From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Dec 16 2004 - 15:36:39 EST
Le Monde diplomatique
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December 2004
ASKING THE BIG WHY QUESTIONS
History: a new age of reason
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One of our greatest historians argues that it is time to promote
a revived idea of history and to create a coalition of reason to
respond to the urgent need for renewed historical research into
the evolution of human beings and their societies.
by Eric Hobsbawm
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"The philosophers so far have only interpreted the world: the
point is to change it." Marxist historiography has developed
along two parallel lines, corresponding to the two halves of
Marx' famous Thesis on Feuerbach'. Most intellectuals who
became Marxists from the 1880s on, including historians, did
so because they wanted to change the world in association
with the labour and socialist movements - movements which
were to become, largely under Marxist inspiration, mass
political forces. This association naturally led historians
who wanted to change the world towards certain fields of
study, notably the history of the common or labouring people.
Though naturally attractive to people on the left, this
originally had no specific connexion with Marxist
interpretation. Conversely, when such intellectuals ceased to
be social revolutionaries, from the 1890s on, they were also
likely to stop being Marxists.
The Soviet revolution of October 1917 revived this incentive.
However, let us not forget that Marxism was not formally
abandoned in the major social-democratic parties of Europe
until the 1950s or later. It also produced what might be
called obligatory Marxist historiography in the USSR and in
the states that later fell under communist rule. The era of
antifascism reinforced the incentive to become Marxist.
From the 1950s on this motivation weakened in the developed
countries - though not in the third world - although the huge
expansion of university education and student unrest produced
a substantial new academic contingent of world-changers in
the 1960s. However, although radical, a good number of these
were no longer clearly, or at all, Marxist.
This resurgence reached a peak in the 1970s, shortly before a
massive reaction against Marxism began - again primarily for
political reasons. Its main effect has been to destroy the
belief that the success of a particular way of organising
human societies can be predicted and assisted by historical
analysis, although this is still believed by liberals.
History has been severed from teleology (1).
Given the uncertain prospects of social-democratic and
social-revolutionary movements, I think it is unlikely that
there will again be a politically motivated rush to Marxism.
But here we must avoid too much occidentalo-centrism. If I am
to judge by the demand for my own history books, I note that
it expanded in South Korea and Taiwan from the 1980s, in
Turkey in the 1990s, and there are signs that it is now
expanding in the Arabic-speaking world.
What of interpreting the world'?
Meanwhile what of "interpreting the world"? Here the story is
somewhat different but also parallel. It is about the rise of
what may be called the anti-Rankean (2) reaction in history,
of which Marxism was an important, but not always fully
acknowledged, element. Essentially this was a double
movement.
It challenged the positivist belief that the objective
structure of reality was, as it were, self-explanatory: all
that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to
it, explain why things happened the way they did and discover
"wie es eigentlich gewesen" (how it actually was). For all
historians, historiography remained, and remains, anchored to
an objective reality - the reality of what happened in the
past. But it starts not with facts but with problems, and
requires us to enquire how and why such problems - paradigms
and concepts - are formulated in different social/cultural
environments and historic traditions.
But at the same time, it was also a movement to bring history
closer to the social sciences, and therefore to turn it into
part of a generalising discipline capable of explaining the
transformations of human society in the course of its past.
History was to be about what Lawrence Stone (3) called
"asking the big Why questions". This "social turn" came not
from within historiography, but from the social sciences,
some of them in the process of being created, which were
themselves being set up as evolutionary, that is to say
historical, disciplines.
Insofar as Marx may be seen as the father of the sociology of
knowledge, Marxism certainly contributed to the first of
these movements - though it has been mistakenly attacked for
an alleged blind objectivism. On the other hand, the most
familiar impact of Marxist ideas, the stress on economic and
social factors, was not specifically Marxist, though it was
greatly assisted by the impact of Marxist analysis. It was
part of a general historiographical movement, observable from
the 1890s on, which was eventually to reach its peak in the
1950s and 1960s, to the benefit of my own generation of
historians which had the good luck to become the transformers
of the discipline.
This socio-economic current was wider than Marxism.
Occasionally the initiative in founding the journals and
institutions of economic/social history came from Marxist
social-democrats (as in the journal Vierteljahrschrift in
1893). But this was not the case in Britain, France or the
United States. And even in Germany the strongly historical
school of economics was far from Marxian. Only in the third
world of the 19th century - Russia and the Balkans - as in
that of the 20th century, did economic history become
primarily social-revolutionary in orientation, like all
"social science"and therefore likely to be strongly attracted
to Marx.
Marx's impact on history
The historical interests of most Marxist historians were not
so much in the "base" (the economic infrastructure) but in
the relations of base and superstructure. The number of
specifically Marxian historians was always relatively small.
The major impact of Marx on history was through historians
and social scientists who took up Marx's questions, whether
or not they gave alternative answers to them. And, in turn,
Marxist historiography has moved a good way ahead of what it
was in the days of Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov (4),
largely owing to fertilisation by other disciplines (notably
social anthropology) and by Marx-influenced and
Marx-supplementing thinkers like Max Weber (5).
I stress the generality of this historiographical current not
because I want to underestimate the differences within it, or
within its components, like Marxism. The historical
modernisers asked the same questions and saw themselves as
engaged in the same intellectual battles, whether they
derived their inspiration from human geography, Durkheimian
sociology (6) and statistics as in France (both the school of
the Annales and Labrousse), or from Weberian sociology like
the Historische Sozialwissenschaft in federal Germany, or
from the Marxism of the Communist party historians who became
crucial carriers of historical modernisation in Britain, or
at least founded its main journal.
These all saw each other as allies against historiographical
conservatism, even when they represented mutually hostile
political or ideological positions, like Michael Postan (7)
and his British Marxist students. The classical expression of
this coalition of progress is the journal Past & Present,
founded in 1952, which became influential within the world of
historians. It succeeded because the young Marxists who
founded it deliberately refused ideological exclusiveness and
the young modernisers of other ideological stamps were
prepared to join with them and, what is more, knew that
ideological and political differences did not stand in the
way of collaboration. This front of progress advanced
dramatically from the end of the second world war to the
1970s and what Lawrence Stone calls the "broad cluster of
changes in the nature of historical discourse". This lasted
until the crisis of 1985, which saw the transition from
quantitative to qualitative studies, from macro- to
micro-history, from structural analysis to narrative, from
the social to the cultural.
Since that time the modernising coalition has been on the
defensive - including even the non-Marxist components such as
economic and social history.
By the 1970s the mainstream of history had been so
transformed, not least by the influence of the Marxist way of
asking the "big questions", that I found myself writing: "It
is today often impossible to tell whether a work has been
written by a Marxist or a non-Marxist unless the author
advertises his or her ideological position...I would like to
look forward to a time when no one asks whether authors are
Marxist or not." But, as I also observed, we were far from
such a utopia. On the contrary. The need to insist on what
Marxism can bring to historiography has become greater since
then. Greater than it has been for a long time. That is
because history needs to be defended against those who deny
its capacity to help us understand the world, and because new
developments in the sciences have transformed the
historiographical agenda.
Methodologically, the major negative development has been the
construction of a set of barriers between what happened or
happens in history and our capacity to observe and understand
it. It is denied that there is any reality that is
objectively there and not constructed by the observer for
different and changing purposes. It is claimed that we can
never penetrate beyond the limitations of language, ie of the
concepts which are the only way in which we can talk about
the world, the past included.
This vision would eliminate the question of knowing whether
there are patterns and regularities in the past about which
historians can make meaningful statements. Meanwhile less
theoretically minded historians argue that the course of the
past is too contingent for generalisations or causal
explanation, because the options in history are endless.
Pretty well anything could happen or might have happened.
Implicitly these are arguments against any science. I won't
bother about the more trivial attempts to return to the past:
the attempt to hand back its course to high political or
military decision-makers, or to the omnipotence of ideas or
"values", or to reduce historical scholarship to the
important, but by itself insufficient, search for empathy
with the past.
My truth is as valid as yours'
The major immediate political danger to historiography today
is "anti-universalism" or "my truth is as valid as yours,
whatever the evidence." This naturally appeals to various
forms of identity group history, for which the central issue
of history is not what happened, but how it concerns the
members of a particular group. What is important to this kind
of history is not rational explanation but "meaning", not
what happened but what members of a collective group defining
itself against outsiders - religious, ethnic, national, by
gender, lifestyle or in some other way - feel about it.
That is the appeal of relativism to identity-group history.
For various reasons the past 30 years have been a golden age
for the mass invention of emotionally skewed historical
untruths and myths. Some of them are a public danger: I am
thinking of countries like India in the days of the BJP (8),
the US, Sylvio Berlusconi's Italy, not to mention many of the
new nationalisms, with or without fundamentalist religious
reinforcement.
This produces endless claptrap and trivia on the further
fringes of nationalist, feminist, gay, black and other
in-group histories, but it has also stimulated some extremely
interesting new historical developments in cultural studies,
such as the new "memory boom in contemporary historical
studies" as Jay Winter (9) calls it, of which Les Lieux de
Mémoire (Places of memory) (10) is a good example.
It is time to re-establish the coalition of those who want to
believe in history as a rational enquiry into the course of
human transformations against those who systematically
distort history for political purposes - and also, more
generally, against relativists and postmodernists who deny
this possibility. Since some of these relativists and
postmodernists consider themselves on the left, this may
split historians in politically unexpected ways. I think the
Marxist approach is a necessary component of this
reconstruction of the front of reason, as it was in the 1950s
and 1960s. Indeed the Marxist contribution is probably more
relevant today since the other components of the coalition,
for instance the post-Braudelian Annales and those inspired
by structural-functional social anthropology have rather
abdicated. Social anthropology as a discipline has been
particularly affected by the stampede towards postmodern
subjectivity.
An evolutionary history of humanity
While postmodernists have denied the possibility of
historical understanding and historians have barely noticed,
developments in the natural sciences have put an evolutionary
history of humanity firmly back on the agenda. They have done
so in two ways.
First because the new DNA analysis has established a firmer
chronology of development since the emergence of homo sapiens
as a species, and especially for the chronology of the spread
of the species from its original African origin throughout
the rest of the world and subsequent developments, before the
appearance of written sources. This has both established the
astonishing brevity of human history - by geological and
palaeontological standards - and eliminated the reductionist
solution of neo-Darwinian socio-biology (12). The changes in
human life, collective and individual, in the course of the
past 10,000 years, let alone in the past 10 generations, are
too great to be explained by a wholly Darwinian mechanism of
evolution via genes. They amount to the accelerating
inheritance of acquired characteristics by cultural and not
genetic mechanisms - I suppose it is Lamarck's (12) revenge
on Darwin via human history. And it doesn't really help to
dress this up in biological metaphors - "memes" (13) and not
"genes". Cultural and biological inheritance don't work the
same way.
In short, the DNA revolution calls for a specific,
historical, method of studying the evolution of the human
species. It also provides us with a rational framework for a
world history. A history that takes the globe in all its
complexity as the unit of historical studies, and not any
particular environment or sub-area within it. History is the
continuance of the biological evolution of homo sapiens by
other means.
Second, the new evolutionary biology eliminates the
hard-and-fast distinction between history and the natural
sciences, already much weakened by the systematic
"historisation" of these in the past decades. Luigi
Cavalli-Sforza, one of the multidisciplinary pioneers of the
DNA revolution, speaks of "the intellectual pleasure of
finding so many similarities between disparate fields of
study, some of which belong traditionally to the two opposite
sides of culture: science and the humanities". In short, it
bypasses the bogus debates on whether history is or is not a
science.
Third, it inevitably returns us to the basic approach to
human evolution adopted by archaeologists and prehistorians,
which is to study the modes of interaction between our
species and its environment and its growing control over it.
That means asking the questions that Marx asked. "Modes of
production" (or whatever we want to call them), based on
major innovations in productive technology, in
communications, and in social organisation - but also in
military power - have been central to human evolution. These
innovations, as Marx was aware, did not and do not make
themselves. Material and cultural forces and relations of
production are not separable. They are the activities of men
and women in historical situations not of their making,
acting and taking decisions ("making their history"), but not
in a vacuum- not even a vacuum of imputed rational
calculation.
However, the new perspectives on history should also return
us to that essential, if never quite realisable, objective of
those who study the past: "total history". Not a "history of
everything", but history as an indivisible web in which all
human activities are interconnected. Marxists are not the
only ones to have had this aim (for instance, Fernand
Braudel), but they have been its most persistent pursuers, as
noted by one of them, Pierre Vilar (15). (1)
Not the least of the theoretical problems for which the
perspective of history as interaction is essential, is one
that is crucial for the understanding of the historic
evolution of homo sapiens. It is the conflict between the
forces making for the transformation of homo sapiens from
neolithic to nuclear humanity and the forces whose aim is the
maintenance of unchanging reproduction and stability in human
collectivities or social environments. For most of history,
the forces inhibiting change have usually, though with
occasional exceptions, effectively counteracted open-ended
change. Today this balance has been decisively tilted in one
direction. And the disequilibrium, which may be beyond the
ability of humans to absorb, is almost certainly beyond the
ability of human social and political institutions to
control. Perhaps Marxist historians, who have had occasion to
reflect on the unintended and unwanted consequences of human
collective projects in the 20th century, can at least help us
understand how this came about.
Eric Hobsbawm is author inter alia of The Age of Extremes:
The Short 20th Century: 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London,
1994.
This article is taken from his concluding speech to the
British Academy Colloquium on Marxist historiography this
November.
________________________________________________________
(1) Like Marx, he refused "any firm division or watertight
separation among the various sectors of history. Analysis, of
course, remains an essential pat of any investigation and the
historical profession cannot do without specialization. But
economics alone can never fully account for all economic
phenomena, nor political theory for all political phenomena,
nor the theory of the spiritual for all spiritual phenomena.
In each concrete instance the problem lies in the interaction
of all these."
(1) The doctrine that there is evidence of purpose or design
in the universe.
(2) A reaction against Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), seen as
the father of the dominant school of academic historiography
before 1914.
(3) Lawrence Stone (1920-99), one of the most eminent and
influential social historians, was author of, among other
works, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (1972)
and The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977).
(4) Respectively theoreticians of German and Russian social
democracy at the start of the 20th century.
(5) The German sociologist (1864-1920)
(6) After Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), who was one of the
founding fathers of modern sociology.
(7) Michael Postan held the chair of economic history at
Cambridge University from 1937.
(8) The Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) was in power from 1999
to May 2004.
(9) Professor at Yale University, US and a specialist in 20th
century war history, in particular in the subject of places
of memory.
(10) Les lieux de mémoire, Gallimard, Paris, edited by Pierre
Nora, seven volumes, 1984 -1992.
(11) After Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the British naturalist
who was responsible for the theory of the evolution of the
species on the basis of natural selection.
(12) Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the French naturalist
who was the first to reject the idea of the permanence of the
species, believed in the heritability of acquired
characteristics.
(13) Memes, according to Richard Dawkins, a leading
neo-Darwinist, are basic units of memory, which are supposed
to be vectors of cultural transmission and survival just as
genes are vectors of the survival of genetic characteristics.
(14) Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds, Histories:French
Constructions of the Past, The New Press, New York, 1995.
Original text in English
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