This paper explores explanatory practices of macro-historical social science in light of philosophical stances on determinism versus indeterminism. Analysis of determinism and its implications show its compatibility with practices emphasizing causal complexity, contingency, and choice. It can, moreover, clarify and contain these practices in ways that extend the priority traditionally given to causal explanation by macro-historical social scientists. Analysis of indeterminism shows, by contrast, that each of its major varieties challenge macro-historical explanatory practices. To embrace indeterminism and follow through its (...) implications would, in effect, terminate the tradition of macro-historical inquiry as pursued by American sociologists and political scientists. (shrink)

Many believe that the Marxist philosophy of history entails that man is not free in a sense in which it seems obvious that he is. In particular it is held to be (1) materialistic, (2) holistic, (3) economistic, and (4) fatalistic. It is claimed, in short, that since the Marxist philosophy of history has these features, man is not capable of shaping his own (social) destiny if it is true. I show for each of these features either that it does (...) not entail what it is believed to entail or that it is not correctly attributed to the Marxist philosophy of history. (shrink)

Abstract If we define tradition too hastily we leave to one side the question of what the relevance of tradition is for us . Here the concept of tradition is opened up by considering the different views of it taken by Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre. We see that each has put tradition into a fully developed picture of what our predicament is in modernity; and that each has differed in their assessment of what our relation to tradition (...) is or should be. Arendt sees tradition as something which no longer conditions action, Oakeshott sees tradition as something which conditions all action, and MacIntyre sees tradition as something which should condition right action. In each case, the view of tradition is clearly one element in an attempt to see how the most important constituent elements of human existence - variously called the human condition, human conduct, or human virtue - should be understood in a modernity which is ours because it has put the traditional concept of tradition into question. (shrink)

Historicism -- Time -- Interpretation -- Representation -- Reference -- Truth -- Meaning -- Presence -- Experience (I) -- Experience (II) -- Subjectivity -- Politics.

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, (...) truth, and knowledge. These experiences of rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes (the possibility of) historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth. (shrink)

What is history? From Thucydides to Toynbee historians and nonhistorians alike have wondered how to answer this question. A New Philosophy of History reflects on developments over the last two decades in historical writing, not least the renewed interest in the status of narrative itself and the presence of the authorial "voice." Subjects include the problems of Grand Narrative, multiple voices and the personal presence of the historian in his text, the ambitions of the French Annales school and the so-called (...) "Grand Chronicler," and the relevance of non-literary models--museum presentations and picturings--regarding historical discourse. The range of approaches found in A New Philosophy of History ensures that this book will establish itself as required reading not only for historians, but for everyone interested in literary theory, philosophy, or cultural studies. This volume presents essays by Hans Kellner, Nancy F. Partner, Richard T. Vann, Arthur C. Danto, Linda Orr, Philippe Carrard, Ann Rigney, Allan Megill, Robert Berkhofer, Stephen Bann, and Frank Ankersmit. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the historical text as a whole. It does so by conceiving of the historical text as representation - in the way the we may say of a photo or a painting that it represents the person depicted on it. It is argued that representation cannot be properly understood by modelling it on true description. So all the central questions asked since the days of Frege with regard to how the true statement relates to the world must (...) be asked anew, if we wish to understand how a historical representation relates to what it is about. Three claims are made. In the first place, representation is not a two-place but a three-place operator: apart from a representation (say, a book on Napoleon) and what the representation represents (Napoleon himself), a representation also indicates an aspect of represented reality (an aspect of Napoleon). The second claim is that this notion of the aspect is crucial for a proper understanding of (historical) representation. Thirdly, it is argued that traditional theories of reference cannot account for the relationship between a representation and the aspect indicated by it. (shrink)

Rankean historicism is ordinarily seen nowadays as an outdated nineteenth century fashion and that we could not possibly tolerate in our modern intellectual homes. In opposition to this common wisdom I argue that historicism - i.e. the claim that the nature of a thing is to be found in is history - is no less true for all writing of history as it was in the days of Ranke. So Ranke was right, after all. I shall argue my untimely thesis (...) by focusing on the historian's language and by insisting that all the claims made by historicists such as Ranke make eminently sense if read as claim not about objects having existed in the past itself but about the language used by historians in their attempt to account for the past. (shrink)

Unlike physics and chemistry, the behavioral sciences are historical sciences that explain the fuzzy complexity of social life through historical narratives. Unifying the behavioral sciences through evolutionary game theory would require a nested hierarchy of three kinds of historical narratives: natural history, cultural history, and biographical history. (Published Online April 27 2007).

The twelve essays in this book demonstrate the importance of bringing history back into historical materialism.

The historicist approach is rarely challenged by art historians, who draw a clear distinction between art history and the present-centred pursuit of art criticism. The notion of the 'period eye' offers a relevant methodology. Bearing this in mind, I examine the nineteenth-century phase in the development of history painting, when artists started to take trouble over the accuracy of historical detail, instead of repeating conventions for portraying classical and biblical subjects. This created an unprecedented situation at the Paris Salon, where (...) such representations of history could be experienced as a collective 'dream-work', in Freud's sense. In France, this new pictorial language dates back to the aftermath of the Revolution, and the activities of the 'Lyon School'. Two artists, Richard and Révoil, were its leading proponents. However their initial closeness has obscured the differences in their approach to the past. Substituting for Freud's 'condensation' and 'displacement' the concepts of 'Resurrection' and 'Restoration', I analyse the pictorial language of the two painters, taking two works as examples. The conclusion is that Révoil, also a collector, was a precursor of the historical museum, which convinces through accumulating objects. Richard, however, employs technical and rhetorical devices to evoke empathetic reactions, and anticipates the illusionism of cinema. (shrink)

Considers what aspiring and mature historians need to know about the discipline of history in the United States today.

In spite (or because) of the infinity of (the) voice, of the boundless mystery it carries and exhales, of its disembodied traversing and joining, sayings follow barely traced courses. They travel along fragile lines of memory, often discontinuous bridges, transpositions into notational forms. They travel alone, exposed to corruption, consuming friction, repetition - their beginning and final destination often lost to those who listen to them and send them past. In spite of the power of memory and its arts, there (...) are sayings and stories handed down to us in fragments, like decapitated Níke and disfigured Diónysos. There are poems reaching us, race of diggers and preservers, through somebody else's reminiscence, recovery, or loving quotation. In turn, our receiving and sending (stretching) forth, our being thus traversed, shares something with the destiny of these sayings and sculpted deities - being sent, crossing and (un)covering distances, in the fragmented continuity of dialogues, or what remains of them. The present essay is devoted to a meditation on the question of temporality and history in its epistemologico-metaphysical implications. It is developed mainly by reference to Aristotle, after Heidegger. (shrink)

The historical background -- Epicycle and Telos : Hegel on history -- Schelling and the time(s) of the Weltalter -- Hölderlin and history : philosophy and tragedy -- Hyperion and history.

This is the first full study in English of the German historicist tradition.

For those familiar with the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, it might at first seem unwise to pursue a Deleuze and Guattarian philosophy of history. After all, is it not Deleuze who, in an interview with Antonio Negri, argues that ‘What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond the scope of history'? (Deleuze 1995: 170). And more damningly, Deleuze adds, ‘History isn’t experimental, it's just the set of (...) more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history' (Deleuze 1995: 170). History, in short, is a starting point for experimental work, but it is precisely history ‘that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new’ (1995: 171). Similarly in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘History is made by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 295). In the very first line of his book, Lampert recognizes the possible conclusion these citations might lead one to, namely, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming seems at times opposed to the very idea of historical succession' (1); and yet, as Lampert adeptly demonstrates, it would be a mistake to conclude that opposing history to ‘create something new’, ‘something beyond history’, necessarily entails being hostile to history, to the ‘idea of historical succession’, and thus to a philosophy of history. (shrink)

Translator's note -- Foreword by Boris Jakim -- On the essence of the historical : the meaning of tradition -- On the nature of the historical : the metaphysical and the historical -- Of celestial history : god and man -- Of celestial history : time and eternity -- The destiny of the Jews -- Christianity and history -- The Renaissance and humanism -- The end of the Renaissance and the crisis of humanism : the advent of the machine -- (...) The end of the Renaissance and the crisis of humanism : the disintegration of the human image -- Spiritual development and the eschatological problem -- The doctrine of progress and the goal of history -- Epilogue: the will to life and the will to culture. (shrink)

Argues for an evolutionary mechanism to underpin the functional explanations at the center of Karl Marx's theory of history.

Abstract This paper defends a historicist approach to the history of ideas. A historicist ontology implies that texts have meaning only for specific people, whether these be individual authors, particular readers, or the intersubjective beliefs of social groups. Texts do not have intrinsic meanings in themselves.

This paper offers a theory of genealogy, explaining its rise in the nineteenth century, its epistemic commitments, its nature as critique, and its place in the work of Nietzsche and Foucault. The crux of the theory is recognition of genealogy as an expression of a radical historicism, rejecting both appeals to transcendental truths and principles of unity or progress in history, and embracing nominalism, contingency, and contestability. In this view, genealogies are committed to the truth of radical historicism and, perhaps (...) more provisionally, the truth of their own empirical content. Similarly, genealogies operate as denaturalizing critiques of ideas and practices that hide the contingency of human life behind formal ahistorical or developmental perspectives. (shrink)

The classic national history narrates the formation and progress of a nation-state as a reflection of principles such as a national character, liberty, progress, and statehood. Today there appears to be a growing nostalgia for them, and with it for the role that history once played in the life of the nation. This paper argues that such nostalgia is justified insofar as it expresses skepticism about the philosophical assumptions of much social science history. In doing so, it defends the use (...) of concepts such as narrative and tradition. Yet this paper argues that such nostalgia is not justified insofar as it sides with an analysis of these concepts in terms of given principles of nationhood and statehood. Rather, the paper argues for a shift from developmental historicism to radical historicism. Radical historicism would treat traditions as pragmatically constructed and narratives as contingent. It would thus lead to denaturalizing accounts of the nations as dispersed, discontinuous, and disrupted, and arguably to histories of networks of peoples rather than nations. (shrink)

Strauss championed a philosophy of history according to which philosophers characteristically hide their actual beliefs when writing about ethics and politics. This paper begins by suggesting that an esoteric philosophy of history encourages a set of specific biases when writing histories of philosophy. Proponents of esotericism are liable to be far too ready to conclude that philosophers intended to hide their beliefs; they are likely to be insufficiently attuned to the varied contexts in which philosophers write; and they are likely (...) to be too ready to assimilate the beliefs of philosophers to a norm. Thereafter the paper considers the presence of these biases in Strauss's account of modernity. Strauss allows for waves of modernity but he defines these waves as part of a single, monolithic project that is defined in contrast to the esoteric character of ancient philosophy and that leads inexorably to nihilism. Once we correct for the biases mentioned above, however, modernity appears as a series of projects located in specific contexts and confronting particular dilemmas. Again, where Strauss presents our own era as one of crisis, this revised account of modernity suggests that we merely confront the more local issue of how to forge a community out of self-governing individuals. (shrink)