Idea of History

In many ways contemporary ideas of history have been re-shaped and redirected in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns taken by historical investigation and interpretation in the past century. With the decline of Marxist ideology and the rise of an anthropological model, historians have shifted from social to cultural matters, from the search for underlying causes to the human condition over time. Cultural history rejects the reductionism of economic and political history, gives up the "noble dream" of objectivity, the privileging of particular causes, recognizes the fundamental role of imagination in historical reconstruction, and, no longer aspiring to rigorous explanation, turns instead to what Clifford Geertz and Charles Taylor have called "interpretive social science." For cultural historians, following the lead of anthropology, nothing human was alien to their inquiries, so that their aim indeed became, in the words of Fernand Braudel, "the history of everything." Life around the clock, around the globe, from cradle to grave, and including the secrets of private life and sexuality: these have been the horizons of what has been trumpeted as the "new cultural history"; and the postmodern rejection of "grand narratives" has reinforced this move toward microhistory, multiple points of view, and loss of historiographical focus.

Yet the contemporary idea of history has in other ways lowered its sights, especially by shifting from a natural science to a linguistic model and so from a concern with primary sources to literary criticism of secondary, published and usually classic, narratives of key texts and questions of historiography. In a sense this shift, most conspicuously exemplified in the work of Hayden White and his followers, represents a return to the ancient rhetorical tradition of historical writing (and reading). To read history out of a text or to read history as a text: in either case we are impelled to shift from history as past reality (res gestae) to history as a phenomenon of literature (rerum gestae narratio) —from context to text. According to this shift of perspective, illustrated by the "New Historicism" of recent vintage, history is not a bygone process to be explained but a field of written accounts whose meaning can only be represented through the interpretation of traces, mainly linguistic traces. History is not rational but commemorative and imaginative; and there is no Archimedean point from which to view, still less to move, humanity in its passage. We may pose questions, but we cannot link cause and effect in any rigorous way. We may tell many stories, true as well as probable, about the past; but we cannot tell the story, the whole truth, the metanarrative, as scientific, philosophical, and theological historians used to do and, in some quarters, are still doing. This is the critical perspective from which the idea of history has encountered various deconstructionist, poststructuralist, and postmodernist views of the human sciences that have changed the way many historians write if not the way they think.

Such are some of the conditions of the modern idea, or ideas, of history. As Michael Oakeshott long ago and Croce longer ago argued, history is not a thing of the past; and as the authors of the old artes historicae also taught, writing and reading history is a thing of the present. So are the remnants and relics of the past on which historical interpretation is based and the "contexts" that historians try to reconstruct from their own standpoints. The result is to qualify some of the key elements of our received ideas of history. There can be no single account of an essentialized "past" but only multiple stories that select, arrange, and interpret surviving records, testimony, and artifacts from particular points of view; nor can there be "facts" outside of human interpretations of its remains and uncertain human memory—no objects outside a human subject. A philosopher has written that we cannot speak the truth because "words cannot mimic the way the world is." How much less can historians speak the truth of the way the world was—and its languages were ? History cannot "speak" except through human ventriloquism, and (to invoke Jean-François Lyotard's post-modernist criticism) there can be no "metanarrative" that captures the "nature and destiny of man." Such metanarratives we have, of course—they have founded all sorts of ideologies and utopias—but as frameworks for the story of humanity they all sooner or later come to grief. The idea of history has in many ways become globalized. Yet it remains a human—time-and culture-bound—creation, whose technologically enhanced future is as uncertain as its past has been controversial and irregular; and its history will continue to be rewritten.