Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T06:55:13.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Towards a Critical Historiography: Recent Work in Philosophy of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Stephen Bann
Stephen Bann
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A British historian might be excused for looking slightly askance at any collection of recent books relating to the philosophy of history. This is because we have been told, several times over and by distinguished members of the profession, that such speculative and analytic activity has little, if anything, to do with the actual business of historiography. One of the most forthright warnings was delivered on the very first page of Professor G. R. Elton's The Practice of History (1967), when we were advised that: ‘Every new number of History and Theory is liable to contain yet another article struggling to give history a philosophic base, and some of them are interesting. But they do not, I fear, advance the writing of history’. For Elton, therefore, there could be little point in granting his colleague in another discipline the right to assess the cognitive claims of historiography. The historian himself, and he alone, was qualified to determine, for all practical purposes, the aims and applications of historical method. It was left to the late Arnold Toynbee to diagnose (in Toynbee on Toynbee, 1974) the dangers in this protectionist approach. He claimed that Elton was ‘trying deliberately to create a closed circuit of “professional” historians’ which was, in his opinion, ‘fatal to any form of study’. But of course Toynbee's own lack of standing within the historical profession could be put forward as a telling index of the dangers of transgressing the barriers between history and philosophy.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 56 , Issue 217 , July 1981 , pp. 365 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 ‘Le discours de 1'histoire’, by Barthes, Roland: first published in Social Science Information (Paris, 1967); English translation in Rhetoric and History, Comparative Criticism yearbook, Shaffer, Elinor (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in autumn 1981)Google Scholar.

2 The Genesis of Secrecy—On the Interpretation of Narrative, by Kermode, Frank (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

3 The Historian at Work, Cannon, John (ed.) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 The Writing of History—Literary Formand Historical Understanding, Canary, Robert H. and Kozicki, Henry (eds) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

5 Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, by White, Hayden (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 Philosophy of History and Action, Yovel, Yirmiahu (ed.) (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978)Google Scholar.

7 The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, by Mandelbaum, Maurice (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, paperback edition, 1979)Google Scholar.

8 The Dialectic of Action: A Philosophical Interpretation of History and the Humanities by Olafson, Frederick A. (University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

9 Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, by Plantinga, Theodore (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

10 Carnival—A People's Uprising at Romans 1579–1580, by Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, trans. by Reeney, Mary (London: Scolar Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

11 The Territory of the Historian, by Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, trans. by Ben, and Reynolds, Siàan (London: Harvester Press, and University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

12 Comment on écrit I'histoire, suivi de Foucault revolutionne I'histoire, by Veyne, Paul (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978)Google Scholar.