## 1. History and its representation



What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian's
work? In a sense, this question is best answered on the basis of a
careful reading of some good historians. But it will be useful to
offer several simple answers to this foundational question as a sort
of conceptual map of the nature of historical knowing.



First, historians are interested in providing conceptualizations and
factual descriptions of events and circumstances in the past. This
effort is an answer to questions like these: "What happened?
What was it like? What were some of the circumstances and happenings
that took place during this period in the past?" Sometimes this
means simply reconstructing a complicated story from scattered
historical sources--for example, in constructing a narrative of
the Spanish Civil War or attempting to sort out the series of events
that culminated in the Detroit race riot / uprising of 1967. But
sometimes it means engaging in substantial conceptual work in order to
arrive at a vocabulary in terms of which to characterize "what
happened." Concerning the disorders of 1967 in Detroit: was this
a riot or an uprising? How did participants and contemporaries think
about it?



Second, historians often want to answer "why" questions:
"Why did this event occur? What were the conditions and forces
that brought it about?" What were the motivations of the
participants? This body of questions invites the historian to provide
an explanation of the event or pattern he or she describes: the rise
of fascism in Spain, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the
occurrence of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1992 and later. And
providing an explanation requires, most basically, an account of the
causal mechanisms, background circumstances, and human choices that
brought the outcome about. We explain an historical outcome when we
identify the social causes, forces, events, and actions that brought
it about, or made it more likely.



Third, and related to the previous point, historians are sometimes
interested in answering a "how" question: "How did
this outcome come to pass? What were the processes through which the
outcome occurred?" How did the Prussian Army succeed in
defeating the superior French Army in 1870? How did the Polish trade
union Solidarity manage to bring about the end of Communist rule in
Poland in 1989? Here the pragmatic interest of the historian's
account derives from the antecedent unlikelihood of the event in
question: how was this outcome possible? This too is an explanation;
but it is an answer to a "how possible" question rather
than a "why necessary" question.



Fourth, often historians are interested in piecing together the human
meanings and intentions that underlie a given complex series of
historical actions. They want to help the reader make sense of the
historical events and actions, in terms of the thoughts, motives, and
states of mind of the participants. For example: Why did Napoleon III
carelessly provoke Prussia into war in 1870? Why did the parties of
the far right in Germany gain popular support among German citizens in
the 1990s? Why did northern cities in the United States develop such
marked patterns of racial segregation after World War II? Answers to
questions like these require interpretation of actions, meanings, and
intentions--of individual actors and of cultures that
characterize whole populations. This aspect of historical thinking is
"hermeneutic," interpretive, and ethnographic.



And, of course, the historian faces an even more basic intellectual
task: that of discovering and making sense of the archival and
historical information that exists about a given event or time in the
past. Historical data do not speak for themselves; archives are
incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, and confusing. The historian
needs to interpret individual pieces of evidence, and he or she needs
to be able to somehow fit the mass of evidence into a coherent and
truthful story. Complex events like the Spanish Civil War present the
historian with an ocean of historical traces in repositories and
archives all over the world; these collections sometimes reflect
specific efforts at concealment by the powerful (for example,
Franco's efforts to conceal all evidence of mass killings of
Republicans after the end of fighting); and the historian's task
is to find ways of using this body of evidence to discern some of the
truth about the past.



In short, historians conceptualize, describe, contextualize, explain,
and interpret events and circumstances of the past. They sketch out
ways of representing the complex activities and events of the past;
they explain and interpret significant outcomes; and they base their
findings on evidence in the present that bears upon facts about the
past. Their accounts need to be grounded on the evidence of the
available historical record, and their explanations and
interpretations require that the historian arrive at hypotheses about
social causes and cultural meanings. Historians can turn to the best
available theories in the social and behavioral sciences to arrive at
theories about causal mechanisms and human behavior; so historical
statements depend ultimately upon factual inquiry and theoretical
reasoning. Ultimately, the historian's task is to shed light on
the what, why, and how of the past, based on inferences from the
evidence of the present.



Three preliminary issues are relevant to almost all discussions of
history and the philosophy of history. The first is a set of issues
having to do with the "ontology" of history, the kinds of entities,
processes, and events that make up the historical past. This topic
concerns the entities, forces, and structures that we postulate in
describing the historical phenomena, whether the medieval manor or the
Weimar Republic, and the theory we have of how these social entities
depend upon the actions of the historical actors who embody them. The
second issue has to do with the problems of selectivity unavoidable
for the historian of any period or epoch. Here we take up the question
of how the unavoidable selectivity of historical inquiry in terms of
theme, location, scope, and scale influences the nature of historical
knowledge. The third issue has to do with the complicated relationship
that exists between history, narrative, and collective memory. This
topic addresses the point that real human beings make history. And, as
Marc Bloch insists (1953), we humans are historical beings, we tell
stories about ourselves, and those stories sometimes themselves have
major historical consequences. The collective memories and identities
of Serb nationalism were a historical fact in the 1990s, and these
elements of mythic collective identity led to massive bloodshed,
ethnic cleansing, and murder during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia
(Judt and Snyder, 2012; Judt, 2006).


### 1.1 Actors, structures, and causes in history



An important problem for the philosophy of history is how to
conceptualize "history" happenings. What are the "objects"
of which history consists? Are there social structures or systems that
play a role in history? Are there causes at work in the historical
process? Or is history simply an concatenation of the actions and
mental frameworks of myriad individuals, high and low? If both
structures and actors are crucial to understanding history, what is
the relationship between them?



Marc Bloch (1953) provided a very simple and penetrating definition of
history. History is "man in time". By this he meant that history is
the product of human action, creativity, invention, conflict, and
interaction. Bloch was skeptical about many other categories commonly
used to analyze history--periods, epochs, civilizations, reigns,
and centuries. Instead, he advocated for what can be called an
"actor-centered" conception of history. If there are structures and
systems in history, they depend upon the beliefs, attitudes, and
actions of individual actors. If there are causes in history, they
likewise depend upon the actions and interactions of human actors
within a setting of humanly created institutions and norms. The task
of the historian is to reconstruct the meanings, beliefs, values,
purposes, constraints, and actions that jointly explain the moments of
history, from the meaning of an ancient stele to the causes of the
rapid defeat of France in 1940.



This perspective does not diminish the ontological importance of
structures, systems, and ideologies in history. It simply forces the
historian, like the social scientist, to be attentive to the problem
of articulating the relationship that exists between actors and
structures. A system of norms, a property system, and a moral ideology
of feudal loyalty can all be understood as being both objectively
present at a time and place, and being ontologically dependent upon
the mental frameworks, actions, and relationships of the individual
actors who make up these systems. This problem has been thoroughly
discussed in the philosophy of social science under the rubric of
"ontological individualism" (Zahle and Collin, 2014). Higher-level
social entities are indeed causally powerful in the social world; and
they depend entirely for their causal powers on the characteristics of
the individual actors who constitute them. This is the requirement of
microfoundations: extended social structures and causes depend upon
microfoundations at the level of the individuals who constitute them
(Little 2017). In particular, we need to have some idea about how
individuals have been brought to think and act in the ways required by
the structures and ideologies in which they function as adults. On
this approach, history is the result of the actions and thoughts of
vast numbers of actors, and institutions, structures, and norms are
likewise embodied in the actions and mental frameworks of historically
situated individuals. Such an approach helps to inoculate us against
the error of reification of historical structures, periods, or forces,
in favor of a more disaggregated conception of multiple actors and
shifting conditions of action. This is the conception to which we are
drawn when we understand history along the lines proposed by
Bloch.



This orientation brings along with it the importance of analyzing
closely the social and natural environment in which actors frame their
choices. A historian's account of the flow of human action
eventuating in historical change unavoidably needs to take into
account the institutional and situational environment in which these
actions take place. Part of the social environment of a period of
historical change is the ensemble of institutions that exist more or
less stably in the period: property relations, political institutions,
family structures, educational practices, religious and moral values.
So historical explanations need to be sophisticated in their treatment
of institutions, cultures, and practices. It is an important fact that
a given period in time possesses a fund of scientific and technical
knowledge, a set of social relationships of power, and a level of
material productivity. It is also an important fact that knowledge is
limited; that coercion exists; and that resources for action are
limited. Within these opportunities and limitations, individuals, from
leaders to ordinary people, make out their lives and ambitions through
action.



Similar microfoundational accounts must be given in support of the
idea of "causes in history". Once established, it is reasonably
straightforward to see how a social structure such as a property
system or an ideology "causes" a historical outcome: by constraining
the choices of actors and contributing to their motivations and values
in the choices they make, a structure or an ideology influences
historically important events like social movements, market crashes,
or outbreaks of ethnic violence. Structures influence individual
actors, and individual actors collectively constitute structures. This
approach gives a basis for judging that such-and-so circumstance
"caused" a given historical change; but it also provides
an understanding of the way in which this kind of historical cause is
embodied and conveyed--through the actions and thoughts of
individuals in response to given natural and social circumstances.



Are there large scale causes at work in historical processes?
Historians often pose questions like these: "What were some of
the causes of the fall of Rome?", "what were the causes of
the rise of fascism?", or "what were the causes of the
Industrial Revolution?". These kinds of questions presuppose
that there were grand causes at work that had grand effects. However,
it is more plausible to believe that the causes of some very large and
significant historical events are themselves small, granular, gradual,
and cumulative. If this is the case, then there is no satisfyingly
simple and high-level answer to the question, why did Rome fall?
Moreover, astute historians like Bloch and his contemporaries
recognized that there is a very large amount of contingency and path
dependency in historical change (Pierson, 2004). Historical outcomes
are not determined by a few large scale causes; instead, multiple
local, contingent, and conjunctural processes and happening jointly
come together in the production of the outcome of interest. It is
possible, for example, that the collapse of the Roman Empire resulted
from a myriad of very different contingencies and organizational
features in different parts of the empire. A contingent account of the
fall of Rome might refer to logistical difficulties in supplying
armies in the German winter, particularly stubborn local resistance in
Palestine, administrative decay in Roman Britain, population pressure
in Egypt, and a particularly inept series of commanders in Gaul.
Without drama, administrative and military collapse ensues. The best
we can do sometimes is to identify a swarm of independent, small-scale
processes and contingencies that eventually produced the large outcome
of interest.



This approach might be called "actor-centered history": we explain a
historical moment or event when we have an account of what people
thought and believed; what they wanted; and what social,
institutional, and environmental conditions framed their choices. It
is a view of history that gives close attention to states of
knowledge, ideology, and agency, as well as institutions,
organizations, and structures, and examines the actions and practices
of individuals as they lived their lives within these constraining and
enabling circumstances. Further, it emphasizes the contingency and
path-dependency of history, and it acknowledges the fact of
heterogeneity of institutions, beliefs, and actions across time and
place.


### 1.2 Selectivity and scale in history



Historical research unavoidably requires *selectivity* in
deciding what particular phenomena to emphasize. As Max Weber (1949)
notes, there is an infinite depth to historical reality, and therefore
it is necessary to select a finite representation of the object of
study if we want to approach a problem rigorously. Let us imagine, for
example, that a historian is interested in cities and their
development over time. This might be pursued as an economic question,
a question of regional geography, a question about cultural change, a
question about poverty and segregation, a question about municipal
governance, or a question about civil disturbances, and so one, for
indefinitely many aspects of urban life. One generation of historians
may be especially interested in cultural topics, while another
generation is preoccupied with the organization of the economy at
various points in history. The two orientations lead to very different
historical representations of the past. Both inquiries lead to true
depictions of the cities in question, but their findings and
interpretations are very different. Likewise, the historian needs to
make choices about location; is he or she interested in the cities of
Britain, the cities of Europe, or all cities in the world? Further,
the historian must consider whether to conduct a *comparative*
history of cities, examining similarities and differences in the
development of Paris and London; or instead restrict attention to a
single case. Simply collecting "historical facts" about
cities in the past is not a valid mode of historical inquiry. The
question of how historians select and identify their subjects for
research is an important one for the philosophy of history, and it has
great significance for how we think about "knowing the
past".



Weber's essays on methodology (1949) provide insight about these
questions. Weber emphasizes the role that the scholar's
*values* play in his or her selection of a subject matter and a
conceptual framework. So it is always open to historians of later
generations to reevaluate prior interpretations of various aspects and
periods of history. There is no general or comprehensive approach to
defining the historical; there is only the possibility of a series of
selective and value-guided approaches to defining specific aspects of
history. We are always at liberty to bring forward new perspectives
and new aspects of the problem, and to arrive at new insights about
how the phenomena hang together when characterized in these new ways.
This inherent selectivity of historical knowledge does not undermine
the objectivity or veridicality of our knowledge; it merely entails
that - like mathematics - history is inherently
incomplete.



Doing history also forces the historian to make choices about the
*scale* of the history with which he or she is concerned. Suppose
we are interested in Asian history. Are we concerned with Asia as a
continent, including China, India, Cambodia, and Japan, or the whole
of China during the Ming Dynasty, or Hubei Province? Or if we define
our interest in terms of a single important historical event like the
Chinese Revolution, are we concerned with the whole of the Chinese
Revolution, the base area of Yenan, or the specific experience of a
handful of villages in Shandong during the 1940s? Given the
fundamental heterogeneity of social life, the choice of scale makes an
important difference to the findings.



Historians differ greatly around the decisions they make about scale.
It is possible to treat any historical subject at the micro-scale.
William Hinton provides what is almost a month-to-month description of
the Chinese Revolution in Fanshen village--a collection of a few
hundred families (Hinton 1966). Likewise, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
offers a deep treatment of the villagers of Montaillou; once again, a
single village and a limited time (Le Roy Ladurie 1979). William
Cronon provides a focused and detailed account of the development of
Chicago as a metropolis for the middle of the United States (Cronon
1991). These histories are limited in time and space, and they can
appropriately be called "micro-history."



Macro-level history is possible as well. William McNeill provides a
history of the world's diseases (McNeill 1976); Massimo
Livi-Bacci offers a history of the world's population
(Livi-Bacci 2007); and De Vries and Goudsblom provide an environmental
history of the world (De Vries and Goudsblom 2002). In each of these
cases, the historian has chosen a scale that encompasses virtually the
whole of the globe, over millennia of time. These histories can
certainly be called "macro-history."



Both micro- and macro-histories have important shortcomings.
Micro-history leaves us with the question, "how does this
particular village shed light on anything larger?".
Macro-history leaves us with the question, "how do these large
assertions about the nature of revolution or the importance of class
conflict in mobilization apply in the context of Canada or
Warsaw?". The first threatens to be so particular as to lose all
interest, whereas the second threatens to be so general as to lose all
empirical relevance to real historical processes.



There is a third choice available to the historian that addresses both
points. This is to choose a scale that encompasses enough time and
space to be genuinely interesting and important, but not so much as to
defy valid analysis. This level of scale might be regional--for
example, G. William Skinner's analysis of the macro-regions of
China (Skinner 1977). It might be national--for example, a social
and political history of Indonesia. And it might be
supra-national--for example, an economic history of Western
Europe or comparative treatment of Eurasian history. The key point is
that historians in this middle range are free to choose the scale of
analysis that seems to permit the best level of conceptualization of
history, given the evidence that is available and the social processes
that appear to be at work. And this mid-level scale permits the
historian to make substantive judgments about the "reach"
of social processes that are likely to play a causal role in the story
that needs telling. This level of analysis can be referred to as
"meso-history," and it appears to offer an ideal mix of
specificity and generality.


### 1.3 Memory, history, and narrative



What is the relation between history, memory, and narrative? We might
put these concepts into a crude map by saying that "history" is an
organized and evidence-based presentation of of the processes,
actions, and events that have occurred for a people over an extended
period of time; "memory" is the personal recollections and
representations of individuals who lived through a series of events
and processes; and "narratives" are the stories that ordinary people
and historians weave together to make sense of the events and
happenings through which a people and a person have lived. Collective
memory, the idea that groups such as Welsh miners, Serbian villagers,
or black Alabama farmers possess a collective representation of the
past that binds them together, can be understood as a shared set of
narratives and stories about the past events of the given group or
community. We use narratives to make sense of things that have
happened; to identify meanings and causes within this series of
events; and to select the "important" events and processes out from
the ordinary and inconsequential.



What is a narrative? Most generally, it is an account of how and why a
situation or event came to be. A narrative is intended to provide an
account of how a complex historical event unfolded and why. We want to
understand the event in time. What were the contextual features that
were relevant to the outcome--the conditions at one or more
points in time that played a role? What were the actions and choices
that agents performed, and why did they take these actions rather than
other possible choices? What causal processes--either social or
natural--may have played a role in influencing the outcome? So a
narrative seeks to provide *hermeneutic understanding* of the
outcome--why did actors behave as they did in bringing about the
outcome?--and *causal explanation*--what social and
natural processes were acting behind the backs of the actors in
bringing about the outcome? And different narratives represent
different mixes of hermeneutic and causal factors. A crucial and
unavoidable feature of narrative history is the fact of selectivity.
The narrative historian is forced to make choices and selections at
every stage: between "significant" and "insignificant", between
"sideshow" and "main event", and between levels of description.



It is evident that there are often multiple truthful, unbiased, and
inconsistent narratives that can be told for a single complex event.
Exactly because many things happened at once, actors' motives
were ambiguous, and the causal connections among events are debatable,
it is possible to construct inconsistent narratives that are equally
well supported by the evidence. Further, the intellectual interest
that different historians bring to the happening can lead to
differences in the narrative. One historian may be primarily
interested in the role that different views of social justice played
in the actions of the participants; another may be primarily
interested in the role that social networks played; and a third may be
especially interested in the role of charismatic personalities, with a
consequent structuring to the narrative around the actions and
speeches of the charismatic leader. Each of these may be truthful,
objective, and unbiased--and inconsistent in important ways with
the others. So narratives are underdetermined by the facts, and there
is no such thing as an exhaustive and comprehensive telling of the
story--only various tellings that emphasize one set of themes or
another.



When we consider collective memory and social identity, we are also
forced to recognize that powerful institutions attempt to shape the
narrative of important events in ways that serve political interests.
A group identity can be defined as a set of beliefs and stories about
one's home, one's people, and one's past. These
ideas often involve answers to questions like these: Where did we come
from? How did we get here? And perhaps, who are my enemies? So an
identity involves a narrative, a creation story, or perhaps a
remembrance of a long chain of disasters and crimes. Identity and
collective memory are intertwined; monuments, songs, icons, and flags
help to set the way points in the history of a people and the
collective emotions that this group experiences. They have to do with
the stories we tell each other about who we are; how our histories
brought us to this place; and what large events shaped us as a
"people". Governments, leaders, activists, and political parties all
have an interest in shaping collective memory to their own ends.
Collective memories and identities are interwoven with myths and folk
histories. And, as Benedict Anderson (1983) demonstrated, these
stories are more often than not fictions of various kinds, promulgated
by individuals and groups who have an interest in shaping collective
consciousness in one way or another.



The philosophy of history must pay attention to the nexus of
experience, memory, and history. There is no single "Civil
Rights era" experience or "Great Depression"
experience; instead, historians must consider a wide range of sources
and evidence, including oral histories, first-person accounts,
photographs, and other traces of the human experience of the time to
allow them to discern both variation and some degree of
thematicization of memory and identity in the periods they study.
Second, attention to history and memory highlights the amount of human
and individual agency involved in memory. Memories must be created;
agents must find frameworks within which to understand their moments
of historical experience. Museums and monuments curate historical
memories -- often with biases of their own. A third and equally
important point is the fact that memories become part of the political
mobilization possibilities that exist for a group. Groups find their
collective identities through shared understandings of the past; and
these shared understandings provide a basis for future collective
action. Paul Ricoeur's *Time and Narrative*
(1984-1988) sheds profound light on the profound relations that
extend among memory, identity, narrative, and history.


## 2. Continental philosophy of history



The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European
philosophy. A long, largely German, tradition of thought looks at
history as a total and comprehensible process of events, structures,
and processes, for which the philosophy of history can serve as an
interpretive tool. This approach, speculative and meta-historical,
aims to discern large, embracing patterns and directions in the
unfolding of human history, persistent notwithstanding the erratic
back-and-forth of particular historical developments. Modern
philosophers raising this set of questions about the large direction
and meaning of history include Vico, Herder, and Hegel. A somewhat
different line of thought in the continental tradition that has been
very relevant to the philosophy of history is the hermeneutic
tradition of the human sciences. Through their emphasis on the
"hermeneutic circle" through which humans undertake to
understand the meanings created by other humans--in texts,
symbols, and actions--hermeneutic philosophers such as
Schleiermacher (1838), Dilthey (1860-1903), and Ricoeur
(1984-1988, 2000) offer philosophical arguments for emphasizing the
importance of narrative interpretation within our understanding of
history. Understanding history means providing a narrative that makes
sense of it from beginning to end.


### 2.1 Universal or historical human nature?



Human beings make history; but what is the fundamental nature of the
human being? Is there one fundamental "human nature," or
are the most basic features of humanity historically conditioned
(Mandelbaum 1971)? Can the study of history shed light on this
question? When we study different historical epochs, do we learn
something about unchanging human beings--or do we learn about
fundamental differences of motivation, reasoning, desire, and
collectivity? Is humanity a historical product? Giambattista
Vico's *New Science* (1725) offered an interpretation of
history that turned on the idea of a universal human nature and a
universal history (see Berlin 2000 for commentary). Vico's
interpretation of the history of civilization offers the view that
there is an underlying uniformity in human nature across historical
settings that permits explanation of historical actions and processes.
The common features of human nature give rise to a fixed series of
stages of development of civil society, law, commerce, and government:
universal human beings, faced with recurring civilizational
challenges, produce the same set of responses over time. Two things
are worth noting about this perspective on history: first, that it
simplifies the task of interpreting and explaining history (because we
can take it as given that we can understand the actors of the past
based on our own experiences and nature); and second, it has an
intellectual heir in twentieth-century social science theory in the
form of rational choice theory as a basis for comprehensive social
explanation.



Johann Gottfried Herder offers a strikingly different view about human
nature and human ideas and motivations. Herder argues for the
historical contextuality of human nature in his work, *Ideas for
the Philosophy of History of Humanity* (1791). He offers a
historicized understanding of human nature, advocating the idea that
human nature is itself a historical product and that human beings act
differently in different periods of historical development
(1800-1877, 1791). Herder's views set the stage for the
historicist philosophy of human nature later found in such
nineteenth-century figures as Hegel and Nietzsche. His perspective too
prefigures an important current of thought about the social world in
the late twentieth century, the idea of the "social
construction" of human nature and social identities (Anderson
1983; Hacking 1999; Foucault 1971).


### 2.2 Does history possess directionality?



Philosophers have raised questions about the meaning and structure of
the totality of human history. Some philosophers have sought to
discover a large organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human
history. This may take the form of an effort to demonstrate how
history enacts a divine order, or reveals a large pattern (cyclical,
teleological, progressive), or plays out an important theme (for
example, Hegel's conception of history as the unfolding of human
freedom discussed below). The ambition in each case is to demonstrate
that the apparent contingency and arbitrariness of historical events
can be related to a more fundamental underlying purpose or order.



This approach to history may be described as hermeneutic; but it is
focused on interpretation of large historical features rather than the
interpretation of individual meanings and actions. In effect, it
treats the sweep of history as a complicated, tangled text, in which
the interpreter assigns meanings to some elements of the story in
order to fit these elements into the larger themes and motifs of the
story. (Ranke makes this point explicitly (1881).)



A recurring current in this approach to the philosophy of history
falls in the area of theodicy or eschatology: religiously inspired
attempts to find meaning and structure in history by relating the past
and present to some specific, divinely ordained plan. Theologians and
religious thinkers have attempted to find meaning in historical events
as expressions of divine will. One reason for theological interest in
this question is the problem of evil; thus Leibniz's
*Theodicy* attempts to provide a logical interpretation of
history that makes the tragedies of history compatible with a
benevolent God's will (1709). In the twentieth century,
theologians such as Maritain (1957), Rust (1947), and Dawson (1929)
offered systematic efforts to provide Christian interpretations of
history.



Enlightenment thinkers rejected the religious interpretation of
history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of
progress--the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of
better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be
witnessed through study of the history of civilization (Condorcet
1795; Montesquieu 1748). Vico's philosophy of history seeks to
identify a foundational series of stages of human civilization.
Different civilizations go through the same stages, because human
nature is constant across history (Pompa 1990). Rousseau (1762a;
1762b) and Kant (1784-5; 1784-6) brought some of these
assumptions about rationality and progress into their political
philosophies, and Adam Smith embodies some of this optimism about the
progressive effects of rationality in his account of the unfolding of
the modern European economic system (1776). This effort to derive a
fixed series of stages as a tool of interpretation of the history of
civilization is repeated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries; it finds expression in Hegel's philosophy (discussed
below), as well as Marx's materialist theory of the development
of economic modes of production (Marx and Engels 1845-49; Marx
and Engels 1848).



The effort to find directionality or stages in history found a new
expression in the early twentieth century, in the hands of several
"meta-historians" who sought to provide a
macro-interpretation that brought order to world history: Spengler
(1934), Toynbee (1934), Wittfogel (1935), and Lattimore (1932). These
authors offered a reading of world history in terms of the rise and
fall of civilizations, races, or cultures. Their writings were not
primarily inspired by philosophical or theological theories, but they
were also not works of primary historical scholarship. Spengler and
Toynbee portrayed human history as a coherent process in which
civilizations pass through specific stages of youth, maturity, and
senescence. Wittfogel and Lattimore interpreted Asian civilizations in
terms of large determining factors. Wittfogel contrasts China's
history with that of Europe by characterizing China's
civilization as one of "hydraulic despotism", with the
attendant consequence that China's history was cyclical rather
than directional. Lattimore applies the key of geographic and
ecological determinism to the development of Asian civilization (Rowe
2007).



A legitimate criticism of many efforts to offer an interpretation of
the sweep of history is the view that it looks for meaning where none
can exist. Interpretation of individual actions and life histories is
intelligible, because we can ground our attributions of meaning in a
theory of the individual person as possessing and creating meanings.
But there is no super-agent lying behind historical events--for
example, the French Revolution--and so it is a metaphysical
mistake to attempt to find the meaning of the features of the event
(e.g., the Terror). The theological approach purports to evade this
criticism by attributing agency to God as the author of history, but
the assumption that there is a divine author of history takes the
making of history out of the hands of humanity.



Efforts to discern large stages in history such as those of Vico,
Spengler, or Toynbee are vulnerable to a different criticism based on
their mono-causal interpretations of the full complexity of human
history. These authors single out one factor that is thought to drive
history: a universal human nature (Vico), or a common set of
civilizational challenges (Spengler, Toynbee). But their hypotheses
need to be evaluated on the basis of concrete historical evidence. And
the evidence concerning the large features of historical change over
the past three millennia offers little support for the idea of one
fixed process of civilizational development. Instead, human history,
at virtually every scale, appears to embody a large degree of
contingency and multiple pathways of development. This is not to say
that there are no credible "large historical"
interpretations available for human history and society. For example,
Michael Mann's sociology of early agrarian civilizations (1986),
De Vries and Goudsblom's efforts at global environmental history
(2002), and Jared Diamond's treatment of disease and warfare
(1997) offer examples of scholars who attempt to explain some large
features of human history on the basis of a few common human
circumstances: the efforts of states to collect revenues, the need of
human communities to exploit resources, or the global transmission of
disease. The challenge for macro-history is to preserve the discipline
of empirical evaluation for the large hypotheses that are put
forward.


### 2.3 Hegel's philosophy of history



Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully
developed philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover
meaning or direction in history (1824a, 1824b, 1857). Hegel regards
history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific
condition--the realization of human freedom. "The question
at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the
spirit sets itself in the world" (1857: 63). Hegel incorporates
a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his
predecessors or successors. He regards the relationship between
"objective" history and the subjective development of the
individual consciousness ("spirit") as an intimate one;
this is a central thesis in his *Phenomenology of Spirit*
(1807). And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to
comprehend its place in the unfolding of history. "History is
the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own
concept" (1857: 62). Hegel constructs world history into a
narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the
polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual
freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the
modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India
and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards
those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical
(O'Brien 1975). He constructs specific moments as
"world-historical" events that were in the process of
bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom. For
example, Napoleon's conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a
world-historical event doing history's work by establishing the
terms of the rational bureaucratic state. Hegel finds reason in
history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be
comprehended when the fullness of history's work is finished:
"When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of
life grown old. ... The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only
with the falling of the dusk" ((Hegel 1821: 13). (See
O'Brien (1975), Taylor (1975), and Kojeve (1969) for
treatments of Hegel's philosophy of history.)



It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not
the indefensible exercise of speculative philosophical reasoning that
analytic philosophers sometimes paint it. His philosophical approach
is not based solely on foundational apriori reasoning, and many of his
interpretations of concrete historical developments are quite
insightful. Instead he proposes an "immanent" encounter
between philosophical reason and the historical given. Here is how W.
H. Walsh (1960) describes Hegel's intellectual project in his
philosophy of history:



> 
> 
> To accomplish this task the philosopher must take the results of
> empirical history as data, but it will not suffice for him merely to
> reproduce them. He must try to illuminate history by bringing his
> knowledge of the Idea, the formal articulation of reason, to bear upon
> it, striving, in a phrase Hegel uses elsewhere, to elevate empirical
> contents to the rank of necessary truth. (Walsh 1960: 143)
> 
> 
> 



Hegel's prescription is that the philosopher should seek to
discover the rational within the real--not to impose the rational
upon the real. "To comprehend what is, this is the task of
philosophy, because what is, is reason" (1821: 11). His approach
is neither purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he
undertakes to discover within the best historical knowledge of his
time, an underlying rational principle that can be philosophically
articulated (Avineri 1972).


### 2.4 Hermeneutic approaches to history



Another important strand of continental philosophy of history proposes
to apply hermeneutics to problems of historical interpretation. This
approach focuses on the meaning of the actions and intentions of
historical individuals rather than historical wholes. This tradition
derives from the tradition of scholarly Biblical interpretation.
Hermeneutic scholars emphasized the linguistic and symbolic core of
human interactions and maintained that the techniques that had been
developed for the purpose of interpreting texts could also be employed
to interpret symbolic human actions and products. Wilhelm Dilthey
maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the
natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of
meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal
explanation of non-intensional events (1883, 1860-1903, 1910). Human
life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and
symbolic expressions. Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of
hermeneutics--the interpretation of meaningful texts--are
suited to the interpretation of human action and history. The method
of *verstehen* (understanding) makes a methodology of this
approach; it invites the thinker to engage in an active construction
of the meanings and intentions of the actors from their point of view
(Outhwaite 1975). This line of interpretation of human history found
expression in the twentieth-century philosophical writings of
Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. This tradition approaches
the philosophy of history from the perspective of meaning and
language. It argues that historical knowledge depends upon
interpretation of meaningful human actions and practices. Historians
should probe historical events and actions in order to discover the
interconnections of meaning and symbolic interaction that human
actions have created (Sherratt 2006).



The hermeneutic tradition took an important new turn in the
mid-twentieth century, as philosophers attempted to make sense of
modern historical developments including war, racism, and the
Holocaust. Narratives of progress were no longer compelling, following
the terrible events of the first half of the twentieth century. The
focus of this approach might be labeled "history as
remembrance." Contributors to this strand of thought emerged
from twentieth-century European philosophy, including existentialism
and Marxism, and were influenced by the search for meaning in the
Holocaust. Paul Ricoeur draws out the parallels between personal
memory, cultural memory, and history (2000). Dominick LaCapra brings
the tools of interpretation theory and critical theory to bear on his
treatment of the representation of the trauma of the Holocaust (1994,
1998). Others emphasize the role that folk histories play in the
construction and interpretation of "our" past. This is a
theme that has been taken up by contemporary historians, for example,
by Michael Kammen in his treatment of public remembrance of the
American Civil War (1991). Memory and the representation of the past
play a key role in the formation of racial and national identities;
numerous twentieth-century philosophers have noted the degree of
subjectivity and construction that are inherent in the national
memories represented in a group's telling of its history.



Although not himself falling within the continental lineage, R. G.
Collingwood's philosophy of history falls within the general
framework of hermeneutic philosophy of history (1946). Collingwood
focuses on the question of how to specify the content of history. He
argues that history is constituted by human actions. Actions are the
result of intentional deliberation and choice; so historians are able
to explain historical processes "from within" as a
reconstruction of the thought processes of the agents who bring them
about. He presents the idea of re-enactment as a solution to the
problem of knowledge of the past from the point of view of the
present. The past is accessible to historians in the present, because
it is open to them to re-enact important historical moments through
imaginative reconstruction of the actors' states of mind and
intentions. He describes this activity of re-enactment in the context
of the historical problem of understanding Plato's meanings as a
philosopher or Caesar's intentions as a ruler:



> 
> This re-enactment is only accomplished, in the case of Plato and
> Caesar respectively, so far as the historian brings to bear on the
> problem all the powers of his own mind and all his knowledge of
> philosophy and politics. It is not a passive surrender to the spell of
> another's mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical
> thinking. (Collingwood 1946: 215)
> 


### 2.5 Conceptual history



The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important
contributions to the philosophy of history that are largely
independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of
history mentioned here. (Koselleck's contributions are ably
discussed in Olsen 2012.) Koselleck contributed to a "conceptual
and critical theory of history" (2002, 2004). His major
compendium, with Brunner and Conze, of the history of concepts of
history in the German-speaking world is one of the major expressions
of this work (Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck 1972-97). Koselleck
believes there are three key tasks for the metahistorian or
philosopher: to identify the concepts that are either possible or
necessary in characterizing history; to locate those concepts within
the context of the social and political discourses and conflicts of
the time period; and to critically evaluate various of these concepts
for their usefulness in historical analysis.



Key examples that Koselleck develops include "space of
experience" and "horizon of expectation". Examples
of metahistorical categories in Koselleck's account include
"capacity to die and capacity to kill," "friend and
foe," "inside and outside," and "master and
servant". Koselleck represents these conceptual oppositions as
representing conditions of possibility of any representation of
history (Bouton 2016: 178).



A large part of Koselleck's work thus involves identifying and
describing various kinds of historical concepts. In order to represent
history it is necessary to make use of a vocabulary that distinguishes
the things we need to talk about; and historical concepts permit these
identifications. This in turn requires both conceptual and historical
treatment: how the concepts are understood, and how they have changed
over time. Christophe Bouton encapsulates Koselleck's approach
in these terms: "[It is an] inquiry into the historical
categories that are used in, or presupposed by, the experience of
history at its different levels, as events, traces, and
narratives" (Bouton 2016: 164). Further, Bouton argues that
Koselleck also brings a critical perspective to the concepts that he
discusses: he asks the question of validity (Bouton 2016). To what
extent do these particular concepts work well to characterize
history?



What this amounts to is the idea that history is the result of
conceptualization of the past on the part of the people who tell
it--professional historians, politicians, partisans, and ordinary
citizens. (It is interesting to note that Koselleck's research
in the final years of his career focused on the meaning of public
monuments, especially war memorials.) It is therefore an important,
even crucial, task to investigate the historical concepts that have
been used to characterize the past. A key concept that was of interest
to Koselleck was the idea of "modernity". This approach
might seem to fall within the larger field of intellectual history;
but Koselleck and other exponents believe that the historical concepts
in use actually play a role as well in the concrete historical
developments that occur within a period.



It is worth noticing that history comes into Koselleck's notion
of *Begriffsgeschichte* in two ways. Koselleck is concerned to
uncover the logic and semantics of the concepts that have been used to
describe historical events and processes; and he is interested in the
historical evolution of some of those concepts over time. (In this
latter interest his definition of the question parallels that of the
so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and J. G. A.
Pocock.) Numerous observers emphasize the importance of political
conflict in Koselleck's account of historical concepts: concepts
are used by partisans to define the field of battle over values and
loyalties (Pankakoski 2010). More generally, Koselleck's aim is
to excavate the layers of meaning that have been associated with key
historical concepts in different historical periods. (Whatmore and
Young 2015 provide extensive and useful accounts of each of the
positions mentioned here.)



Conceptual history may appear to have a Kantian background--an
exploration of the "categories" of thought on the basis of
which alone history is intelligible. But this appears not to be
Koselleck's intention, and his approach is not apriori. Rather,
he looks at historical concepts on a spectrum of abstraction, from
relatively close to events (the French Revolution) to more abstract
(revolutionary change). Moreover, he makes rigorous attempts to
discover the meanings and uses of these concepts in their historical
contexts.



Koselleck's work defines a separate space within the field of
the philosophy of history. It has to do with meanings in history, but
it is neither teleological nor hermeneutic. It takes seriously the
obligation of the historian excavate the historical facts with
scrupulous rigor, but it is not empiricist or reductionist. It
emphasizes the dependence of "history" on the conceptual
resources of those who live history and those who tell history, but it
is not post-modernist or relativist. Koselleck provides an innovative
and constructive way of formulating the problem of historical
knowledge.


## 3. Anglo-American philosophy of history



The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American philosophy have also
devoted occasional attention to history. Philosophers in this
tradition have avoided the questions of speculative philosophy of
history and have instead raised questions about the logic and
epistemology of historical knowledge. Here the guiding question is,
"What are the logical and epistemological characteristics of
historical knowledge and historical explanation?".



David Hume's empiricism cast a dominant key for almost all
subsequent Anglo-American philosophy, and this influence extends to
the interpretation of human behavior and the human sciences. Hume
wrote a widely read history of England (1754-1762). His
interpretation of history was based on the assumption of ordinary
actions, motives, and causes, with no sympathy for theological
interpretations of the past. His philosophical view of history was
premised on the idea that explanations of the past can be based on the
assumption of a fixed human nature.



Anglo-American interest in the philosophy of history was renewed at
mid-twentieth century with the emergence of "analytical
philosophy of history." Representative contributors include Dray
(1957, 1964, 1966), Danto (1965), and Gardiner (1952, 1974). This
approach involves the application of the methods and tools of analytic
philosophy to the special problems that arise in the pursuit of
historical explanations and historical knowledge (Gardiner 1952). Here
the interest is in the characteristics of historical knowledge: how we
know facts about the past, what constitutes a good historical
explanation, whether explanations in history require general laws, and
whether historical knowledge is underdetermined by available
historical evidence. Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical
and scientific status of historical knowledge, and attempted to
understand this claim along the lines of the scientific standing of
the natural sciences (Nagel 1961).



Philosophers in the analytic tradition are deeply skeptical about the
power of non-empirical reason to arrive at substantive conclusions
about the structure of the world--including human history.
Philosophical reasoning by itself cannot be a source of substantive
knowledge about the natural world, or about the sequence of events,
actions, states, classes, empires, plagues, and conquests that we call
"history." Rather, substantive knowledge about the world
can only derive from empirical investigation and logical analysis of
the consequences of these findings. So analytic philosophers of
history have had little interest in the large questions about the
meaning and structure of history considered above. The practitioners
of speculative philosophy of history, on the other hand, are convinced
of the power of philosophical thought to reason through to a
foundational understanding of history, and would be impatient with a
call for a purely empirical and conceptual approach to the
subject.



W. H. Walsh's *Philosophy of History* (Walsh 1960 [1951]),
first published in 1951 and revised in 1960, is an open-minded and
well-grounded effort to provide an in-depth presentation of the field
that crosses the separation between continental and analytical
philosophy. The book attempts to treat both major questions driving
much of the philosophy of history: the nature of historical knowledge
and the possibility of gaining "metaphysical" knowledge
about history. An Oxford philosopher trained in modern philosophy,
Walsh was strongly influenced by Collingwood and was well aware of the
European idealist tradition of philosophical thinking about history,
including Rickert, Dilthey, and Croce, and he treats this tradition in
a serious way. He draws the distinction between these traditions along
the lines of "critical" and "speculative"
philosophy of history. Walsh's goal for the book is ambitious;
he hopes to propose a framework within which the main questions about
history can be addressed, including both major traditions. He advances
the view that the historian is presented with a number of events,
actions, and developments during a period. How do they hang together?
The process of cognition through which the historian makes sense of a
set of separate historical events Walsh refers to as
"colligation" -- "to locate a historical event
in a larger historical process in terms of which it makes sense"
(23).



Walsh fundamentally accepts Collingwood's most basic premise:
that history concerns conscious human action. Collingwood's
slogan was that "history is the science of the mind," and
Walsh appears to accept much of this perspective. So the key
intellectual task for the historian, on this approach, is to
reconstruct the reasons or motives that actors had at various points
in history (and perhaps the conditions that led them to have these
reasons and motives). This means that the tools of interpretation of
meanings and reasons are crucial for the historian--much as the
hermeneutic philosophers in the German tradition had argued.



Walsh suggests that the philosophical content of the philosophy of
history falls naturally into two different sorts of inquiry, parallel
to the distinction between philosophy of nature and philosophy of
science. The first has to do with metaphysical questions about the
reality of history as a whole; the latter has to do with the epistemic
issues that arise in the pursuit and formulation of knowledge of
history. He refers to these approaches as "speculative"
and "critical" aspects of the philosophy of history. And
he attempts to formulate a view of what the key questions are for each
approach. Speculative philosophy of history asks about the meaning and
purpose of the historical process. Critical philosophy of history is
what we now refer to as "analytic" philosophy; it is the
equivalent for history of what the philosophy of science is for
nature.


### 3.1 General laws in history?



The philosopher of science Carl Hempel stimulated analytic
philosophers' interest in historical knowledge in his essay,
"The Function of General Laws in History" (1942).
Hempel's general theory of scientific explanation held that all
scientific explanations require subsumption under general laws. Hempel
considered historical explanation as an apparent exception to the
covering-law model and attempted to show the suitability of the
covering-law model even to this special case. He argued that valid
historical explanations too must invoke general laws. The covering-law
approach to historical explanation was supported by other analytical
philosophers of science, including Ernest Nagel (1961). Hempel's
essay provoked a prolonged controversy between supporters who cited
generalizations about human behavior as the relevant general laws, and
critics who argued that historical explanations are more akin to
explanations of individual behavior, based on interpretation that
makes the outcome comprehensible. Especially important discussions
were offered by William Dray (1957), Michael Scriven (1962), and Alan
Donagan (1966). Donagan and others pointed out the difficulty that
many social explanations depend on probabilistic regularities rather
than universal laws. Others, including Scriven, pointed out the
pragmatic features of explanation, suggesting that arguments that fall
far short of deductive validity are nonetheless sufficient to
"explain" a given historical event in a given context of
belief. The most fundamental objections, however, are these: first,
that there are virtually no good examples of universal laws in
history, whether of human behavior or of historical event succession
(Donagan 1966: 143-45); and second, that there are other
compelling schemata through which we can understand historical actions
and outcomes that do not involve subsumption under general laws
(Elster 1989). These include the processes of reasoning through which
we understand individual actions--analogous to the methods of
*verstehen* and the interpretation of rational behavior
mentioned above (Dray 1966: 131-37); and the processes through
which we can trace out chains of causation and specific causal
mechanisms without invoking universal laws.



A careful re-reading of these debates over the covering-law model in
history suggests that the debate took place largely because of the
erroneous assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of
the regulative logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning
to a few clear examples of explanation in a few natural sciences. This
approach was a deeply impoverished one, and handicapped from the start
in its ability to pose genuinely important questions about the nature
of history and historical knowledge. Explanation of human actions and
outcomes should not be understood along the lines of an explanation of
why radiators burst when the temperature falls below zero degrees
centigrade. As Donagan concludes, "It is harmful to overlook the
fundamental identity of the social sciences with history, and to
mutilate research into human affairs by remodeling the social sciences
into deformed likenesses of physics" (1966: 157). The insistence
on naturalistic models for social and historical research leads easily
to a presumption in favor of the covering-law model of explanation,
but this presumption is misleading.


### 3.2 Historical objectivity



Another issue that provoked significant attention among analytic
philosophers of history is the issue of "objectivity." Is
it possible for historical knowledge to objectively represent the
past? Or are forms of bias, omission, selection, and interpretation
such as to make all historical representations dependent on the
perspective of the individual historian? Does the fact that human
actions are value-laden make it impossible for the historian to
provide a non-value-laden account of those actions?



This topic divides into several different problems, as noted by John
Passmore (1966: 76). The most studied of these within the analytic
tradition is that of the value-ladenness of social action. Second is
the possibility that the historian's interpretations are
themselves value-laden--raising the question of the capacity for
objectivity or neutrality of the historian herself. Does the
intellectual have the ability to investigate the world without regard
to the biases that are built into her political or ethical beliefs,
her ideology, or her commitments to a class or a social group? And
third is the question of the objectivity of the historical
circumstances themselves. Is there a fixed historical reality,
independent from later representations of the facts? Or is history
intrinsically "constructed," with no objective reality
independent from the ways in which it is constructed? Is there a
reality corresponding to the phrase, "the French
Revolution," or is there simply an accumulation of written
versions of the French Revolution?



There are solutions to each of these problems that are highly
consonant with the philosophical assumptions of the analytic
tradition. First, concerning values: There is no fundamental
difficulty in reconciling the idea of a researcher with one set of
religious values, who nonetheless carefully traces out the religious
values of a historical actor possessing radically different values.
This research can be done badly, of course; but there is no inherent
epistemic barrier that makes it impossible for the researcher to
examine the body of statements, behaviors, and contemporary cultural
institutions corresponding to the other, and to come to a justified
representation of the other. One need not share the values or
worldview of a *sans-culotte*, in order to arrive at a
justified appraisal of those values and worldview. This leads us to a
resolution of the second issue as well--the possibility of
neutrality on the part of the researcher. The set of epistemic values
that we impart to scientists and historians include the value of
intellectual discipline and a willingness to subject their hypotheses
to the test of uncomfortable facts. Once again, review of the history
of science and historical writing makes it apparent that this
intellectual value has effect. There are plentiful examples of
scientists and historians whose conclusions are guided by their
interrogation of the evidence rather than their ideological
presuppositions. Objectivity in pursuit of truth is itself a value,
and one that can be followed.



Finally, on the question of the objectivity of the past: Is there a
basis for saying that events or circumstances in the past have
objective, fixed characteristics that are independent from our
representation of those events? Is there a representation-independent
reality underlying the large historical structures to which historians
commonly refer (the Roman Empire, the Great Wall of China, the
imperial administration of the Qianlong Emperor)? We can work our way
carefully through this issue, by recognizing a distinction between the
objectivity of past events, actions and circumstances, the objectivity
of the contemporary facts that resulted from these past events, and
the objectivity and fixity of large historical entities. The past
occurred in precisely the way that it did--agents acted, droughts
occurred, armies were defeated, new technologies were invented. These
occurrences left traces of varying degrees of information richness;
and these traces give us a rational basis for arriving at beliefs
about the occurrences of the past. So we can offer a non-controversial
interpretation of the "objectivity of the past." However,
this objectivity of events and occurrences does not extend very far
upward as we consider more abstract historical events: the creation of
the Greek city-state, the invention of Enlightenment rationality, the
Taiping Rebellion. In each of these instances the noun's
referent is an interpretive construction by historical actors and
historians, and one that may be undone by future historians. To refer
to the "Taiping Rebellion" requires an act of synthesis of
a large number of historical facts, along with an interpretive story
that draws these facts together in this way rather than that way. The
underlying facts of behavior, and their historical traces, remain; but
the knitting-together of these facts into a large historical event
does not constitute an objective historical entity. Consider research
in the past twenty years that questions the existence of the
"Industrial Revolution." In this debate, the same set of
historical facts were first constructed into an abrupt episode of
qualitative change in technology and output in Western Europe; under
the more recent interpretation, these changes were more gradual and
less correctly characterized as a "revolution"
(O'Brien and Keyder 1978). Or consider Arthur Waldron's
sustained and detailed argument to the effect that there was no
"Great Wall of China," as that structure is usually
conceptualized (1990).


### 3.3 Causation in history



A third important set of issues that received attention from analytic
philosophers concerned the role of causal ascriptions in historical
explanations. What is involved in saying that "The American
Civil War was caused by economic conflict between the North and the
South"? Does causal ascription require identifying an underlying
causal regularity--for example, "periods of rapid inflation
cause political instability"? Is causation established by
discovering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Can we
identify causal connections among historical events by tracing a
series of causal mechanisms linking one to the next? This topic raises
the related problem of determinism in history: are certain events
inevitable in the circumstances? Was the fall of the Roman Empire
inevitable, given the configuration of military and material
circumstances prior to the crucial events?



Analytic philosophers of history most commonly approached these issues
on the basis of a theory of causation drawn from positivist philosophy
of science. This theory is ultimately grounded in Humean assumptions
about causation: that causation is nothing but constant conjunction.
So analytic philosophers were drawn to the covering-law model of
explanation, because it appeared to provide a basis for asserting
historical causation. As noted above, this approach to causal
explanation is fatally flawed in the social sciences, because
universal causal regularities among social phenomena are unavailable.
So it is necessary either to arrive at other interpretations of
causality or to abandon the language of causality. A second approach
was to define causes in terms of a set of causally relevant conditions
for the occurrence of the event--for example, necessary and/or
sufficient conditions, or a set of conditions that enhance or reduce
the likelihood of the event. This approach found support in
"ordinary language" philosophy and in analysis of the use
of causal language in such contexts as the courtroom (Hart and
Honore 1959). Counterfactual reasoning is an important element
of discovery of a set of necessary and/or sufficient conditions; to
say that \(C\) was necessary for the occurrence of \(E\) requires that
we provide evidence that \(E\) would not have occurred if \(C\) were
not present (Mackie 1965, 1974). And it is evident that there are
causal circumstances in which no single factor is necessary for the
occurrence of the effect; the outcome may be overdetermined by
multiple independent factors.



The convergence of reasons and causes in historical processes is
helpful in this context, because historical causes are frequently the
effect of deliberate human action (Davidson 1963). So specifying the
reason for the action is simultaneously identifying a part of the
cause of the consequences of the action. It is often justifiable to
identify a concrete action as the cause of a particular event (a
circumstance that was sufficient in the existing circumstances to
bring about the outcome), and it is feasible to provide a convincing
interpretation of the reasons that led the actor to carry out the
action.



What analytic philosophers of the 1960s did not come to, but what is
crucial for current understanding of historical causality, is the
feasibility of tracing causal mechanisms through a complex series of
events (causal realism). Historical narratives often take the form of
an account of a series of events, each of which was a causal condition
or trigger for later events. Subsequent research in the philosophy of
the social sciences has provided substantial support for historical
explanations that depend on tracing a series of causal mechanisms
(Little 2018; Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998).


### 3.4 Recent topics in the philosophy of history



English-speaking philosophy of history shifted significantly in the
1970s, beginning with the publication of Hayden White's
*Metahistory* (1973) and Louis Mink's writings of the
same period (1966; Mink et al. 1987). The so-called "linguistic
turn" that marked many areas of philosophy and literature also
influenced the philosophy of history. Whereas analytic philosophy of
history had emphasized scientific analogies for historical knowledge
and advanced the goals of verifiability and generalizability in
historical knowledge, English-speaking philosophers in the 1970s and
1980s were increasingly influenced by hermeneutic philosophy,
post-modernism, and French literary theory (Rorty 1979). These
philosophers emphasized the rhetoric of historical writing, the
non-reducibility of historical narrative to a sequence of
"facts", and the degree of construction that is involved
in historical representation. Affinities with literature and
anthropology came to eclipse examples from the natural sciences as
guides for representing historical knowledge and historical
understanding. The richness and texture of the historical narrative
came in for greater attention than the attempt to provide causal
explanations of historical outcomes. Frank Ankersmit captured many of
these themes in his treatment of historical narrative (1995; Ankersmit
and Kellner 1995); see also Berkhofer (1995).



This "new" philosophy of history is distinguished from
analytic philosophy of history in several important respects. It
emphasizes historical narrative rather than historical causation. It
is intellectually closer to the hermeneutic tradition than to the
positivism that underlay the analytic philosophy of history of the
1960s. It highlights features of subjectivity and multiple
interpretation over those of objectivity, truth, and correspondence to
the facts. Another important strand in this approach to the philosophy
of history is a clear theoretical preference for the historicist
rather than the universalist position on the status of human
nature--Herder rather than Vico. The prevalent perspective holds
that human consciousness is itself a historical product, and that it
is an important part of the historian's work to piece together
the mentality and assumptions of actors in the past (Pompa 1990).
Significantly, contemporary historians such as Robert Darnton have
turned to the tools of ethnography to permit this sort of discovery
(1984).



Another important strand of thinking within analytic philosophy has
focused attention on historical ontology (Hacking 2002, Little 2010).
The topic of historical ontology is important, both for philosophers
and for practicing historians. Ontology has to do with the question,
what kinds of things do we need to postulate in a given realm?
Historical ontology poses this question with regard to the realities
of the past. Should large constructs like 'revolution',
'market society', 'fascism', or
'Protestant religious identity' be included in our
ontology as real things? Or should we treat these ideas in a purely
nominalistic way, treating them as convenient ways of aggregating
complex patterns of social action and knowledge by large numbers of
social actors in a time and place? Further, how should we think about
the relationship between instances and categories in the realm of
history, for example, the relation between the French, Chinese, or
Russian Revolutions and the general category of
'revolution'? Are there social kinds that recur in
history, or is each historical formation unique in important ways?
These are all questions of ontology, and the answers we give to them
will have important consequences for how we conceptualize and explain
the past.


## 4. Historiography and the philosophy of history



When historians discuss methodological issues in their research they
more commonly refer to "historiography" than to
"philosophy of history." What is the relation between
these bodies of thought about the writing of history? We should begin
by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most
general sense, the term refers to the study of historians'
methods and practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided
by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and
"experts" evaluate the performances of practitioners based
on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards.
So one task we always have in considering an expert activity is to
attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance.
This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing
history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work
for a particular body of historical writing. (Several handbooks
contain a wealth of recent writings on various aspects of
historiography; Tucker 2009, Bentley 1997, Breisach 2007. Important
and innovative contributions to understanding the intellectual tasks
of the historian include Bloch 1953 and Paul 2015.)



Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those
claims based on the reasoning they present. So a major aspect of the
study of historiography has to do with *defining the ideas of
evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning* for historical
inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically
supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to
offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by
standards of scientific rationality. (Simon Schama challenges some of
these ideas in *Dead Certainties* (Schama 1991).) So the
apprentice practitioner seeks to gain knowledge of the practices of
his/her elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling
argument, how to assess a body of archival evidence, how to offer or
criticize an interpretation of complex events that necessarily exceeds
the available evidence. The historiographer has a related task: he/she
would like to be able to codify the main methods and standards of one
historical school or another.



There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these
criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch.
Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well
he or she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic
standards that guide the historian's work is itself an important
task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography
will naturally be interested in the *conventions of historical
writing and rhetoric* that are characteristic of a given period or
school.



A full historiographic assessment of a given historian might include
questions like these: What methods of discovery does he/she use? What
rhetorical and persuasive goals does he/she pursue? What models of
explanation? What paradigm of presentation? What standards of style
and rhetoric? What interpretive assumptions?



A historical school might be defined as a group of interrelated
historians who share a significant number of specific assumptions
about evidence, explanation, and narrative. The *Annales*
school, established by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the 1920s,
represented a distinctive and fertile approach to social history
(Burguiere 2009), united by shared assumptions about both
topics and intellectual approaches to the past. Historiography becomes
itself historical when we recognize that frameworks of assumptions
about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this
assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself
an important subject. How did historians of various periods in human
history conduct their study and presentation of history? Under this
rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient Greeks;
Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German
romanticism. Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient
historians fall in this category (Momigliano 1990). In a nutshell,
Momigliano is looking at the several traditions of ancient
history-writing as a set of normative practices that can be dissected
and understood in their specificity and their cultural contexts.



A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more
present-oriented and methodological. It involves the study and
analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and
presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. How do
contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the
past? Here we can reflect upon the historiographical challenges that
confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy
in the 1920s and 1930s (Huang 1990), or the historiographical issues
raised in Robert Darnton's telling of a peculiar and trivial
event, the Great Cat Massacre by printers' apprentices in
Paris in the 1730s (Darnton 1984). Sometimes these issues have to do
with the scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical
records (for example, the fact that much of what Huang refers to about
the village economy of North China was gathered by the research teams
of the occupying Japanese army). Sometimes they have to do with the
difficulty of interpreting historical sources (for example, the
unavoidable necessity Darnton faced of providing meaningful
interpretation of a range of documented actions that appear
fundamentally irrational).



An important question that arises in recent historiography is that of
the status of the notion of "global history." One
important reason for thinking globally as an historian is the fact
that the history discipline--since the Greeks--has tended to
be Eurocentric in its choice of topics, framing assumptions, and
methods. Economic and political history, for example, often privileges
the industrial revolution in England and the creation of the modern
bureaucratic state in France, Britain, and Germany, as being exemplars
of "modern" development in economics and politics. This
has led to a tendency to look at other countries' development as
non-standard or stunted. So global history is, in part, a framework
within which the historian avoids privileging one regional center as
primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong makes this
point in *China Transformed* (Wong 1997).



Second is the related fact that when Western historical
thinkers--for example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu--have
turned their attention to Asia, they have often engaged in a high
degree of stereotyping without much factual historical knowledge. The
ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation, and Chinese
stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the intricate
and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a
single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of
thought. This is one of the points of Edward Said's critique of
orientalism (Said 1978). So doing "global" history means
paying rigorous attention to the specificities of social, political,
and cultural arrangements in other parts of the world besides
Europe.



So a historiography that takes global diversity seriously should be
expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more
open to discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in
the experiences of India, China, Indochina, the Arab world, the
Ottoman Empire, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Variation and complexity are
what we should expect, not stereotyped simplicity. Clifford
Geertz's historical reconstruction of the "theatre
state" of Bali is a case in point--he uncovers a complex
system of governance, symbol, value, and hierarchy that represents a
substantially different structure of politics than the models derived
from the emergence of bureaucratic states in early modern Europe
(Geertz 1980). A global history needs to free itself from
Eurocentrism.



This step away from Eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied
by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically
interesting. So a global history ought to be global and trans-national
in its selection of topics--even while recognizing the fact that
all historical research is selective. A globally oriented historian
will recognize that the political systems of classical India are as
interesting and complex as the organization of the Roman Republic.



An important current underlying much work in global history is the
reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and the equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and
nation building in the 1960s and 1970s. "The world" was
important in the early-modern capitals of Great Britain, France,
Germany, and Belgium because those nations exerted colonial rule in
various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. So there was a
specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those
societies--in order to better govern them and exploit them. And
post-colonial states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global
historiography in their own universities and knowledge systems, in
order to better understand and better critique the forming relations
of the past.



A final way in which history needs to become global is to incorporate
the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in
non-western countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world
developments. Indian and Chinese historians have their own
intellectual traditions in conducting historical research and
explanation; a global history is one that pays attention to the
insights and arguments of these traditions. So global historiography
has to do with a broadened definition of the arena of historical
change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the
Americas; a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of
institutions and systems in many parts of the world; a recognition of
the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents
for at least four centuries; and a recognition of the complexity and
distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography



Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some
of these issues (Sachsenmaier 2011). Sachsenmaier devotes much of his
attention to the last point mentioned here, the "multiple global
perspectives" point. He wants to take this idea seriously and
try to discover some of the implications of different national
traditions of academic historiography. He writes, "It will
become quite clear that in European societies the question of
historiographical traditions tended to be answered in ways that were
profoundly different from most academic communities in other parts of
the world" (17).



As should be clear from these remarks, there is a degree of overlap
between historiography and the philosophy of history in the fact that
both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of
reasoning that are used in various historical traditions. That said,
historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than
the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics
of research and writing than is the philosophy of history.


## 5. Historical understanding and the twentieth century



Every period presents challenges for the historian, and every period
raises problems for historiography and the philosophy of history. The
twentieth century is exceptional, however, even by this standard.
Events of truly global significance occurred from beginning to end.
War, totalitarianism, genocide, mass starvation, ideologies of murder
and extermination, and states that dominated their populations with
unprecedented violence all transpired during the century. The
Holocaust (Snyder 2010, 2015), the Holodomor (Applebaum 2017), the
Gulag (Applebaum 2003), and the cultural and ideological premises of
the Nazi regime (Rabinbach et al 2020) have all presented historians
with major new challenges of research, framing, and understanding. How
should historians seek to come to grips with these complex and
horrifying circumstances? These occurrences were highly complex and
extended and often hidden: many thousands of active participants, many
groups and populations, millions of victims, conflicting purposes and
goals, new organizations and institutions, numerous ideologies.
Moreover, through too many of these novelties is woven the theme of
evil - deliberate destruction, degradation, and murder of masses
of innocent human beings. The historian of virtually any aspect of the
twentieth century is confronted with great problems of frame-setting,
explanatory purpose, and moral reflection.



These facts about the twentieth century raise problems for the
philosophy of history for several reasons. They challenge historians
to consider the depth, detail, and human experience that the historian
must convey of the events and experiences that war, genocide, and
totalitarianism imposed on millions of people. The discovery and
truthful documentation of the extent and lived experience of these
crimes is a painful but crucial necessity. Second, historians are
forced to reflect on the assumptions they bring to their research and
interpretations - assumptions about geography, political
causation, individual motivation, and behavior resulting in these
crimes. Third, historians must reconsider and sharpen their hypotheses
about causation of these vast and extended crimes against humanity.
Fourth, it appears inescapable that historians have a human
responsibility to contribute to worldwide changes in culture, memory,
and politics in ways that make genocide and totalitarian oppression
less likely in the future.



The ways in which historians have sought to understand the Holocaust
have undergone important historical realignment in the past twenty
years. Raul Hilberg (1961) and Lucy Dawidowicz (1975) captured much of
the postwar historical consensus about the Holocaust. However, recent
historians have offered new ways of thinking about the Nazi plan of
extermination. Timothy Snyder (2010, 2015) argues that the Nazi war of
extermination against the Jews has been importantly
misunderstood--too centered on Germany, when the majority of
genocide and murder occurred further east, in the lands that he calls
the "bloodlands" of central Europe (Poland, Latvia,
Lithuania, Ukraine, the Soviet Union); largely focused on
extermination camps, whereas most killing of Jews occurred near the
cities and villages where they lived, and most commonly by gunfire;
insufficiently attentive to the relationship between extermination of
people and destruction of the institutions of state in subject
countries; and without sufficient attention to Hitler's own
worldview, within which the Nazi war of extermination against
Europe's Jews was framed. Alexander Prusin (2010) conceptualizes
the topic of mass murder in the period 1933-1945 in much the
same geographical terms. Like Snyder, Prusin defines his subject
matter as a region rather than a nation or collection of nations. The
national borders that exist within the region are of less importance
in his account than the facts of ethnic, religious, and community
disparities that are evident across the region. Thus both historians
argue that we need to understand the geography of the Holocaust
differently. Snyder believes that these attempts at refocusing the way
we understand the Holocaust lead to a new assessment: bad as we
thought the Holocaust was, it was much, much worse.



Another strand of re-thinking that has occurred in the study of the
Holocaust concerns a renewed focus on the motivations of the ordinary
people who participated in the machinery of mass murder. A major field
of research into ordinary behavior during the Holocaust was made
possible by the availability of investigative files concerning the
actions of a Hamburg police unit that was assigned special duties as
"Order Police" in Poland in 1940. These duties amounted to
collecting and massacring large numbers of Jewish men, women, and
children. Christopher Browning (1992) and Daniel Goldhagen (1996) made
extensive use of investigatory files and testimonies of the men of
Reserve Police Battalion 101. Both books came to shocking conclusions:
very ordinary, middle-aged, apolitical men of the police unit picked
up the work of murder and extermination with zeal and efficiency. They
were not coerced, they were not indoctrinated, and they were not
deranged; and yet they turned to the work of mass murder with
enthusiasm. A small percentage of the men of the unit declined the
shooting assignments, but the great majority did not. Another
important example of research on ordinary people committing mass
murder is Jan Gross's (2001) case study of a single massacre of
Jews in Jedwabne, a small Polish town during the Nazi occupation, but
not ordered or directed by the German occupation. Instead, this was a
local, indigenous action by non-Jewish residents in the town who
gathered up their Jewish neighbors and then murdered large numbers of
them. Gross's account has stimulated much debate, but Anna
Bikont (2015) validates almost every detail of Gross's original
narrative.



As a different example, consider now the history of the Gulag in the
Soviet Union. Anne Applebaum (2003) provides a detailed and honest
history of the Gulag and its role in maintaining Soviet dictatorship.
Stalin's dictatorship depended on a leader, a party, and a set
of institutions that worked to terrorize and repress the population of
the USSR. The NKVD (the system of internal security police that
enforced Stalin's repression), a justice system that was
embodied in the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38, and especially
the system of forced labor and prison camps that came to be known as
the Gulag constituted the machinery of repression through which a
population of several hundred million people were controlled,
imprisoned, and repressed. Further, like the Nazi regime, Stalin used
the slave labor of the camps to contribute to the economic output of
the Soviet economy. Applebaum estimates that roughly two million
prisoners inhabited several thousand camps of the Gulag at a time in
the 1940s, and that as many as 18 million people had passed through
the camps by 1953 (Applebaum 2003: 13). The economic role of the Gulag
was considerable; significant portions of Soviet-era mining, logging,
and manufacturing took place within the forced labor camps of the
Gulag (13). Applebaum makes a crucial and important point about
historical knowledge in her history of the Gulag: the inherent
incompleteness of historical understanding and the mechanisms of
overlooking and forgetting that get in the way of historical honesty.
The public outside the USSR did not want to know about these
realities. Applebaum notes that public knowledge of the camps in the
West was available, but was de-dramatized and treated as a fairly
minor part of the reality of the USSR. The reality--that the USSR
embodied and depended upon a massive set of concentrations camps where
millions of people were enslaved and sometimes killed--was never
a major part of the Western conception of the USSR. She comments, "far
more common, however, is a reaction of boredom or indifference to
Stalinist terror" (18). Wide knowledge in the West of the scope and
specific human catastrophe of the Gulag was first made available by
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1974).



Similar references could be offered concerning Stalin's war on
the kulaks in the Ukraine (1930s), mass starvation in China
(1958-61), the widespread violence of the Cultural Revolution in
China (1966-1976), and the use of violence in the American South
to enforce Jim Crow-era race relations (1930s-1960s). In each
case terrible things took place on a wide scale, and barriers exist
that make it difficult for historians and the public to come to know
the details of these periods.



The twentieth century poses one additional challenge for the
historian because it falls within the human memories of the
living generation of historians grappling with its intricacies. When
Tony Judt writes (2006) about the fall of Ceausescu in Romania in
1989, or Timothy Snyder (2010) writes about the murderous actions of
German order police in Ukraine in 1940, or Marc Bloch (1949) writes
about the "strange defeat" of France in 1940, they are
writing about events for which they themselves, or their parents, or
Poles and Ukrainian Jews with whom they can interact, have direct
lived experiences and memories. Timothy Snyder's style of
historical writing suggests that the nearness in time of the killings
in the bloodlands both supports and warrants an especially personal
and individual approach; thus Snyder's use of many individual
stories of victims of the killings of peasants, Jews, and other human
victims of the killing machines of Hitler and Stalin suggests that he
believes it is important for the historian to make an effort to convey
the individual meanings of these events affecting millions of people.
How does this accessibility of the recent past affect the problems
facing the historian? Does it influence the ways in which historians
select events, causes, and actions as "crucial"? Does this
experiential access through living memory provide a more secure form
of historical evidence than other sources available to the historian?
Does it give rise to an experiential content and detail to historical
writing that solve an interpretive problem for the reader - for
example, how to put oneself in the position of a Ukrainian peasant
slowly starving to death? Did the stories told in the Judt household
in London in 1942 about beloved cousins then facing deadly threats in
Brussels shape the historical consciousness of the adult historian
(Judt and Snyder 2012)? Did Marc Bloch's own experience as a
French army officer in defeat at Dunkirk influence the way that he
understood war and violence? Access to individuals who lived through
the Holodomor or the Spanish Civil War is of course valuable
historical evidence. Here too, however, Marc Bloch has important
insights, for Bloch specifically challenges the idea that participants
have an inherently more reliable or complete form of knowledge than
more temporally distant historians (1953: chapter II). Memories and
personal accounts are valuable for the historian, but equally,
historians have access to other forms of historical evidence
(archaeological, archival, government records, ...) which may be
comparably important and epistemically secure in attempting to piece
together the complex history of Stalin's war on the Ukrainian
peasantry.



These topics in twentieth-century history create an important reminder
for historians and for philosophers: a truthful understanding of
inhuman atrocity is deeply important for humanity, and it is difficult
to attain. We learn from Judt, Snyder, and Applebaum that there are
powerful mechanisms of deception and forgetting that stand in the way
of an honest accounting of these periods of the recent human past.
Discovering and telling the truth about our past is the highest and
most important moral imperative that history conveys.


## 6. Ethics, history, and memory



As the previous section suggests, there is an ethical dimension
involved in the quest for historical knowledge. Historians have
obligations of truthfulness and objectivity; peoples have obligations
of honest recognition; and nations have obligations of memory and
reconciliation.



Historians themselves have obligations of truthfulness and objectivity
in the accounts they provide of the past. This topic has occupied much
of the discussion of history and ethics in the past few years (Fay
2004). Much of this discussion has centered on the intellectual
virtues to which historians need to aspire, such as truthfulness,
objectivity, and persistence (Creyghton et al 2016, Paul 2015).
Perhaps more generally, we might argue that historians have an
obligation to deliberately and actively include those aspects of the
past for further research that are the most morally
troublesome--for example, the origins and experience of slavery
during the eighteenth century in the American South, or the role of
the Gulag in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. We may
reasonably fault the historian of the American South in the nineteenth
century who confines her investigation to the economics of the cotton
industry without examining the role of slavery in that industry, or
the historian of the USSR who studies the institutions of engineering
research in the 1950s while ignoring the fact of forced labor camps.
Historians have an obligation to squarely confront the hard truths of
their subject matter.



There is a broader ethical question to ask about history that goes
beyond the professional ethics of the historian to the
responsibilities of the public in relation to its own history. The
facts of genocide and other crimes against humanity make it clear that
there are moral reasons for believing that all of humanity has a moral
responsibility to attempt to discover our past with honesty and
exactness. In particular, the facts of past horrific actions
(genocide, mass repression, slavery, suppression of ethnic minorities,
dictatorship) create a moral responsibility for historians and the
public alike to uncover the details, causes, and consequences of those
actions.



The thread of honesty and truthfulness runs through all of these
ethical issues. Tony Judt (1992) argues that a people or nation at a
point in time have a collective responsibility to face the facts of
its own history honestly and without mythology. Judt's points
can be distilled into a few key ideas. Knowledge of the past matters
in the present; being truthful about the past is a key responsibility
for all of us. Standing in the way of honest recognition is the fact
that oppressors and tyrants are invariably interested in concealing
their culpability, while "innocent citizens" are likewise
inclined to minimize their own involvement in the crimes of their
governments. The result is "myth-making", according to Judt. Anna
Wylegala (2017) illustrates the moral importance and complexity of
this kind of investigation with regard to collective memory in
post-1991 Ukraine. The history of the twentieth century has shown
itself to be especially prone to myth-making, whether about resistance
to Nazi occupation or refusal to collaborate with Soviet-installed
regimes in Poland or Czechoslovakia. Judt (1992) argues that a very
pervasive process of myth-making and forgetting has been a deep part
of the narrative-making in post-war Europe. But, Judt argues, bad
myths give rise eventually to bad collective behavior--more
conflict, more tyranny, more violence. So the work of honest history
is crucial to humanity's ability to achieve a better future.
Judt expresses throughout his work a credo of truth-telling about the
past: we have a weighty obligation to discover, represent, and
understand the circumstances of our past, even when those facts are
deeply unpalatable. Myth-making about the past is not only bad history
and bad politics, it is morally deficient.



This observation brings us to a final way in which moral questions
arise in the context of honest history. The crimes of the past have
consequences in the present. The facts of trans-Atlantic slavery
continue to have consequences for millions of descendants of the men
and women who were transported from Africa to the Americas; the facts
of the Rwandan genocide have consequences for the living victims of
these mass killings and their kin; and the fact of colonial
exploitation of the Congo or southern Africa has consequences for the
current poverty of much of Africa. Does knowledge of the crimes of the
past create for the current generation an obligation of engagement in
contributing actively to healing those wounds in the present and
preventing their recurrence in the future? Does "truth and
reconciliation" require more than simply recognizing ugly truths
about the past? Does it require that we act differently, individually
and collectively? It is of course a tragic and immutable reality of
the human condition that the past cannot be changed; the murdered
cannot be unmurdered, and the primary perpetrators of horrific crimes
within a few generations are certainly beyond the reach of justice.
The future is deeply contingent, while the past is fixed and
unchangeable. But does this immutability imply that the present
generation has no obligations created by past crimes? Or rather, does
knowing the truth about our past create for us the obligation to learn
from those tragic human actions how to avoid such crimes in the
future? Does honest knowledge of the human crimes of the past bring
with it an obligation to strive in good faith to address the
consequences of those crimes in the present? Finally, can knowledge of
history help us to become more empathetic, more just, and more
farsighted in our dealings with each other in the grand affairs that
make up future history? One would hope so; and perhaps this is the
most pressing moral obligation of all that is created by our
recognition of our own historicity.