Historicism an Attempt at Synthesis

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Historicism: An Attempt at SynthesisAuthor(s): F. R. AnkersmitSource: History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Oct., 1995), pp. 143-161Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505617 .

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Forum: The Meaning of Historicism and Its Relevance for Contemporary Theory

HISTORICISM: AN ATTEMPT AT SYNTHESIS

F. R. ANKERSMIT

ABSTRACT

According to German theorists historicism was the result of a dynamization of the static world-view of the Enlightenment. According to contemporary Anglo-Saxon theorists historicism resulted from a de-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing. It is argued that, contrary to appearances, these two views do not exclude but support each other. This can be explained if the account of (historical) change implicit in Enlighten- ment historical writing is compared to that suggested by historicism and, more specifi- cally, by the historicist notion of the "historical idea." Aspects of the contemporary debate about the nature and the task of historical writing can be clarified from the perspective of the differences between Enlightenment and historicist historical writing.

Historicism remains puzzling. German historians and historical theorists like Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Meinecke have seen in it the greatest intellectual revolution of the last two hundred years.' On the other hand Anglo-Saxon theorists tend to be indifferent to it to the point of not even being aware of its existence. Of those who are aware of it, many primarily associate the term "historicism" with Popper's use of the word, that is, with the view that prediction is the major aim of history and the social sciences and that the so-called specula- tive philosophies of Hegel, Marx, Spengler, or Toynbee present us with such predictions of the future course of human history. German theorists, on the other hand, associate the word with the approach to the past that was advocated by nineteenth-century historians like Ranke, Humboldt, or Droysen. Histori- cism in this latter sense was defined by Mandelbaum as follows: "historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering

1. Well-known is Mannheim's eloquent and high-pitched eulogy of historicism: "Historicism is thus not a fad nor a mere fashion. It is not an intellectual current. It is the foundation on which we make our observations of social-cultural reality. It is not something ingeniously contrived nor is it programmatic. It is the organically developed soil, indeed the world view itself, which came into being after the religiously-conditioned medieval conception of the world had fallen apart and after the secularized world-picture of the Enlightenment which grew out of it - with its fundamental idea of a supra-temporal Reason-had been dialectically transcended." See K. Mannheim, "De Historismus," in Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie (Neuwied am Rhein, 1970), 246, 247.



144 F. R. ANKERSMIT

it in terms of the place it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development."2

In short, according to this second definition the nature of a thing lies in its history; if we wish to grasp the nature of a nation, a people, an institution, or an idea, the historicist will require us to consider its historical development. This definition also makes clear where historicism differs from the Weltan- schauung implicit in the sciences. For scientists rarely have any good reason to be interested in the history of the phenomena under investigation. Even more so, whereas the historicist argues from the history of a thing to its nature, scientists will most often argue the other way round. Thus astronomers and geologists have been able to reconstruct the history of our universe and of our earth on the basis of how they now present themselves to the scientist.3 This may already suggest the extent to which the Popperian definition and the "German" definition of the word are not merely different but even exclude each other. For, as Popper demonstrated, his version of historicism was ordinarily the result of a misguided transposition of misguided scientistic cognitive ideals to the writing of history. "German" historicism, on the other hand, always condemned such transpositions as exemplifying either apriorism (as in the case of Hegel), positivism (as in the case of Buckle), or a combination of these two (as in the cases of Marx or Toynbee). From that perspective the (German) historicist would even gladly concur with Popper in his rejection of historicism.

In this essay I shall use the word "historicism" in the sense meant by Mandel- baum. This variant of historicism has had a bad reputation in the last half- century-not only in the Anglo-Saxon countries but in Germany as well. It was argued again and again by German theorists during the so-called "crisis of historicism" in the first half of this century that historicism would automati- cally lead to a dangerous historical relativism undermining all the norms and values we believe to be essential to the free and just society-in short, as Meinecke dramatically put it, to the "Inferno der Wertanarchie."4 The conclu-

2. M. Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason (Baltimore, 1971), 42. 3. Of course, the argument is valid only if we recognize that phenomena should not be identified

with the evidence we have here and now for the true statements that we may make about them. 4. F. Meinecke, Zur theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte (Sruggrat, 1965), 370. When reading

this collection of Meinecke's essays, one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that Meinecke, unlike Troeltsch. Heussi, and so many other of his contemporaries, never seriously worried about historicism's propensity to moral relativism. One can only admire his intuitions in this respect. For (moral) relativism only arises if one tries to be both a good historicist and a good positivist. Indeed, if one shares the positivist's desire for timeless truth, problems necessarily arise if one wants to be a historicist as well. But positivist historicists are like dipsomaniac total abstainers. Historicists have no need to share their worries. Hence, for the historicist there is nothing self-contradictory about the notion of the evolution of moral values; the suggestion that this evolution undermines the notion of moral Qbligation seems just as strange and bewildering as the suggestion that we need not obey the traffic rules since these had not already been formulated in the days of the Pharaohs. Though Meinecke's subtle mind would not have permitted him to put his views of the matter in this succinct and blunt way, this is the upshot of his discussion of historicism and relativism. Relativism is of interest only to those who will or cannot chose between positivism and historicism.



HISTORICISM: AN ATTEMPT AT SYNTHESIS 145

sion seemed inevitable that historicism would thus weaken our moral resistance against objectionable political regimes such as Nazism. In the postwar years this was even seen as at least part of the explanation of why German historians (with a few telling exceptions such as Mannheim or Meinecke themselves5) were so easily seduced by the treacherous songs of the Pied Piper of Braunau-am-Inn. Strangely enough, in their zeal for self-destruction these historicists wrestling with the (non-)problem of relativism never even raised the obvious question whether or not all historical writing, and not just historicist historical writing, might result in relativism. Indeed, insofar as all historians of the last few centuries have the pretension not only to describe but also to explain the past, the whole of the discipline of history ought to be put into an intellectual quarantine if these relativist fears were justified and historical explanation were to have the serious consequences that some have so assiduously attributed to it.

It has recently been pointed out by Arthur Danto that "a first test of a philosophical theory should be that it account for itself whenever relevant. A theory of knowledge, for example, ought to be able to explain how, in its own terms, we know it to be true, and if it is not up to this, then it is either inadequate or incomplete."6 Discussions of historicism of the present and the recent past seem to satisfy Danto's methodological criterion. Historicism's main claim is that the nature of a phenomenon lies in its past (as we observed a moment ago); given this it is entirely appropriate that most contemporary discussions of historicism center around the question of the relationship between Enlighten- ment and historicist historical writing and around the question how historicism could gradually emerge from the Enlightenment's conception of the past.

Two accounts are given of this genesis of historicism. According to the first account historicism is the result of a historicization of the ahistoricist conception of social and political reality that was adopted by eighteenth-century natural-law philosophy. This is the account ordinarily proposed by historicists themselves and codified in Meinecke's Die Entstehung des Historismus and in the brilliant essay on historicism that Mannheim wrote in 1924.7 The second account points out that in the Enlightenment, historical writing was seen as "literature," that it was taught by professors of rhetoric, and that historicism reacted to this literary conception of historical writing by advocating an "elimination of rhetoric and emphasis on facts in historical thought"-to use Rtisen's terms.8 This alternative account was originally developed by Anglo-Saxon theorists such

5. Needless to say, I am not attempting to exculpate German scientists for their lack of Zivil- courage; I only want to question the view that historicism had any specific role to play in this. Perhaps the way the ideals of the German Obrigkeitsstaat were traditionally internalized by German scientists - not just historians - brings us closer to a satisfactory explanation of this lack than an emphasis on the alleged sins of historicism. See, for example, R. de Wilde, Discipline en legende: De identiteit van de sociologie in Duitsland en de Verenigde Staten 1870-1930 (Amsterdam, 1992).

6. A. C. Danto, "The Decline and Fall of Analytical Philosophy of History," in The New Philosophy of History, ed. F. R. Ankersmit and H. Kellner (London, 1995 [forthcoming]).

7. See K. Mannheim, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1936) and Wissenssoziologie. 8. J. RUsen, "Historisches Erzahlen zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft" in RUsen, Konfigurati-

onen des Historismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), 117.



146 F. R. ANKERSMIT

as White, Reill, Gossman, Bann, and Megill; it now inspires a good deal of contemporary German thought about the genesis of historicism.

We thus have two alternative accounts of the genesis of historicism that are so entirely different that we cannot believe that both could be true. What sepa- rates the two accounts is their picture of Enlightenment historical writing and its theoretical assumptions. What could natural-law philosophy with its love of rational argument, of proceeding more geometrico, and its affinities with what we now know as the social sciences, possibly have to do with rhetorics and literature? Surely, one of these two accounts must be profoundly mistaken. I want to demonstrate, however, that the two accounts are compatible and that the recognition of this compatibility not only furthers our insight into the nature of historicism but also into what is at stake in contemporary theoretical debate which in many ways continues the debate between historicism and Enlighten- ment natural-law philosophy. My argument to this effect will proceed in three steps. First, I shall propose an abstract, rational argument in favor of the compatibility of the two accounts; second, I shall illustrate this abstract argument with a few, necessarily short, comments on Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the book that may well be seen as the supreme achievement of Enlightenment historical writing. Finally, I hope to show the relevance of my argument for contemporary theoretical debate, especially by looking at the relation of historicism and narrativism, and historicism and the "new history.

If we wish to grasp the nature of Enlightenment historical writing we must realize that it took the true statement as its model; the ontology presupposed by Enlightenment historical writing is the ontology suggested by the true statement. The true statement consists of two parts: the subject-term, which typically refers to an object in reality, and the predicate-term attributing a property to that object. The ontology suggested by the statement is therefore that of a world consisting of objects, all more or less remaining the same even while acquiring or losing certain properties in the course of their histories. Two consequences follow from this account of the ontology of the statement. First, the model of the statement suggests the kind of substantialism found in natural-law philosophy, that reality is made up of entities essentially remaining the same in the course of time. We may think here of our notion of a universe consisting of things like mountains, rivers, stones, chairs, or pieces of organic material. These things may change in the course of time because of causes external to them. So the ontology of the statement by no means excludes change, even radical change. Only, when change occurs we will always be able to identify an unchanging subject of change to which change can be ascribed.9 In the second

9. As is also the case, by the way, in Ovid's Metamorphoses; it is no coincidence that this was one of the books most eagerly read by eighteenth-century historians. For Ovid's conception of change, see G. K. Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses (Berkeley, 1975), 42-61. Ovid formulates in book XV his conception of change in the following way: "Nor does anything retain its own appear-




place, change can be explained with the help of the language of causality. The language of causality always presupposes an object whose changes are the effects of causes external to those objects themselves. In sum, the ontology of the statement underwrites the substantialism characteristic of natural-law philosophy and predisposes us to use the language of cause and effect. This is, in a nutshell, how Enlightenment historical writing conceived of the historical world.

But this is only part of the story. Where to draw the demarcation line between what belongs to the substance of an object and its contingent properties changing in the course of time is unclear. Indeed, as Locke realized, all our intuitions about what still does belong and what no longer belongs to the substance will in the end prove arbitrary. 10 Here is what one might call the dialectics of Enlightenment historical writing. This dialectics has a double origin. First, as Locke's own argument suggests, because no fixed demarcation line exists between the substance itself and what is merely contingent to it, we shall in practice be unable to tell where the substance ends and where what is merely peripheral begins. Second, substantialist ontology restricts cause and effect to what is merely peripheral to the substance itself. Moving a chair or spilling ink on it can be explained with the language of cause and effect, but they remain peripheral to the chair itself or its "substance." However, the most eligible cause will always be the cause that is least peripheral and closest to the substance: peripheral causes will tend to remain mere necessary conditions, whereas causes close to the substance will tend to become sufficient causes. For example, if we have the chair reupholstered because of the ink that was spilled on it, the relevant actions of the upholsterer are a more satisfactory explanation of its partial metamorphosis (that is, an explanation in terms of sufficient rather than merely necessary causes) than our decision to take the chair to the upholsterer. If, then, we combine these two facts about the ontology of natural-law philosophy, we will understand that within this ontology is a permanent and persistent urge to invite causal language to invade the domain of the substance. This is the dialectic of Enlightenment historical writing. For it is only in that domain that "deeper" and not merely peripheral causes can be given for the phenomena studied by the historian.

However, if historians actually surrender to this dialectics of Enlightenment historical writing by entering the domain of the substance, they will have moved outside the domain where the language of cause and effect can properly be used. As soon as cause and effect enter the domain of substance, the substance is no longer the passive substratum separating causes from their effects; effects now become part of their causes and vice versa. Since both have now lost themselves in the substance, the substance may now present itself as the cause

ance permanently. Ever-inventive nature continually produces one shape from another. Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary and adopt a new form." See Ovid, Metamorphoses (London, 1955), 341. This is exactly how Gibbon conceives of historical change.

10. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1972), I, 245.



148 F. R. ANKERSMIT

of its own effects and, hence, of its own history. Two further conclusions can be derived from this. First, if effects have become part of their causes and vice versa, each attempt to separate them will have become arbitrary. This means that the consistency of the use of causal language no longer has its guarantees in a (historical) reality outside language, but only in the historian's language itself. Not facts about the past, but the rhetorical vigor of the historian's text, is now the exclusive basis for the consistency of that text. This may show us why the two accounts of what is involved in the transition from Enlightenment to historicist historical writing can both be correct despite their apparent incom- patibility. Second, we can be more specific about the nature of the kind of rhetoric to be favored by Enlightenment historical writing. If the regime that customarily governs the language of cause and effect is abrogated-as is the case here-we will enter a world that is defined by the trope of irony. For it is essential for irony to ironize our intuitions about the relationship between cause and effect. Irony will therefore be the master-trope of Enlightenment historical writing.

II

We find all this, as it were in a pure culture, in Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that undisputed chef d'oeuvre of Enlightenment historical writing. To begin with, the story of the history of a "substance" will be a narrative without beginning or ending and without incisive caesuras. The permanent presence of the unchanging substance excludes origins, terminations, and radical discontinuities. Precisely this is what determines the structure of the Decline andFall. The three opening chapters give a description of the Empire in the second century AD, its military power, its prosperity, and its constitution in the age of the Antonines. Two features of this way of beginning the book must be observed. First, this is not the beginning of a story informing us about some development in historical time: the argument here is synchronic and not diachronic. It might be objected, however, that no historical narrative can be convincing that does not start with some such sketch of the background against which the story will unfold. But if this narrative strategy is adopted and is to succeed, the background must be related to the story itself in the way a plant relates to the soil from which it grows. This brings me to my second observation. For this is precisely what Gibbon wishes to avoid. Discussing the reign of Antoninus Pius, Gibbon comments: "his reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."' The happy days of the Empire under the Antonines are thus, so to speak, "lifted out" of the history that Gibbon wishes to tell: they are placed outside the realm of (narratable) history in the proper sense of the word, and have no beginning in the proper sense of the word.

11. E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Basel, 1787), 1, 102.




A similar story can be told for the end of the Decline and Fall. As new readers of the book find out to their surprise, it does not end with the fall of the Western Empire, or even with the reigns of Theodoric and Justinian, but only with the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453. Yet, as Gibbon repeatedly emphasizes, the nature of his account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire suggests nowhere the necessity of including the history of Byzantium in his enterprise. Thus Gibbon himself candidly states in his Autobiography: "so flexible is the title of my History, that the final era could be fixed at my own choice: and I long hesitated whether I should be content with the first three volumes, the fall of the Western Empire, which fulfilled my first engagement with the public."'2 But even the year 1453 does not fix the end of Gibbon's narrative. Not only are there many substantial references to the history of the West in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries; more importantly, the book ends with a history of the city of Rome from the twelfth century.'3

Finally, if Gibbon's narrative avoids beginnings and endings, it no less resists the effort of periodization that ordinarily structures historical narrative and even seems a condition for its very intelligibility.'4 No reader of the Decline and Fall can fail to be struck by Gibbon's provocative minimization of the significance of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus as the last emperor of the Western Empire in 476 AD. On the one hand, in agreement with a periodization already generally accepted in Gibbon's time, he observes that Romulus's reign marked "the extinction of the Roman empire in the West,"'5 but on the other, the event is presented as just one more of the tediousfaits divers of that chaotic epoch. Moreover, Gibbon skillfully discourages our inclination to assign any historical significance to the event by demonstrating the relative successes of the reign of Odoacer, "king of Italy," whose victories seemed to repeat, at least to a certain extent, the triumphs of republican Rome.'6 So the suggestion of Gibbon's presentation of 476 AD is that nothing ended in that year that had not ended already and that nothing began that had not already begun before that date. In the contextualization of this period Gibbon carefully avoids sug- gesting any alternative periodization of the more than one thousand years of history that he is telling.

Let us now turn to causality. Two levels must be distinguished here. On the first and more superficial level we find the causal explanation of the fall of the Empire that is best summarized by Gibbon himself when he writes in the last chapter of his book: "in the preceding volumes of this history, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion."''7 "Barbarism" and "Christian religion"

12. E. Gibbon, Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. 0. Smeaton (New York, 1923), 159. 13. It had been Gibbon's plan to write a history of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages before

he decided to write the history of the fall of the Roman Empire. See Gibbon's famous, but perhaps not entirely reliable, account of the inception of his work in his Autobiography, 124.

14. Huizinga acknowledges the "indispensability of periodization." See J. Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken (Haarlem, 1950), VII, 85-95.

15. Gibbon, Decline, VI, 186. 16. Ibid., VI, 190. 17. Ibid., XII, 186.



150 F. R. ANKERSMIT

are presented here as the kind of external, "peripheral" causes that we may expect in a history sharing the substantialist assumptions of the Enlightenment. However - and this is crucial for my argument - when asking himself in his "general observations" added to chapter XXXVIII what is to be seen as the deepest cause of Rome's fall, Gibbon comes to the following conclusion:

The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it subsisted so long.'8

Obviously, in agreement with the relevant tendencies of the dialectic of Enlight- enment historical writing, Gibbon enters here the domain of the substance': Rome is presented as being the cause of its own decline. The Empire succumbed to the pressure of its own weight and the conditions of its rise were also the conditions of its ultimate fall. This also explains Gibbon's statement that we should not ask why the Empire was destroyed but rather focus on the subsidiary question of the date of its ultimate demise: Rome's fall is part of its "substance" and the really interesting question is the question of when and why this potenti- ality was activated. Neither should it surprise us that Gibbon's explanation of Rome's fall is the same as the one given by his Enlightenment predecessor as Rome's historian, Montesquieu,20 nor that both Montesquieu and Gibbon appealed to the strangely helpless metaphor of a "poison" that was introduced "into the vitals of the empire."'2' For in both cases the search for the "deepest" and ultimate causes of Rome's fall resulted in an invasion of the domain of substance by the language of cause and effect and in the peculiar conclusion that in the use of that language Rome's rise and greatness becomes indistinguish- able from its decline and dissolution.

The paradox of Rome having been the cause of its own fall will explain the propensity for paradox, irony, and ambivalence that is so clearly present in Gibbon's rhetoric. As soon as the language of cause and effect enters the domain

18. Ibid., VI, 323. 19. I would therefore disagree with Womersley when he explains this evolution in Gibbon's

analysis in the following way: "the question in his mind seems less to be 'What are the causes of this event?' than 'What sort of thing is cause?"' On the other hand, Womersley's comment that Gibbon is moving here from a "sociological interest" to "a more metaphysical interest" is closer to my view. See Womersley, The Transformation of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 188.

20. "On n'entend parler dans les auteurs que des divisions qui perdirent Rome; mais on ne voit pas que ces divisions 6taient necessaires; qu'elles y avoient toujours &6 et qu'elles y devoient toujours &re. Ce fut uniquement la grandeur de la republique qui fit le mal, et qui changea en guerres civiles les tumultes populaires." See C. L. de Montesquieu, Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence (Paris, 1834), 81.

21. Gibbon, Decline, I, 74; Montesquieu, Considerations, 106.




of the substance, nothing outside the text itself can govern or check its use. Gibbon was aware of this himself as may become clear from an annotation he wrote in the margin of his own copy of the Decline and Fall a few years before his death: "should I not have deduced the decline of the Empire from the Civil Wars, that ensued after the fall of Nero or even from the tyranny which succeeded the reign of Augustus? Alas! I should: but of what avail is this tardy knowledge? Where error is irretrievable, repentance is useless."22 Cause and effect can now roam more or less freely through the whole of the history of the Roman Empire; what has been a cause of Rome's greatness can now equally be seen as a cause of its decline. As a result the relation between the actions of historical agents and their results is now systematically ironized. The apparent saviors of the Empire in its most difficult predicament, emperors like Augustus, Diocletian, or Constantine, can now also be presented as its most effective grave-diggers. Nowhere has irony been more successful in finding its way to the rhetorical surface of Gibbon's text than in his account of that most paradoxical emperor, Julian the Apostate, the emperor to whose ephemeral reign of only one and a half years Gibbon devotes no fewer than three chapters. All the ironies, paradoxes, and ambivalences of Gibbon's text, perhaps even of all Enlightenment historical writing, are epitomized in Gibbon's struggle with the career of that most enigmatic among the Roman emperors. On the one hand, Julian was for Gibbon the reincarnation of all that contributed to Rome's greatness; on the other hand Gibbon observes that even if Julian had succeeded, he would have achieved merely an impotent and "imperfect copy" of republican Rome.23 Imitation could never save Rome, but only contribute to its decline; because of this, the best Romans are, in fact, the worst of them all. In this way the conclusion of Gibbon's narrative, informed as it is by the moral and political certainties of the Enlightenment, is, paradoxically, uncertainty and ambivalence.

III

We now have obtained a vantage point that is ideally suited for assessing what was at stake in the transition from Enlightenment to historicist historical writing. This transition determines to a large extent the nature both of historical writing and of historical theory down to the present day. We have seen in the foregoing that the ontology of the statement is a good heuristic instrument for comprehending why natural-law philosophy and rhetorics were necessarily intimately related in Enlightenment historical writing. On the one hand, the constative statement and the kind of knowledge expressed by it seems hostile to metaphysics: constatives appear merely to provide straightforward empirical knowledge of the world. This is why contemporary protagonists of a "scientific historical writing," of Geschichte als Sozialwissenschaft, have often felt a nos-

22. Cited in Womersley, 44. 23. Gibbon, Decline, IV, 73.



152 F. R. ANKERSMIT

talgia for Enlightenment historical writing and why they were tempted to charac- terize the birth of historicism as a "Verlustgeschichte" (historiography of loss), to quote RUsen.24 On the other hand, as Nietzsche already surmised and as was demonstrated by Strawson in his Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, the constative statement suggests the metaphysics of a universe consisting of unchanging entities whose properties may vary in the course of time-in short, the kind of metaphysics that was embraced by natural-law philosophy. In Enlightenment historical writing this paradox of an anti-metaphysical metaphysics was resolved by rhetoric. Language and its rhetorical potentialities were now appealed to in order to account for processes of historical change that effectively defied the parameters of the ontology of the statement. Precisely this was Gibbon's paradoxical predicament when he wanted to explain to his readers how the substance or, as he called it himself, the "genius" of the Roman Empire at one time or another disappeared from the inventory of historical entities. Rhetoric had to fill the void created by the gradual disap- pearance of that particular substance.

The ontology of the statement is a no less useful heuristic tool for measuring the achievement of historicism and for appreciating the intellectual courage displayed by the first historicists. Historicism effected a historicization of the substance. For the historicists historical change could not be restricted to what is merely peripheral; indeed, "substantial" change was seen as the true domain of historical research. In this way Gibbon's aporia was now provocatively trans- formed into historicism's most cherished and valuable insight. Within this new and more comprehensive conception of historical change the ontology of the statement is no longer adequate. We can now no longer trust that what the subject-term in the constative statement refers to will "substantially" remain the same object during a process of historical change. Thus, contrary to what the logical structure of the statement may suggest, the subject-term in one statement about the Roman Empire may refer to a "substantially" different entity than the Roman Empire at a different phase of its history. So instead of a set of statements all sharing a subject-term referring to the same entity, we now have a set of statements whose shared subject-term should never tempt us to believe that in all cases reference is made to one and the same historical entity. What we have now is, in fact, a set of statements with different subject- terms (if we recognize that the literal sameness of the subject-terms is mis- leading)-in short, a set of statements in principle as disjunct as any set of statements arbitrarily put together. This may explain why in the transition from Enlightenment to historicist historical writing coherence, or Zusammenhang, suddenly became an issue of great urgency and importance for both history and historical theory. Coherence and Zusammenhang now had to provide the historicist historian with a substitute for the coherence that was still unproblem- atically granted to the historian who accepted the assumptions of natural- law philosophy.

24. Rtisen, 118.




But making coherence do the job performed by the substance was not without its own problems. First, historicizing the substance only makes sense if one is prepared to accept the "substantial" differences in the several manifestations of a historical entity in the course of its history. It is part of the historicist program to emphasize these differences as much as possible. But this suggests a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to the historicist thesis that the essence or nature of a historical entity lies in its history. For the more the difference between the individual phases of an entity's history is emphasized, the less plausible it will be to go on considering it one and the same thing through all the phases of its development. Put differently, the suggestion of diachronicity that is implied by the definition of historicism as given by Mandelbaum will have the effect of ungluing the successive phases a historical entity passes through in its history; this will result in synchronicity.

This unpleasant dialectics can actually be observed in the writings of historicists like Ranke. On the one hand Ranke writes about the nations whose histories fill the many volumes of his stupendous oeuvre: "the states are also products of a creative genius, not of individual men, nor of one specific generation, but just like language, the products of a collectivity and many generations."25 Like languages, nations are the product of the creative genius of many generations; their nature can never be grasped if one narrows one's view to merely one generation, but reveals itself only if we carefully follow the whole of their histories. This is how historicism was defined at the beginning of this essay. But on the other hand we have Ranke's well-known dictum "each epoch is immediate to God," emphasizing the unique character of each phase of a historical entity's development. A continuous historical process thus disintegrates into its many components. It thus becomes impossible to meet the requirements of coherence and Zusammenhang that had to be satisfied after the dissolution of the Enlightenment conception of the past. This dialectic of historicism in the end results in Burckhardt's conception of history in which the different phases of historical evolution tend to become independent of each other (in this way it anticipated the contemporary, postmodernist attitude towards the past).26

As long as our knowledge of the web of history is still vague and incomplete the diachronic and the synchronic approach can retain so much overlap that we may not notice their intrinsic opposition and divergence. But when our historical knowledge becomes more precise, both tendencies will articulate themselves at the cost of each other and, as a result, the overlap will gradually lose content. In the end the subject of historical change completely evaporates and all that is left is a mere jumble of fragments stubbornly resisting each effort to relate them in a meaningful way.27 (It might be argued that something like

25. Quoted in F. Wagner, Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1966), 198. My translation. 26. For Burckhardt's proto-postmodernism, see J. Rusen, "Jacob Burckhardt and Historical

Insight on the Border of Postmodernism," History and Theory 24 (1985), 235-247. 27. For this tendency of historicism to evolve in opposite directions, see F. R. Ankersmit,

Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language (The Hague, 1983), 120ff.



154 F. R. ANKERSMIT

this has actually happened in the course of twentieth-century historical writing28; I shall return to this at the end of this essay.)

I will not investigate here the question whether the historicists were themselves aware of this inconvenient dialectic in their historicism. I will focus instead upon the technical concept by means of which historicists, either knowingly or unknowingly, succeeded in obscuring this dialectic from sight. This is the notion of the "historical idea," of the historische Idee, which is, in my opinion, the most fruitful concept that has ever been developed in the history of historical theory. The historical idea manifests itself in two ways, wrote Humboldt,

on the one hand as a creation of energies which affects many particulars, in different places and under different circumstances, and which is initially barely perceptible, but gradually becomes visible and finally irresistible; on the other hand as a creation of energies which cannot be deduced in all their scope from their attendant circumstances.29

The features ascribed by Humboldt and Ranke to the historical idea can be summed up as follows: 1) the historical idea embodies what is unique to both a historical entity and a historical period; 2) by embodying the unique, it gives us access to what is essential to that entity or period; 3) in becoming acquainted with the idea of an entity or period, we have in a theoretically crucial sense "explained" it; 4) though social-scientific laws may help us to ascertain the nature of the historical idea, it can never be reduced entirely to the kind of knowledge expressed by these laws; 5) the historical idea embodies the coherence of the many properties of a historical entity or period so that when debating the merits of several proposals for how to conceive of a historical idea, the decisive criterion will be which proposal is most successful in giving coherence; and 6) the historical idea cannot be defined aprioristically as Fichte or Hegel had hoped to do, but only on the basis of unbiased historical research.30

From the point of view of historical practice the historical idea effectively solved the problems that had been created by abandoning the Enlightenment notion of the unchanging substance of historical entities. But from a theoretical point of view the solution is not satisfactory. The problem already announces itself quite clearly in Humboldt's essay. Humboldt states: "it is, of course, self-evident that these ideas emerge from the mass of events themselves, or, to be more precise, originate in the mind through contemplation of these events undertaken in a truly historical spirit"; but a little later he writes about the historian: "above all, he must take great care not to attribute to reality arbitrarily created ideas of his own, and not to sacrifice any of the living richness of the parts in his search for the coherent pattern of the whole."'3' The question raised by statements like these is the question of where the historical idea must be situated:

28. See F. R. Ankersmit, "History and Postmodernism," If story and Theory 28 (1989), 137- 153; reprinted in Ankersmit, History and Tropology (Berkeley, 1994).

29. W. von Humboldt, "On the Historian's Task," in The Theory and Practice of History, ed. G. G. Iggers and K. von Moltke (Indianapolis, 1973), 19.

30. F. R. Ankersmit, Denken over geschiedenis (Groningen 1986), 178ff. 31. Humboldt, 14, 23.




is the historical idea part of the inventory of the past itself, or is the historical idea, as the term itself suggests already, merely a construction by the historian?

IV

At this juncture we can discern where historicism and contemporary narrativism agree and disagree with each other. Narrativism is that view which requires the historical theorist to focus on the whole of the historian's text and not its constituent parts (for example, its individual constative or causal statements). It is appropriate to discuss the relation of historicism and narrativism at this point because both historicism and narrativism see the whole of the historian's text as the exclusive expression of historical meaning.

Narrativists agree with their historicist predecessors that it is the historian's task to see coherence and Zusammenhang in the past and they will readily acknowledge the immense value of the notion of the "historical idea." But where the historicists - with the sole exception of Droysen32 - thought of the historical idea as an entelechy present in the past itself that had to be "mirrored" by the historian's language, narrativists believe that the historian's language does not reflect a coherence or Zusammenhang in the past itself, but only gives coherence to the past.

This narrativist point of view is not inspired by the philosophical fashions of today like instrumentalist, nominalism, or anti-representationalism-though it shares the epistemological asceticism of these positions. Rather narrativism accepts here the consequences of surrendering the Enlightenment's attachment to the unchanging substance. For as soon as we give up the ontology of the single statement for the ontology of the set of statements whose subject-terms no longer refer to one and the same entity in extra-linguistic reality, coherence is no longer guaranteed by the coherence of that objective entity, but by whatever coherence and unity the set of statements may possess. There is no third possi- bility: coherence has its source either in reality or in the language we use for speaking about it. If the former option cannot satisfy the consistent historicist historian's requirements, the latter has to be accepted. Substance must not be conceived as being part of historical reality, but as originating in language, in the historian's narrative. Post-Enlightenment historians' substance is, therefore, a narrative substance"3 and its coherence is not found but made in and by their texts. In one word, narrativism, as a historical theory of the narrative substance, is a historicism that is stripped of all its metaphysical accretions and of the last remnants of Enlightenment substantialism that historicists like Humboldt and Ranke (unlike Droysen) still retained in their notion of the historical idea.

This enables us to define how Enlightenment historical writing, historicist historical writing, and narrativism are related to one another. The Enlighten-

32. Obviously, I am thinking here of Droysen's erster Fundamentalsatz. 33. See Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, chapters V and VI for the logical properties of these

narrative substances.



156 F. R. ANKERSMIT

ment accepted the notion of substance and situated it, as is at first sight the obvious thing to do, in the past itself. But this option had the unintended result of surrendering historical writing to rhetoric when the historian addressed topics like the fall of the Roman Empire that clearly involve the fate of a historical substance. Historicism was, from this point of view, both revolutionary and reactionary. It is revolutionary since it resolutely situated itself precisely where Enlightenment historical writing was inadequate: that is, where substantial change occurs. Gibbon's Decline was, in fact, an Enlightenment attempt to write the history of a substance; the aporias and dilemmas inevitably occasioned by such an attempt are anomalies of the Enlightenment paradigm of historical writing. These anomalies could and would effectively be solved only with the help of the historicist's notion of the historische Idee. But while historicism indeed meant the introduction of a new paradigm for both historical writing and historical theory, it was also reactionary since in its effort to de-rhetoricize historical writing and to restrict the aesthetic dimension of historical writing to what is merely a matter of presentation, the role that the Enlightenment had unwittingly assigned to language was denied it again. For the historicist the historian's language merely passively registers the res gestae of the historical idea, and this means a return to an even more pronounced substantialism than that of the Enlightenment. This explains why the ideal of an "objective" and "scientific" history was even more plausible within the historicist tradition than in its Enlightenment predecessor.

For the narrativist the substance is a linguistic thing that satisfies all the ontological requirements of what it means to be a thing. We may speak about a table, but the table itself will not make its appearance in the language. Simi- larly, we may speak about narrative substances, enumerate their properties, discuss their merits or demerits, and so on, but in spite of being a linguistic thing the narrative substance itself will, like a chair or a table, always remain outside that language itself. In all such discussions the narrative substance will be mentioned referentially, not as a syntactic component of the statements in which such reference to a narrative substance is made.34 The narrative substance being a thing from a logical point of view (albeit a linguistic thing) enables us to ascertain what rhetorical figure will be favored by both historicism and narrativism. On the one hand we have historical reality itself that is the historian's object of investigation; on the other hand we have the linguistic things (that is, narrative substances) in terms of which the historian tries to make sense of the past. In other words, one (linguistic) thing is used for understanding another thing (that is part of historical reality). This is how metaphor works. Think of the metaphor "the earth is a spaceship." In this metaphor two things are compared, while one of the two things is not part of the other (that would give us either synecdoche or metonymy).

34. See F. R. Ankersmit, "The Use of Language in the Writing of History," in History and Tro- pology.




Though I cannot do justice here to the many discussions of metaphor pres- ently occurring,35 the following remarks may suffice. By inviting us to see one thing from the point of view of another, metaphor effects an organization of our knowledge. Thus the metaphor just mentioned organizes the knowledge we have of our earth and of spaceships in such a manner that our present and future ecological problems are highlighted by that organization. The organization of knowledge (paradigmatically expressed in constative statements) thus brings about a hierarchization of our knowledge; it suggests what is important and what is unimportant and by this chiaroscuro succeeds in giving us the contours and even a "picture" of that part of reality that is at issue in the metaphor. This is one of the reasons that metaphor is the preferred rhetorical tool for both historicists and narrativists. Second, metaphor also allows us to answer the difficult question of how to decide between rival accounts of the past. If historical insight is essentially metaphorical, it follows self-evidently that the best account of the past must be the most insightfully metaphorical one. Historians are thus required to think of the strongest metaphor in terms of which they invite us to see the past. Semantic deviance is what makes metaphor into what it is; the best metaphor is therefore the metaphor in which semantic deviance is most pronounced without the metaphor becoming incom- prehensible. In the practice of history this means that historians should aim at the most courageous and most risky narrative and avoid what seems to fit most easily within accepted historical conventions. One is reminded of Popper's critique of logical positivism when he argued that the strongest theory is not the most probable, but, on the contrary, the most improbable theory, the theory maximizing its empirical content by "forbidding" the greatest number of possible states of affairs. This is, in a nutshell, how we can rationally decide between alternative representations of parts of the past and where we must discern the rationality of historical writing and of historical debate.36

Precisely this similarity to Popper's criterion for scientific acceptability justi- fies the hypothesis that the historicist and narrativist historian's metaphor has a function in historical writing analogous to that of theories in the sciences. I therefore agree with Rilsen when he argues that the opposition that was created between the historicist's narrative interpretation of the past on the one hand, and Strukturgeschichte or Geschichte a/s Sozialwissenschaft on the other, has been much exaggerated, ignoring the essential continuity existing between the two of them.37 Note that Kocka defines theory as it functions in Geschichte

35. See F. R. Ankersmit and J. J. A. Mooij, "Introduction," in Ankersmit and Mooij, Knowl- edge and Language: Metaphor and Knowledge (Dordrecht, 1993).

36. It should be emphasized, once again, that this criterion, in spite of the fact that it enables us to decide rationally between alternative historical representations, can never be reduced to any theory of truth. For truth is a property of constative statements expressing knowledge of the past, whereas historical representations are non-cognitive by offering us not knowledge, but organizations of knowledge.

37. Riisen, 114. For a thorough and all-encompassing elaboration of this thesis of the essential continuity between historicism and "newer" variants of historical writing, whose opposition to historicism is more apparent than real, see I. Olabarri, "'New' New History: A Longue Duree Structure," History and Theory 34 (1995), 1-30.



158 F. R. ANKERSMIT

als Sozialwissenschaft as follows: "Theories are well-defined and consistent conceptual systems that cannot be derived from the sources, but that make possible the identification, exploration, and explanation of historical objects."38 Narrativism provides us, in fact, with an optimally convincing justification of this definition. Metaphor organizes our knowledge by seeing one thing from the perspective of another; no thing has the capacity to determine itself the perspective from which it will, has to, or can best be seen by the spectator. Metaphor thus both respects and explains the independence of theory from data about the past itself required by Kocka's definition, thanks to the separation between perspective (or point of view) and what is seen from that perspective. Narrativism is the up-to-date theoretical legitimation of historicism and of its latter-day variant of Geschichte als Sozialwissenschaft.

Hence, if we are looking for a fruitful way to periodize contemporary historical writing, we should not situate historicism and Geschichte als Sozialwis- senschaft on opposite sides of a caesura. Admittedly, there is a difference in subject matter and often in ideological inspiration, but narrativism makes us aware of the more fundamental similarities. If we think, however, of what is called "the new cultural history,"39 of contemporary history of mentalities, of Alltagsgeschichte, or of what has become known as "micro-stories," we will encounter the kind of paradigm change with which Geschichte als Sozialwis- senschaft does not present us. I shall assume the reader to be sufficiently acquainted with these new forms of historical writing40 and therefore restrict myself to an enumeration of the major differences between the traditional historicist or narrativist paradigm and the newer one. In the first place, in agreement with its metaphorical character, historicist historical writing is panoramic, in the sense that it wishes to provide its readers with as wide a survey of the most important developments in our history as the historian can achieve. These new forms of historical writing, by contrast, have an amazing fascination for the small and apparently insignificant detail. They are no longer interested in history on the grand scale.

Second, traditional history often aimed at defining our historical identity, at describing the historical process that has made us into what we are. Identitdts- stiftung lay at the heart of historicist historical writing. These new forms of historical writing, however, have surrendered all the ideological and emancipa- tory pretensions of their historiographical predecessor. History is more de- politicized than even in cliometric economic history. Or, to be more precise, this new form of historical writing exemplifies the politics of de-politicization

38. J. Kocka, T. Nipperdey, "Einfdhrung," in Theorie der Geschichte. Band 3. Theorie und Erzdhlung in der Geschichte, ed. Kocka and Nipperdey (Munich, 1979), 9. My translation.

39. See for example, The New Cultural History, ed. L. Hunt (Berkeley, 1989). 40. A comprehensive and succinct summary of the relevant features of these newer forms of

historical writing can be found in G. G. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft irn 20. Jahrhundert (Got- tingen, 1993), 73-84. Without denying the important innovations brought by these newer forms of historical writing, Iggers emphasizes their indebtedness to the tradition of Geschichte als Sozial- wissenschaft.




and could from that point of view properly be seen as the counterpart in historical writing of the victory of democratic individualism that we may observe in so many Western countries and that has so surprisingly effected the evanescence of the collective will that used to legitimate the state and its actions. The historical agent living in the past is no longer presented as being part of the same historical process of which we are also a part; a kind of "democratic" or even "anarchical" independence of the elements of the historical process (including the present) is achieved.

Third, all historical writing has its raison d'&tre in the difference between the past and the present. Historicist historical writing was an attempt to bridge the gap between the past and the present and to make the past accessible to us in this way. The historian's language, the (metaphorical) technical concepts used by the historian and the (socioscientific) theories in which these concepts are often defined, have traditionally functioned as such bridges between the past and the present. Consider concepts like "revolution," "social class," "industrial- ization," "intellectual movement," "Enlightenment," or "Romanticism." We should not forget that history has its technical concepts just as much as have the sciences! These bridges are almost entirely absent in the newer forms of historical writing. This has important consequences. For, pursuing the metaphor of the bridge for a moment, bridges enable us to overcome a distance or difference but at the same time also mark that distance. However, in the new forms of historical writing the paradox of the bridge is absent; thus the past is both more distant from and yet closer to us.

Thinking over these three major differences, we encounter here a movement of both de-contextualization and an increasing directness and immediacy with which the past is presented to us. "De-contextualization," since the reassuring context of a historical development connecting all the many different phases of our history has been given up. Fragments of the past present themselves without the larger context of which they were formerly believed to be a part. "Directness and immediacy," since the intermediary of the conceptual bridges has disappeared. We now encounter the past with the same directness with which anthropologists encounter the alien culture in which they suddenly find themselves as they step out of the airplane that has brought them to a strange and mysterious part of the world. "Hans Medick and the advocates of historical anthropology in general," says Iggers in his recent book on twentieth-century historical writing, "emphasize the strangeness of each historical object of investigation, not only of non-European 'natives' but also of the Wtirtemberger vil- lagers of Early Modern Europe."94' The fascination for anthropology that is so clearly present in these new forms of historical writing need no longer surprise us.

41. Ibid., 84.



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V

I come to a conclusion. I began my story with two apparently incompatible accounts of the origins of historicism. But from the point of view of contemporary narrativism the two accounts are not incompatible but complementary; indeed, both accounts presuppose one another. Once again, narrativism shows us why this must be the case. Narrativism thus complicates our picture of what was at stake in the transition from Enlightenment to historicist historical writing. However, this does not result in a blurring of the boundaries between the Enlightenment and historicism but, on the contrary, in an increased aware- ness of the intellectual daring and revolutionary newness of historicism. The old cliche is true: historicism did give us historical writing as we know it down to the present day. And if we recognize to what extent historicism revolutionized historical thought, we will also recognize that much of the resistance to historicism (as exemplified for instance by structuralist or socioscientific historical theory and writing) does not really transcend the parameters of historicist historical thought. Such a paradigm change may, however, be observed in the newer forms of historical writing I referred to above. For two reasons this paradigm change can be characterized as a movement from "language" to "experience." First, as is emphasized by Iggers, "experience" has become the new subject matter of the historian: "this emphasis on the subjectivity of ordinary people requires a new conception of historical writing that complements the traditional centrist and unilinear conceptions of Sozialgeschichte and its methodology with a logic of the life-world focusing on communication and experience."42 But there also is a second, no less important, "formal" reason: historicism relied upon the historian's language to give coherence to the past, whereas these newer forms seem no longer interested in coherence and in viewing the past from the perspective of a center only from which can coherence be achieved.

What is at stake in this transition from language to experience was never expressed more clearly than in Hugo von Hoffmansthal's Der Brief des Lord Chandos. In this fictitious letter Lord Chandos writes to Francis Bacon that he has lost the capacity "to think and speak coherently about anything" and that he therefore has to abandon his plans to write a history of the reign of Henry VIII or of classical mythology. "Everything broke apart into its constituent parts, these parts into their parts, and nothing allowed itself to be captured by a concept." What strikes one when reading the letter is that Chandos fears in his strange affliction an alienation from society rather than from reality itself. It is as if he himself realizes that we always have to choose between either being part of the social world or being part of the world of objects which have their existence outside the social world. So the loss of the world of his family and his friends was strangely compensated for by a new and almost uncanny aware- ness of the world of things and of the hidden life of these things. Not only has the most insignificant object now become the sublime "instrument of a

42. Ibid., 75. My translation.




revelation," writes Chandos, but he also experiences "an amazing participation, a flowing over in the objects of the world or the feeling that a shade of life and death, of dreaming and waking has permeated them." This "participation" is an experience, both vague and unusually intense, of "what it is like to be" these objects or creatures that have so strangely paralyzed his mind and language.43 Similarly, the new forms of historical writing also want to give us an idea of "what it was like" to live in a certain period of the past -"what it was like to be a peasant in seventeenth-century Wtirttemberg," or "what it was like to live through the French Revolution." Hence, they do not primarily want to convey a (coherent) knowledge of the past that can only estrange us from experience, but rather to impart to the reader an "experience" of the past that is as direct and immediate as the historian's language may permit. This is how Chandos would write history after having found out about his inability to write a history of Henry VIII or of classical mythology. Chandos's letter is therefore ideally suited to show us what the stakes are when historical writing moves from Gesch- ichte als Sozialwissenschaft to these newer forms of historical writing.

But was this not what historicism had always seen as its supreme goal? Did not the historicist always invite us to leave behind the familiar present and to enter the strange and alien world of the past? And to do all this by giving us an idea of "the feel of the past"? So once again historicism quietly awaits us at the end of the route we had chosen in our attempt to escape from it. Histori- cism is and will be our fate, whether we like it or not. And we had better try to like it, for as long as we stubbornly resist historicism, we will neither be capable of understanding the nature and the rationality of history, nor the many metamorphoses that historical writing has gone through during the last two centuries.

University of Groningen

43. H. Von Hofmannsthal, "Ein Brief" (1902), in Von Hofmannsthal, Samntliche WerkeXXXI, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 45-56. For the element of "what it is like to be x" in Hofmannsthal's argument, see the passage on his sudden fascination for the fate of the poisoned rats. My translations.



Historicism an Attempt at Synthesis

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