm has pointed out, is central to the difference between History and fiction.
The future of History is assured, not in adding one more definition but in practicing it. While the philosophers are meandering endlessly through the imponderables, it is demonstrated time and again that history can be written engagingly, following just the instinct.
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