History

24. Kaiser, A Life in History (23 November 2023)

by kurto

Academic historians, having abandoned researching statesmanship and economic development for the Foucauldian sketching of marginalized groups, have torpedoed the discipline’s relevance to government and society. University professors can no longer synthesize or teach, but only present their abstruse pursuits. Although the trade holds too many important historical topics have been exhausted, one can inevitably discover new materials and so revised perspective (somewhat along the lines of Banner’s Ever-changing Past, albeit the latter seems more favorably inclined to sociocultural avenues). Through his own career, the author makes a persuasive case but routinely betrays conceit of unrecognized brilliance. A New Deal-Great Society liberal, he sees modern topics such as the Vietnam War in predictable terms.

Also of interest:
• The study of imperialism should entail the economic basis of hegemony, the administration of conquered territory, sources of resistance, military and naval factors, and the role of decision making process
• Camille Paglia (one of many with whom the author compares himself) first identified the cult of Foucault as reducing all events to relationships of power, indicated by language as interpreted by post facto critics.
• On his second appointment at Williams: ‘Political correctness was omnipresent, spread in a steady stream of emails to the whole campus from the dean’s office’ (p. 363) Also: ‘All
n— must die’ was revealed to him as a black student’s agit-prop by another student
• Training is how to do a task, education is how to think about the right tasks

4. Klibansky and Paton, ed., Philosophy and History (27 Feb 2020)

by kurto

A festschrift for Ernst Cassirer treating philosophy, history of philosophy and history of ideas, historiography, and related pursuits. Author names are given in underline:

    Alexander

: the permanent features of things appear at different times in different forms; it’s permissible to think of forever in terms of now so long as we consider essence not surface characteristics. Novelty is the essence of history, explanation is the work; determinism in history means asserting pre-arranged necessity instead of changes in form over time.

    Webb

: philosophy is different from history, science, etc. in declining to accept precepts; but it may settle on some and proceed from these. Consciousness, such as religious consciousness, is finite. Yet philosophy cannot ignore religious consciousness because of finitude: Athens cannot disprove Jerusalem.

    Gilson (one of the better essayists)

: there is no great scientific discovery dating to the Middle Ages. Science rose in opposition to medieval philosophy and theology. Save the Aristotelian Leibniz, all chose between science or scholasticism. But they are not irreconcilable: scholastic philosophy has only to become true to itself to reconcile with science.
Descartes converted ideas to mathematical models, bereft of discourse, representing reality itself. Scholastic ideals could not be reduced to expressible content; they are something other. His successor was Hobbes: the effects of Cartesian metaphysics spread to proto-sociology. And thence to political philosophy – servitude to all powerful state derived from liberties!
The antinomy of philosophy consists of 1) the irrationality of building the collective (the state) from irreducible individuals versus 2) man is nothing, humanity is everything. Aquinas and Duns Scotus held they are reconciled in the real: the antinomy is manmade. In the other words, the error is Cartesian reduction to science (mathematics), which decrees a priori thee real is the sum of the real.
Aristotle’s mistake was to biologize the inorganic; Descartes’ to mathematize physics, chemistry, biology, metaphysics, and moral theory. Every ‘nature’ requires a formal principle, but not every form is living. Then metaphysics is the science above natural sciences, and its problem of defining existence is superior. For this reason, Christianity cannot allow metaphysics to expire

    Groethuysen

: reflection on the self occurs in different forms: religion, art, philosophy.

    Gentile

: historical fact is not presupposed by history. ‘Ideas without facts are empty; philosophy which is not history is the value’s abstraction’. The truth of the past lies not in facts but in imaginative use of what happened (or was happening). Does this trend toward existentialism?

    Stebbing

: without time there is no causation; without causation there is no time. The possibility of causal order is the sole condition for a time sequence in nature

    Medicus

: the final problem of the Kantian system is the unity of object and subject, of nature and freedom, which is treated in

    Critique of Judgment

. How does it assert itself? ‘Intransferable uniqueness’ is one’s calling, according to Cassirer; an era has it too – but neither are usually well defined – more usually they are in a form of questions. The historian is the servant of a culture’s self-awareness, not in obsequious search of power but truth. ‘The longest view is always from the heights’. For Cassirer, the object of history is the fulfillment of humanity.

    Brehier

: the history of philosophy commenced in the 17th century from Cartesian thought, and circa 1930 needs reworking. Documentary evidence, standing in for tradition, stands in the way of understanding what happened. Historical truth does not involve truth of the thought in question

    Hoffman

: The Platonic idea is behind Augustine’s philosophy of History

    Levy-Bruhl

: Descartes attacked the authority of tradition because it could not be demonstrated by scientific method. History was lumped together with religion

    Saxl

: veritas filia temporis – truth reveals itself over time. Art struggles with abstract concepts such as truth. The scientific age settled the war between the ancients and moderns on the side of the moderns, which admitted no abstract truth.

    Wind

: there are several commonalities at the intersection of history and science. The information which a document reveals requires presupposition of understanding the contents themselves in the first place. The observer of events is an intruder, and the dividing line between observer and participant is difficult to fix. Until recently historians and scientist were cloistered; now their discoveries could be world-changing

    Pos

: Philosophy is never deductive like math. Knowledge is relative in the sense that it’s open to interpretation and permeated by ‘alien’ (unproven) concepts

    Gundolf

: the two predominant objectives of historiography are to preserve the past as it actually was (Ranke) and whether to interpret the past in light of a) providence or b) universal laws.The pattern recurs in German historiography: German practice springs from the philosophically minded Herder, and thence to Ranke

    Ortega y Gasset (another standout)

: the most decisive changes in humanity are those of belief.
Historical reason is more demanding than scientific reason, which does not understand what it’s saying, only that it can be proven true. Science’s loss of the ability to express truths is mortal to civilization. Reason, in modern times degraded to mean the play of ideas, was in Greece and the 16th century understood as being in contact with the order of the cosmos / providence. It was itself a faith.
German idealism represents the attempt to place man before nature, like positivism. Hegel in particular demonstrates the lack of intellectual responsibility, evidencing a bankrupt moral climate.
Philosophy since Kant has been a ‘second apprenticeship’, pursuit of discovering authentic reality. Thought has its own form and projects these onto the real: man cannot escape. We must de-intellectualize the real to be faithful to it. But: nature is a transitory interpretation of what man finds around him. He has no nature; but he has history. Only under the pressure of events (history) do we differentiate between what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be: we become compact, solid.

    Klibansky

: history can be described as a science inasmuch as philosophic precepts (e.g., Kantian regulative principle or Platonic sense of normative pattern from ideas) order its proceedings

10. Bostert, ed., Newhall and Williams College (14 June 2023)

by kurto

Collected letters of Richard Newhall, one of Williams College’s foremost history professors, a dean of the faculty, and wartime stand-in president. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, the assemblage demonstrates the views of a Harvard-trained, (medieval) Europeanist dedicated to teaching rather than research, whose characteristic approach was to expose ignorance so as to promote humility, to encourage self-discovery is the basis of real education. A World War I officer and casualty, he emphasized facts as evidence of decision making and outcomes – how leaders managed important affairs – while disfavoring documentary sources as tending toward abstract ideas which would mislead one from the heart of the matter. Decisions, like journalism and history, were always made with partial evidence. It was appropriate to give actors the benefit of the doubt, and more important for businessmen and lawyers to learn about what we know was done than to prepare for research degrees or to search for the absolute (a ‘mental disease’, according to a favored colleague). The teacher himself must be willing to be forgotten.
His influence on Hyde, Waite, Bahlman, and Bostert are evident. The latter’s narration is useful if sometimes repetitive, notably the summation that history and scholarship had moved over 1920-70 from understanding and explanation to post facto criticism and challenge, from the dispassionate to the ideological.
Well footnoted so as to identify contemporary academics and politicians, the book’s themes include comparison of military training to education (the former suppresses individualism, the latter cultivates it with a view toward citizenship); faculty debate over isolationism, college administration, curricular changes (e.g., instruction in classics, mandatory chapel); and sundry academic and political matters. A review should tell what the author attempted and whether he succeeded by his own standards, since it was unlikely the reviewer could match the scholar in the latter’s specialty. Newhall helped Bailyn transition from English to history by recommending his Harvard application ignore lack of undergraduate studies. Politically a Wilsonian who nonetheless believed political leaders knew more than journalists (and presumably bureaucrats?), he came to be a neoconservative avant la lettre.

‘History has no sides’

by kurto

On the opponents of Whiggish and, worse, philosophy of history:

History has no sides. That this has been easily missed by modern conservatives arises, I suspect, from the dearth of conservative historical consciousness. The bulk of modern conservative intellectual energy has been devoted to politics, economic policy, and political philosophy; there has been no corresponding conservative historical theory, much less a natural law theory of history. But there should, and must, be one. We will need it, too, because all the major movements of the last century into tyranny and intellectual vacuity have been built on theories, not of economics or politics, but of history. Not Webster, not G.F.W. Hegel, not Leopold von Ranke or Jacob Burckhardt, but Lincoln, James Madison, Trenchard and Gordon, Samuel Johnson, and Emmerich de Vattel are the path we need to rediscover. Perhaps we shall soon enough do so.

Allen Guelzo’s ‘Black Dan’ in Claremont Review Winter 2022/23

5. Blainey, A Shorter History of Australia (10 Feb 2015)

by kurto

Geography and economics have been more important to Australian history than politics. The ‘tyranny of distance’ shows itself in Aboriginal culture, Western settlement and economic development, foreign relations, and so on. They have often been interrelated, as in the development of export products (notably wool and mining) or the influence of drought. Owing to scarcity of labor, working conditions and labor law have been advanced, leading to egalitarianism (equality of outcomes) and also devotion to sport (as outside leisure). Black-white relations, obviously one-sided and sometimes fraught, are not more significant than the latter 20th-century influx of Asian peoples, which supplemented steadily decreasing European migration. Crisply written.

21. Banner, Ever-changing Past (15 October 2022)

by kurto

The discipline of history depends on evidence, which element is protean, and seeks for relevance, which changes with passing generations. Therefore conclusions are in the long run unstable. So runs the main tenet of Banner’s argument for historicism. ‘Only by writing for their own times and in response to questions of their day can historians make the past comprehensible to those who wish to learn of it. … What to one person and one age is orthodoxy to another is revision, and vice versa’ (p. 269). Banner commences with the contrast between Herodotus, who valued informal culture and mindsets, and Thucydides, who preferred tangible deeds and recorded public affairs. Put another way, whether the discipline’s purpose is to advance moral understanding or be objective (Ranke’s as it actually happened) is an important source of competing perspective. Revisions may also stem from method, which prompt different queries. After a tour of such revisionists – really pioneering practitioners – as the 4th-century theologian Eusebius and Marx, the author establishes himself as a postmodern fellow traveler. The premise of deconstruction is admitted; objectivity is ‘masculine’; historical propositions usually cannot be falsified; the would-be neutrality (positivism) of psychology is smuggled into historical practice to demonstrate the impossibility of conclusion. Yet Banner is pleased to defend the mandarinate’s expertise: ‘Whatever modern and postmodern doubts about the objectivity ideal have arisen since the nineteenth century, it is impossible to imagine that the inborn human thirst for dependable historical understanding will suffer significantly among professional historians and members of the general public because of these uncertainties’ (p. 262)! And: ‘Such prudent relativism in historical thought has never come close to being so unhinged and radical as to threaten historians’ commitment to truth and accuracy’ (p.265). The usual (circa 2021) progressive platitudes are frequently aired. Lacking any boundary between ‘revisionism’ and nihilism, Banner tacitly encourages postmodern attacks on the heritage of Western society. The matter of historicism is treated by recognizing it is not the answers but the great recurring questions that establish transcendence.

9. Burckhardt, Force and Freedom (15 May 2017)

by kurto

Across the sweep of world history, three phenomena predominate: the state, religion, and culture. Synthesizing the course of events through the late 19th century, Burckhardt posits archetypal behaviors of these institutions and studies their equilibria (i.e., how they influence one another). The significance of history lay not in the rise and fall of civilizations (qua events), but in the legacy of original values forged and safeguarded to future civilizations. The author then turns to identifying the elements of crises — generally an exhausted worldview or one overwhelmed by a more virile rival — and notes they create opportunity for truly original and energetic individuals (who would not otherwise success thusly in ordinary times). Finally, a treatment of how the confluence of events make for fortune or misfortune in history.

10. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (28 May 2017)

by kurto

Philosophic thought and particularly ‘essentially contested’ concepts improve with understanding of their predecessors, with a sense of context. History helps us to see the value of characteristics or features that otherwise seem arbitrary: when presented in a narrative (i.e., a story that can be followed, in which the crucial developments are contingent and the act of following expresses real interest), trends or ideas are integral to the topic in question and not analytical. Conversely, failure to see the entire range of possibilities (i.e., failure of imagination) undermines understanding of what the principal(s) in fact chose to say or do. Rather than a general set of scientifically discovered rules, history is a public exercise in continuous criticism (revision) combined with advancing interpretation via the discovery of new evidence. Having outlined a dynamic philosophy of history, the author shows that the schools of philosophy themselves – comprising logic (valid inferences), epistemology (objective criteria of different kinds of knowledge), and ethics (individual responsibility to society) – tend to talk past one another, and so their systems and constructs are weakened. As a case in point, the author suggests that metaphysics (Hegel: absolute presuppositions) can only be understood after the unquestioned becomes questionable.

6. Becker, Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers (6 Mar 2018)

by kurto

The Enlightenment philosophes, so far from being the first modern cohort, were in fact premodern because of their unshakeable belief in reason and progress. Relying on nature to reveal the organic laws of society, although based on the Newtonian approach to the physical sciences, was simplistic and bound to fall short. Becker focuses on the philosophes’ inability to solve such problems as the nature of virtue, while sidestepping their manifest challenge to the received wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The philosophes are always compared with the scholastics: there is no discussion of classical antiquity, a comparison which would lend another perspective on the basis of inquiry. At the same time, Becker himself points out history was the most popular scholarly topic of the late 18th century. Following Hume, contemporaries sought to identify universal principles of human nature (i.e., natural law) as well as continuity and progress. Such as variegated field is hardly to be compared with religious doctrine. Heavenly City turns on his own assumptions. The world is factual not rational, the author asserts (as an aside, saying it’s more important to use things efficiently than to understand them!); there is no predetermined order of progress or end of things; and no contemporary cohort can really understand the world of its predecessors. Accordingly, intelligence is conditioned by the very forces it seeks to understand. Thus, Becker not only stands in direct contrast with Cassirer, who described the philosophes as the first moderns, but also as a neo-Romantic and a forerunner of the postmoderns. As the introduction points out, Becker’s work was well timed to match emerging relativism and has since enjoyed periodic revival, but the failure to consider Athens as well as its historicism is crucial.

7. Roberts, Twentieth Century (8 Apr 2018)

by kurto

Surveys the 20th century, narrating political events while elaborating a case for structural forces – without a comprehensive framework. During the 1900s, the pace and scale of change accelerated. At the start of the century, religion was sufficient for categorizing humanity. By the conclusion, the expansion of personal wealth and ‘lifestyles’ driven by personal choice, women’s liberation, the rise of mass communications (including the Internet), and most important the belief that human happiness can be obtained on earth came to the fore. Windy social chapters at the start and end surround socioeconomic and political events grouped into pre-1914, interwar, and Cold War. Personnel changes rarely cause decisive shifts, according to the author. World War I and II combined to the end of European dominance, although its culture continued to resonate; the interwar era was less a triumph of fascism than a recession of democracy; the second world war saw the defeat of the ‘greatest challenge to liberalism’. Nationalism was the greatest political force of the century. In India and China, nationalist movements (loosely clothed in Western garb) were conscious of self-determination as a means to their own ends. However, Africa’s failures following Ghanaian independence in 1957 – 12 wars and 13 assassinations in 27 years – demonstrate fragile self-governance. Roberts routinely understates the tyranny of Soviet Russia and Maoist China, skipping past Ukrainian Holodomor or postwar repression in Eastern Europe (although acknowledging Soviet industrialization based on slave labor). The Cultural Revolution was as a ‘exercise in modernization’. The fall of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the European Union is also shortchanged; oddly, the UK is blamed for a late entry, but de Gaulle’s role is omitted. A new skepticism of science (i.e., the conquering of nature) arose in the 1970s and 80s. Roberts chronicles the rise and fall of Freudian psychoanalysis, but overlooks social relativism. In looking for deeper meaning in social trends, Roberts forgets history of democracy is the self-conscious choices of people. His shallow portrayal of tyranny leaves him unable to pick out liberalism’s high points and the true effects of statesmanship.