Essays on the historiographic practices of famous 19th- and early 20th-century historians, particularly Arnold Toynbee, whom Geyl disparages for introducing systems which effaces facts and events.
• Toynbee, asserting ‘civilizations’ not nation-states are the atomic unit of history and that climates produce innovation through challenge of necessity, habitually treats ‘mental convenience as objective fact’. His facts are but interpretations which can be seen in other ways. He is not a historian but a Christian prophet hoping to stem the modern West’s decline. The problem is not only looking for ‘laws’ but also treating eras by standards foreign to them (historicism); whereas the value of history is entering into each period on its own terms, to enlarge one’s own frames of understanding.
• Ranke’s firm insistence on removing the historian’s personal views is itself the imposition of a personal view. In disdaining such retrospective criticism as the left favors, the stance in inherently conservative, yielding each generation’s ‘immediacy to God’. Though not quietist, it presumes the practitioner’s taking events as fixed. Sometimes this is too accepting, too open-minded.
• Macaulay, the Whiggish progressive and critic, demonstrates more personal intellect than the moral imagination necessary to connect with the past.
• In Carlyle, not ideas but people are the indicators of events in trend; the ‘eternal truth’ appears in great personalities. He represents the puzzle of disavowing technocratic expertise without descending into cultural mayhem. Yet however beholden to power, he roused concern for 19th-century industrial blight more than anyone else.
• Michelet overlooked the totality of events in service of the French Revolution’s mythology, most notably Rousseau’s general will in action. Nothing is less historical than associating the struggle between good and evil with the course of events. French historians disavow Talleyrand for distinguishing between statist (i.e., Napoleonic) France and the conscience of a statesman: in fact he represents a flawed but individual pursuit of right and justice. Not only foreigners should be reminded to resist the dictator.
• America proved its claim itself to Western heritage by fighting a civil war to eradicate slavery. There was no majority for war yet it came because the sides would not be reconciled. Lincoln’s holding the abolitionists at arm’s length is comparable to William the Silent’s seeking to establish the Netherlands nation-state not Protestant religion. The essay dwells more on (lack of) inevitability in history (see below).
• Not Dutch religious attitudes but riverine geography held off Habsburg Spain.
• Subordinating facts and one’s imagination to system (ideology) is unforgiveable. Quoth Maitland: national spirit is the historian’s unacceptable deus ex machina.
• The historian’s entire mind, including the present, inevitably surfaces in his work. He does not accept inevitability; often the minority prompts the course of events. Whereas Hegel, the Romantics, and advocates of philosophy of history follow a metaphysical logic. Such determinism, when promoted by the professional historian, stems from the practitioner’s mind, said Berlin.