The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi

and John Tedeschi

California, 328 pp, £20.95, January, ISBN 978 0 520 25961 4

Carlo Ginzburg became famous as a historian for extraordinary discoveries about popular belief,

and what was taken by its persecutors to be witchcraft, in the early modern period. The Night

Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy,

were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies. The work that has appeared since is

no less challenging, but there has been a significant alteration of its forms, and many of its

themes. The books of the first twenty years of his career have been succeeded by essays; by now

well over fifty of them, covering a staggering range of figures and topics: Thucydides, Aristotle,

Lucian, Quintilian, Origen, St Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne,

Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust,

Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living

historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest

work to appear in English, offers an illustration of it. Ginzburg, who has a nominalist resistance

to epochal labels of any kind, would like to override Fredric Jameson’s dictum that ‘we cannot

not periodise,’ but it is impossible to grasp his achievement without recalling that the centre of

his work lies in what, protestations notwithstanding, we still call the Renaissance. It is that pivot,

on which his writing swings back and forth with complete ease and naturalness from classical

antiquity and the church fathers across to the Enlightenment and the long 19th century, that is

such a striking feature of this collection, as of its predecessors: Clues, Myths and the Historical

Method; Wooden Eyes; History, Rhetoric and Proof; No Island Is an Island.

By definition Renaissance scholarship requires transhumance between ancient and early modern

sources, passing across what lies between them. At its highest, the kind of philological mastery it

requires can also be seen in the work of the historian with whom Ginzburg can perhaps best be

compared, Anthony Grafton, another astonishing comet of learning. The two, each from Jewish

families with a political background, one in Turin, the other Manhattan, share a common

starting-point in seasons in London at the Warburg Institute, with the influence of Arnaldo

Momigliano nearby. There is also an occasional overlap in interests – Panofsky, Jesuits, Bayle,

Judaica – and perhaps some similarity in civic sensibility. The most obvious difference is the

anthropological cast of Ginzburg’s best-known work, exploring popular rather than elite culture.

In the past two decades, however, there has been a convergence of terrain, as Ginzburg has

shifted the focus of his writing to intellectual history, where Grafton has always worked.

Yet such commonalities also highlight the contrasts. The essays that have become Ginzburg’s

chosen instrument are unlike any other. They are all quite short: few of them over thirty, most

under twenty pages. Typically, their form is that of a cascade, one intellectual reference – author

or passage – tumbling after another, in a swift, staccato procession, to a sudden end. In one case,

we move: from Paolo Sarpi through Augustine, Cicero, Vasari, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Hegel,

Heine, Baudelaire, Semper, Scott, Riegl, Feyerabend, Simone Weil and Adorno, ending with

Roberto Longhi. In another, from Viktor Shklovsky through Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and

popular riddles of Roman times, Antonio de Guevara and the transmission of medieval tales to

the age of Charles V, Montaigne, La Bruyère, Madame de Sévigné, Voltaire, to finish in Proust –

all in 25 pages. In this procedure, which we could also call historical montage, the premium is

always – to use a contrast that gives its title to the opening entry in Threads and Traces – on

citation, rather than description. Ginzburg’s spare prose embodies Claudel’s maxim ‘La crainte

de l’adjectif est le commencement du style’ – in this case adverbs too. To an Attic terseness of

language is joined the signature device of a sudden swerve of direction in the finale. The

conventional ending of an article or essay takes one of two forms. Either, at its direst, in standard

versions of North Atlantic social science, it will recapitulate once again everything that has gone

before, or – more respectful of the intelligence of the reader – it will be the logical culmination

of an argument. Any decent writer will avoid the former. What is distinctive about the Ginzburg

ending is that it breaks sharply away from the latter too, offering not the conclusion of an idea or

an argument, but the unannounced intimation of another one, at a tangent to what has gone

before, pointing in a new direction and abruptly closing on it. The gesture can be taken as token

of the restless fertility of this mind, its impatience even with what it has itself just made known,

its invitation to start thinking aslant what it set out to show.

If the forms of this writing set Ginzburg apart as a historian, so too do its themes. Grafton’s

variegated corpus forms, in effect, a single overarching project: the demonstration that

Renaissance humanism, long dismissed as something of a dead end – a maze of textual manias,

chronological speculations and astrological obsessions – in intellectual progress towards modern

science and historical scholarship, was on the contrary a highly productive condition of these.

The unity of Ginzburg’s work, in its own way no less marked, lies at a more reflexive level. In a

profession often incurious or gauche about such issues, what has been unusual from the start is

the high theoretical pressure of his output. Questions of epistemology and issues of method are

no mere preambles or afterthoughts in his work. They are shapers of its direction. The subtitle of

Threads and Traces is ‘True False Fictive’, and this is the trio that has set much of the agenda of

Ginzburg’s recent writing. Across one essay after another, its most conspicuous concern is with

historical truth, tackled from any number of different angles: the relationship between the

veridical and the fictional, the document and the counterfeit, myths and narratives, perspective

and proof, judgments of the court and judgments of the chair. These interventions are aimed,

overwhelmingly, at what he calls the modern form of scepticism that tends to erode any

significant difference between fact and invention, the claims of history and the ruses of rhetoric.

A second leading theme is the importance of anomalies for historical inquiry, and the role of

clues in identifying them. These in turn inform Ginzburg’s case for micro-history, set out more

systematically now than in the works which had famously exemplified it. Finally, breaking new

ground, the writing of the last two decades has touched on issues of contemporary politics. This

concern with the present is not separate from inquiries into even the remote past. They run in

tandem. Among other connections, a turn towards Jewish themes and problems, from the time of

Isaiah to that of Wojtyla, is noticeable.

Each of these strands in Ginzburg’s writing is an invitation to thought. The first question that

comes to mind is this. Why does epistemology figure so prominently in the work of a historian

who has otherwise often expressed his aversion to intellectual systems? A possible answer might

be: to parry the danger of a scepticism that could permit denial of the Judeocide. There must be

some truth in that. In Threads and Traces, Ginzburg remarks that the biographical connection

between his work on witchcraft and the persecution of the Jews took him some time to realise.

Since then, Jewish concerns have recurred in many of his essays. But negationism of this

particular genocide – others, as Armenians have reason to know, have fared differently – is so

negligible a phenomenon in the West that it would scarcely seem to warrant of itself such an

investment of intellectual energy. Another answer might point to the spread of structuralism and

post-structuralism as sources of a late philosophical relativism, each in their way undermining

any stable conceptions of truth; and certainly Ginzburg has made no secret of his dislike of the

legacy of Derrida. But this too is not entirely persuasive, since he has never taken Lévi-Strauss to

task for scarcely less cavalier handlings of truth, or indeed engaged with either doctrine himself.

Moreover – and this is the really significant fact – there is little evidence that the epistemological

doctrines of such thinkers, or even a more vaguely defined modern scepticism, have had much

influence on the practice of historians, as distinct from anthropologists or literary theorists. The

overwhelming majority of practitioners have remained oblivious to them. On the face of it, there

appears to be a puzzling disproportion between the extent of the phenomenon and the length and

passion of the attack on it.

What might explain this? A more compelling answer lies in the sources of Ginzburg’s historical

sensibility. His first ambitions, he has told us, were literary. He has also said that once he turned

to history, his permanent inspiration became Auerbach’s Mimesis, the reconstruction by a literary

scholar of the path to modern realism, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included

Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and

novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter

lain adjacent to it. There is a long tradition of the practice of history as a branch of literature, but

what this has usually meant is either a studied elegance (or unbridled flamboyance) of style –

Gibbon or Michelet – closer to works of imagination than of record, or the quasi-reproduction of

literary genres in the construction of narratives: for obvious reasons, epic and tragedy – Motley

or Deutscher – more frequently than comedy or romance.

The bearing of literature on history, however, is of a different order for Ginzburg, and is original

to him. In his work, literature is taken not as a standard of styles, nor a repertoire of genres, but

as a tool of knowledge. In one essay after another, he has insisted that what novelists or poets can

bring to an objective study of the past are cognitive instruments: techniques of estrangement as

social critique in Tolstoy, free direct style as passage to a new interiority in Stendhal, ellipsis as

at once suspender and accelerator of time in Flaubert, unmediated visualisation as access to fresh

insight in Proust. But, of course, these are instruments to be found within what remain fictions. It

is from this standpoint, quite specific to Ginzburg, that the modern scepticism that would erase

the boundary between history and fiction altogether – Hayden White, already criticised by

Momigliano, is the King Charles’s Head here – becomes such a bugbear. Not so much because it

looms large in the discipline, but because it threatens the integrity of one conjugation of literature

and history with false proximity to another, deleterious one.

This is an individual motivation for a stance of embattlement rather than indifference. Of the

intellectual productivity to which it has led there can be no question: we owe many of

Ginzburg’s most remarkable essays to it. But we can pose a further question about the

epistemological passion driving them. The force of these interventions is a defence of history as

an inquiry capable of attaining truths, rather than merely weaving tales, let alone diffusing

falsehoods, about the past. But is this defence, in the end, quite robust enough? The title of

another of Ginzburg’s collection of essays is History, Rhetoric and Proof (1999). In it, he argues

that for Aristotle rhetoric, far from being an appeal to emotions as opposed to proof (the way it is

usually, following Cicero, understood today), was based, at least in its deployments in courts of

law, on the very idea of proof. He then shows that one of the landmark achievements of

Renaissance humanism, Lorenzo Valla’s demonstration that the so-called Donation of

Constantine must have been a clerical forgery, was conceived by Valla as a rhetorical

declamation. The example then stands as an emblem of the correct relationship between the two.

Yet the case may tell us less than we might infer from Ginzburg’s use of it. In the Latin

languages a single word – prova, preuve, prueba – covers what in English are distinguished as

‘proof’ and ‘evidence’. Evidence alone is not necessarily decisive: we can speak of ‘weak

evidence’ as well as ‘strong evidence’. Proof, on the other hand, is something quite different: it is

conclusive evidence. Valla’s demonstration that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery

rested, indeed, on a proof stricto sensu: the presence in the text of anachronisms that could not

have been written by any Roman of Constantine’s time. But that proof was negative. It excluded

the authenticity of the document. Proof positive of the identity of the forger, or the date of the

forgery, was missing, though the logic of cui bono naturally indicated a churchman of one kind

or another and a period well after the fourth century. When historians later argued – they still do

– over the dating and provenance of the document, they could turn only to evidence, never to

proof. In that, they have been in the usual situation for any historian. Evidence, which must be

weighed, is the normal stuff of history. Proof – as we move further back in time, where traces

thin out – is on the whole much less frequent, and is typically negative. It is far easier to disprove

a conjecture about an object or a controverted process – let us say, the Bayeux Tapestry or the

fall of Rome – than to prove one. The problems attending these have not gone away. They are

amenable to evidence, not to proof.

Ginzburg tends to elide these two. Partly, no doubt for the reasons of language suggested. But

also because of another distinctive gradient in his work. For if on one slope, it abuts on literature,

on another it tilts towards law. In the last two decades, Ginzburg’s one departure from the essay

form has been The Judge and the Historian, a passionate defence of his friend Adriano Sofri,

convicted of ordering the assassination in 1972, when he was a leader of the revolutionary group

Lotta Continua, of an Italian policeman, Luigi Calabresi, under whose charge the anarchist Pino

Pinelli had died, and was widely thought to have been murdered. Ginzburg’s book demolished

the case for the prosecution. To no avail: Sofri was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment, from

which he has only just emerged. Commenting on the relationship between the judge and the

historian, here and elsewhere, Ginzburg has remarked that the principal differences between

them are two: judges hand down sentences, and on individuals only, whereas historians deal with

groups or institutions too, without penal authority over them. Marc Bloch, in the spirit of the

Annales, had rejected the intrusion of judicial models into history, as encouraging not only

concern with famous persons rather than collective structures, but moralising treatments of them.

For Ginzburg these are sound objections. But he insists they should not obscure a crucial

imperative uniting the judge and the historian: the commitment of each to the idea of proof.

The argument is impressive, but it overlooks a critical difference, brought home starkly by

Ginzburg’s study of Sofri’s trial itself. His destruction of the case against Sofri and his co-

defendants was a disproof: that is, a negative demonstration that the evidence against them did

not stand up. That evidence essentially came down to the testimony of another former member of

Lotta Continua, Leonardo Marino, that he had been the driver of the car used in the assassination

of Calabresi 15 years earlier, acting on orders of the group, and repented of his role in the killing.

By then – 1990 – Marino had a record of petty crime, and his testimony was, as Ginzburg

showed, riddled with contradictions. For a verdict in the trial, this was all that was required.

Legally, judges are obliged to acquit an accused if the evidence against them is faulty or

insufficient. But for historians, matters will be quite otherwise. For them, the obvious questions

in a case like this must be: why did Marino bring false witness against his former comrades 15

years after the assassination, and if they were not its authors, who was? In other words, the

historical task to hand would be the most plausible reconstruction, on the basis of what evidence

has survived, of what actually happened in 1972, as distinct from the judicial task, in this case, of

registering what could not have happened. Ginzburg expressly disavows any attempt at that. For

the purpose at hand, to save a friend from an unjust sentence, he did all that was necessary. All

that was necessary for a lawyer; not for a historian. The difference between a judicial verdict and

historical inquiry is thus not just a question of the necessarily individual object and penal

character of the first, absent from the second. It is to do with the status of evidence itself. So if

we can ask whether Ginzburg’s conjugation of history and literature doesn’t involuntarily risk

weakening the notion of truth, by suggesting too close a bearing of fictions on facts, the same

kind of query can be put to his conjugation of history and law. Might it not, by appealing so

insistently to the notion of proof, with its quite narrow and rigid protocols, involuntarily weaken

a sense of the complexities of historical evidence, so rarely amenable to the simple yes/no

verdicts of a court of law?

Such a paradox could, however, be merely one of principle, without effect on practice. To see

how far this may be so, we can look at the distinctive form of Ginzburg’s work in recent years:

the cascades, those tumbling genealogies of concepts, tropes, devices that mark out his writing as

an essayist. Any reader who is familiar with the earlier Storia notturna[1] – bafflingly translated

as Ecstasies – will perceive the kinship between his treatment of myths and rituals there, and

ideas and figurations in the more recent book, as anthropology is succeeded by intellectual

history. The same authority for the procedures at work is invoked in both: Wittgenstein, and his

image of a rope that may consist of multiple overlapping threads, none extending through its full

length, yet still forming a single cord. More technically, this is the idea of a polythetic

classification, in which there is no need for all members of a given category to possess the same

traits; they may instead be linked as in a sequence – abc/bcd/def – in which the last unit in the

series may have no trait in common with the first.

The frailty of this way of parsing social or cultural forms should be plain. For the relationships it

establishes are essentially uncontrollable: at the limit so indeterminable that anything can be

ultimately connected with anything. The illustration that Wittgenstein – a holy fool in these and

other matters, innocent either of interest in history or knowledge of the social sciences – gave of

his conception was Spengler’s Decline of the West. That it is a hazardous basis for the analysis of

myths becomes clear in Ecstasies, for all the attraction of the book as a whole.

Transferred from myths in pre-literate societies to arguments and ideas – most of them highly

sophisticated – in classical, medieval and modern societies, the same procedure is safer. Myths

are notoriously malleable, offering multiple versions for the convenience of later interpreters: as

their arch-interpreter Lévi-Strauss, whose shadow looms over Ecstasies, once confessed, they are

agreeably manipulable. This is far less true of written texts, where all kinds of well-established

philological controls are available to check such dexterity, should it occur. The cascades of

Wooden Eyes or Threads and Traces thus not only form a beautiful spectacle, with many

intellectual rainbows curving above them, but have solider rock beneath them. It is difficult to

read any of them without a sense of intellectual excitement. Typically composed of a chain of

radically unexpected connections across texts often separated by centuries, even millennia, they

contain, again and again, arresting discoveries, fruit of that combination of extraordinary

erudition and uncanny intuition that has been a hallmark of Ginzburg’s work from the start. Here

it is enough to mention only three recent such surprises in the modern period, to indicate the

range of these findings: the probable mediation of Edouard Drumont, author of La France juive,

in the genesis of the Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the hidden links of

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique; and the presence of

Georges Bataille in the composition and character of Picasso’s Guernica.[2]

That said, we may still ask how the cascades relate to the broader waters of intellectual history,

as it has developed since the 1960s. Here the problem of polythetic classification returns. What

this could never specify, when applied to the human sciences, was any objective – that is, non-

arbitrary – delimitation of the units it would interconnect: the problem is less conspicuous in the

study of myths that typically lack any clear boundaries, allowing them to be cut up in different

segments in any number of ways at the will of the anthropologist. Texts are more resistant.

Slicing and dicing them can be done, but the distortions that result are more readily checkable.

The historiography of ideas – the Cambridge School to the fore – has in large measure developed

out of a reaction against these. How far is the kind of criticism the Cambridge School represents

of relevance to the cascades?

In one sense, it might be said to be beside the point. Ginzburg has never set out to reconstruct the

work of a writer or thinker as such: even the kind of abridgments of them at which Momigliano

was skilled. His way with texts comes not from any sort of Ideengeschichte, however practised,

but primarily from Stilistik. This was the legacy, above all, of Auerbach and Spitzer, for whom

seizure of the telling detail was the key to unlocking any literary whole – Auerbach’s

Ansatzpunkt, often invoked by Ginzburg, yielding Spitzer’s ‘click’ of comprehensive insight,

neither requiring exhaustive inspection of a writer. A secondary influence comes not from the

study of literature, but from the visual arts that form such a rich parallel arena of inquiry in

Ginzburg’s writing. There it was Warburg’s notion of Pathosformeln – figural expressions of

human emotion in stone or paint, capable of being transposed across centuries into widely

contrasting styles and works of art – that early caught his attention. Here too, as with the great

German-Austrian Romanists, the operation is one of extraction: what can be taken – to good

purpose – from a text or an image, not what actually composes it.

Ginzburg’s use of these legacies is no less productive. But applied in compressed form to the

history of ideas, it can lead to arbitrary results. Examples include his handling of the lineage of

estrangement as a device. In the long chain of authors he traces as practitioners of estrangement,

historically the most important of all never figures. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, arguably

more radical than anything Voltaire or Tolstoy could offer, and certainly more influential,

vanishes from the line. The work of novelists suffers too. Tolstoy and Flaubert are offered as

inspirations for the historian on the basis of clips from War and Peace (the Battle of Borodino)

and Sentimental Education (the Revolution of 1848). Bracketed are both the structures and

ideologies of these novels. Yet these are far from irrelevant to the scenes offered as models for

the historian. Tolstoy’s battle-scenes – panoramas of accident, futility, confusion – are calculated

illustrations of his long concluding rhodomontade on the pointlessness of history in general: not

counsel that has moved many historians. Flaubert’s scenes of revolution invert the case, nowhere

more strikingly than in the episode singled out by Ginzburg, in which the leonine innocent

Dussardier is slaughtered by the sinister turncoat Sénécal. The predictability of Flaubert’s

narrative, here as elsewhere (the future villainy of the teacher of mathematics is as plain from his

first physiognomic depiction as the outcome of Charles Bovary’s operation on the club-foot,

once the chemist produces his nostrum), remains as distant from the construction of any serious

history as Tolstoy’s insistence on its unintelligibility. In Ginzburg’s use of the novels as

exemplars, features of them such as these, which do not serve the purpose of his argument, are

excised. That the cut cannot be clean can be seen from the judgments that then go astray: in

Tolstoy no social paternalism, in Flaubert prevision of the KGB. In these two cases, since they

are after all novels, one might well reply that it’s a matter of taste, little weight attaching to them.

That holds. But the principle that texts, whether discursive or imaginative, are best treated as

wholes, rather than dismembered at will, remains central to intellectual history as a discipline,

though not precluding outriders. At the opposite pole from Ginzburg’s sparkling – if, on occasion,

eye-bespeckling – cataracts, we could think of the majestic ocean of Pocock’s ongoing study of

Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion, now in its fifth volume.

The cataracts fall vertically across time. What of the horizontal moves in Ginzburg’s work? Here

the key term is the anomaly. An anecdote can serve as illustration. One day Franco Moretti and

Carlo Ginzburg went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York together. Coming upon

Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, depicting a servant-girl drowsing at a table laden with fruit, a wine-

glass lying on its side, a painting of Cupid on the wall above, and an empty chair half-swung

towards a door half-open, implying the recent departure of a male companion, Moretti – reading

the image as a depiction, in Hegel’s phrase, of the ‘prose of everyday life’ – exclaimed: ‘That is

the beginning of the novel.’ In other words, a narrative of ordinary people in a familiar setting –

neither epic nor tragedy. Ginzburg then spun round to a portrait by Rembrandt on the opposite

wall, of the disfigured painter Gérard de Lairesse, his nose deformed by syphilis, and retorted:

‘No, that is the beginning of the novel.’ In other words, the anomaly, not the rule. Here Ginzburg

certainly had the better of the argument, as Moretti has since in effect conceded, recasting the

originating principle of the novel as the adventure rather than the average existence.

Fiction is one thing, history is another, and the connections between them are more tenuous than

Ginzburg tends to suggest. In historical research, he has often contended, the anomaly tells us

more than the rule, because it speaks also of the rule, whereas the rule speaks only of itself: the

exception is thus always epistemologically richer than the norm. This, however, is not so. By

definition, an anomaly is only such in terms of a rule, which ontologically commands it. If there

is no rule, there can be no exception to it. But the converse does not hold. A rule does not depend

for its existence on an exception. For there are rules that admit of no exceptions: mathematical

ones, in the first place, but not only them. Does this matter? Many productive research

programmes, after all, have been founded on a misprision of method, and who could deny the

productivity of Ginzburg’s research? One way of trying to adjudicate this is to look at the kind of

history which fascination with anomalies has generated: that is, the micro-history of which

Ginzburg is the world’s most celebrated exponent. What kind of unanticipated knowledge does

micro-history of the anomaly – there are other, more statistically minded kinds – give us, that

sets it apart from other branches of the discipline?

Early on, Ginzburg defined micro-history as ‘the science of real life’ – ‘la scienza del vissuto’ –

that would investigate ‘the invisible structures within which … lived experience is articulated’,

to which ‘analyses elaborated on a macro-historical scale’ were of ‘rare and sometimes non-

existent relevance’. In due course, the more or less complete disjuncture between the two implied

by this was modified. Later formulations speak of the corrective administered by micro-history

to the temptations of teleology and ethnocentrism, a negative check. The positive claims of

Ginzburg’s micro-history, however, rest on the power of the anomaly. For what micro-history

could reveal, as illustrated dramatically in The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, was

the existence of worlds undreamed of in standard versions of the past, challenging their easy

acceptance. Still, the logical question persists: does the anomaly alter the rule, the micro-

historical discovery overthrow the macro-historical commonplace? That is less clear.

Belief in the iconoclastic force of the anomaly can draw confidence from Kuhn’s Structure of

Scientific Revolutions and its argument that such revolutions occur when a given scientific

paradigm encounters an observational anomaly that it cannot explain, which in due course

generates a new paradigm capable of accounting for it. The analogy is misleading, however.

Historiography does not possess covering laws like those of the natural sciences, nor

codifications of them into paradigms. It is an altogether looser fabric, in which the discovery of

an anomalous patch here and there is less likely to unravel the whole cloth, obliging it to be

rewoven to a different pattern. Macro-history is the study of the largest changes that societies

undergo. For micro-history to alter these – the anomaly to yield a new rule – the objects of its

study would have to be, actually or potentially, microcosms of another world to come. But that,

in its modesty, micro-history has not often claimed. There is, however, one exception.

Ginzburg’s Ecstasies does so, but with a twist. In it, the micro-practices of a shamanism now

scarcely visible reveal a macro-structure that encompasses us all. But this structure is invariant: it

involves no change. In Ginzburg’s generation there was a strong reaction against grand

narratives, as Lyotard called them while also denouncing them, and micro-history was one of the

first expressions of it. But as Lyotard’s own trajectory would demonstrate, they are not escaped

so easily. In Ecstasies, there is no grand narrative as a story of macroscopic change over time.

Simply, the shaman’s journey to the dead becomes the master narrative of all other stories that

human beings have ever told themselves. Micro and macro are linked, but not as interconnected

levels of a history in movement – rather, as common expressions of an unchanging human nature.

With this, we step out of a historia rerum gestarum into another sort of inquiry, perfectly

legitimate, but something different: what would at one time have been called a philosophical

anthropology.

For further reflection on this complex of issues, we can do no better than turn to Ginzburg’s

beautiful recent lecture ‘Our Words and Theirs’,[3] which takes as its Ansatzpunkt – which he

renders as ‘connecting point’– Marc Bloch’s reflections in The Historian’s Craft on the gaps that

can occur between words and meanings in the vocabulary used by people in the past, and

between this vocabulary and the vocabulary historians may use in writing about them. Adopting

terms coined by Kenneth Pike, Ginzburg recodes this problematic as a tension between ‘emic’

and ‘etic’ perspectives, stressing that there may be conflicts not only between the two but within

each of them. Properly posed, he argues, etic questions generate emic answers that yet never

absorb them without residue, but modify them. What kinds of question, then, yield the most

fruitful answers? He recommends a focus on cases that can lead to new generalisations. The most

promising of these will be anomalies: cases that do not exemplify, but deviate from expected or

established norms. Micro-history – understood not as the scrutiny of very small events, but rather

as the very close scrutiny of any event – has, he argues, been the domain par excellence of the

study of such anomalies, the characteristic effect of whose discovery is to subvert pre-existing

historiographic, as indeed also political, hierarchies.

The Ansatzpunkt of this brief for micro-history is no random choice. Alongside Auerbach,

Warburg and Momigliano, Bloch is the other touchstone for Ginzburg. It was the Annaliste who

made the young Ginzburg a historian, he has explained, when at the age of twenty he read The

Royal Touch, Bloch’s study of the medieval belief, which in England persisted down to the time

of James II, that the king could cure scrofula by laying hands on the sufferer – a puzzle in any

modern retrospect. Today, few would question that Bloch was the greatest historian of his age, or

that The Historian’s Craft remains unsurpassed as a reflection on the tests and tasks of the

discipline. But the respect we owe this manifesto and its author is not paid, if we receive them

uncritically. The key sentence of the book reads: ‘When all is said and done, a single word,

“understanding”, is the beacon light of our studies’. (‘Un mot, pour tout dire, domine et illumine

nos études: “comprendre”’.)[4] To which we can add these two others: ‘For in the last analysis it

is human consciousness which is the subject matter of history’ and ‘Historical facts are, in

essence, psychological facts.’ These successive dicta are not late developments in Bloch’s

thought. They are guiding principles right from the beginning. In the opening pages of The Royal

Touch, he declares his study to be a contribution to ‘la connaissance de l’esprit humain’.

In The Historian’s Craft, understanding – of realities that are fundamentally psychological in

nature – stands contrasted with judging, as historical to unhistorical approaches to the past. There

is no doubting the strength of Bloch’s conviction on this score. But the contrast so highlighted

conceals another that is more significant. Comprehension: is that the same as explanation? A

large methodological literature tells us it is not. To reconstruct the consciousness of an agent –

hopes, memories, intentions, emotions – is not the same as to identify the causes of an action, or

an event. Where does causation figure in Bloch’s account of the historian’s craft? The answer is,

scarcely at all. The last few pages of his text broach it, then peter out. Causes in The Historian’s

Craft are a bit like classes in Marx’s Capital, a word followed by … This could be because the

text, written in very difficult conditions during the war, is unfinished. But there are reasons for

thinking that even had it been finished, the emphases might not have been very much altered.

To see why, we may look at the text Bloch composed a year earlier, his impassioned account of

the fall of France in 1940, Strange Defeat. Written in anger and despair, it posed the historical

question: why had his country been routed? What is striking is that Bloch’s answers remain

entirely within the psychological optic of the later work. His analysis consists essentially of an

enumeration of the states of mind – capacities, outlooks and attitudes – of the actors in the

tragedy, as he saw them. Why had the Third Reich been victorious? ‘The German triumph was,’

he writes, ‘essentially, a triumph of intellect.’ That is, the German high command had understood,

as the French had not, that speed – the Blitzkrieg of tanks and aircraft – had become the key to

victory in the field. Not only that, Bloch found it quite believable that ‘Hitler, before drawing up

his final plans for the campaign, summoned a number of psychologists to his headquarters and

asked their advice,’ German dive-bombing then aiming more at nerves than bodies.[5] On the

French side, culprits for the defeat were to be found in every quarter: cowardly and incompetent

generals, narrow-minded and selfish trade unions, a bitter and fearful bourgeoisie, a pacifist and

dogmatic left, an unstable and cynical right, a parochial press, a paltering parliament, and last but

not least a defaulting professoriat, among whom he numbered himself, that in its fatigue and

sloth had failed to educate the youth of the nation to its duties and dangers. All in all, and

symmetrically with the reasons for the enemy’s victory, ‘it was not only in the field that

intellectual causes lay at the root of our defeat.’ (‘Ce n’est pas seulement sur le terrain militaire

que notre défaite a eu ses causes intellectuelles’).

Viewed morally and aesthetically, Strange Defeat is an impressive document, an indictment

written at white heat by a patriot who did not spare himself in the effort to understand where his

country had gone wrong, and lived up to its concluding call to his compatriots to risk their lives

in the struggle to redeem it, as Bloch, tortured and executed by the Nazis as an organiser of the

Resistance four years later, eminently did. But as a historical explanation of the collapse of

France, it is plainly wanting. The reasons for that are twofold. In part, they stem from the

psychologistic bias of Bloch’s work from early on, which in 1940 led him to treat as

explanations what are only descriptions of the variously deplorable – in his eyes – mind-sets of

his countrymen, without stopping to ask what might, historically speaking, have brought about

the condition of a republic as uniformly rotten as he then perceived it.

In addition to this epistemological weakness, there was a political blind-spot. At the age of 28,

Bloch had plunged with ardour into the trenches of the First World War. Rising to the rank of

captain, and treasuring his four decorations, he exulted in the final defeat of the boches. ‘Before I

myself had breathed the joy of victory in the summer and autumn of 1918 … did I truly know all

that was contained in that beautiful word?’ he was still writing 22 years later. The death of

millions in the carnage of war between rival imperialist powers appears to have occasioned not a

moment’s critical reflection in him, at the time or later. The descent of liberal civilisation into

barbarism he could still describe as late as 1941, incredibly, as a fight for ‘justice and

civilisation’. So little had the realities of the conflict impinged on him that he never batted an

eyelid, even in retrospect, at his own tour of duty in Algeria, at the height of the war, where his

regiment was dispatched to help put down resistance to the forcible conscription of peasants in

the Maghreb for the killing-fields of Flanders. What patriot could question France’s right to an

empire stretching from the Caribbean across Africa to the South Seas?

Bloch was a humane man, free from the chauvinist hysteria of Durkheim or Seignobos, and his

attitudes were widely shared. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss, to whom Ginzburg has

dedicated another admiring essay, was once a socialist internationalist, who became an

enthusiastic nationalist overnight in 1914. Fresh from the massacres of the war, he would deplore

the violence of the Bolsheviks, and calmly declare in Rabat that ‘Morocco is not and has never

been an Arab country.’ So might it not be said in extenuation of Bloch what he himself said of

Montaigne, that ‘the steadiest of minds did not and could not escape the common prejudices of

the time’? That would be too easy. For, taking us back to Ginzburg’s observation that there is

always conflict within both emic and etic idioms, there were others – initially, few of them, later

very many – who saw perfectly clearly what Bloch shut his eyes to, at the time and afterwards. It

is enough to think of Luxemburg or Lenin, or for that matter Bertrand Russell or Romain

Rolland. A contemporary word was readily available to grasp the real nature of the conflict, but

Bloch could never bring himself to use it. Instead of the term ‘imperialism’, he stuck to the

tropes of social patriotism, going so far, in the most dismal single sentence he ever wrote, as to

dismiss the idea that ‘war is the concern of the rich and powerful, that the poor should have

nothing to do with it,’ remarking: ‘as though, in an old society, cemented by centuries of a shared

culture, the humble are not always, for good or ill, constrained to make common cause with the

mighty’. Always? So much for the February and October Revolutions.

More striking even than Bloch’s political blindness, however, was the epistemological blankness

to which it led. For, existentially central as the First World War always was to him, it remained

an explanatory void. At no point in his life does he ever seem to have asked himself what were

its causes. His only historical reflection on it was an essay on the collective psychology of false

news – rumours – in conditions of war, a triviality within the enormity of the surrounding

catastrophe. So, when the Second World War came, as the long predicted sequel to the first,

Bloch could not even see that the defeat of France he mourned was an effect of the victory over

which he had rejoiced, which had left the country, with proportionately the highest losses of any

of the major powers, incapable of competing in the same way a second time, without any ally to

the east.

None of this, of course, affects Bloch’s stature as a medievalist, which remains unsurpassed. No

historian is omnicompetent. What Bloch achieved with his deep commitment to understanding is

extraordinary enough. In its practice, once set well back in the past, it could often furnish,

alongside interpretation, more explanation than its socio-psychologistic principle might have

suggested. The Royal Touch illustrates the way in which the two could coexist in his work. What

primarily interested Bloch, and occupies the bulk of the work, was essentially the mystique of

sacred kingship and the outlook of the ailing supplicant. By comparison, strikingly brief is his

discussion of what on another way of looking at his story must be regarded as its real punchline:

namely, the sporadic character of scrofula as a disease, whose natural remissions put the touch

beyond systematic discredit. More than the – a priori predictable – desire of rulers to enhance

their power and of sufferers to seek a cure, it is this materialist explanation of the miraculous that

is Bloch’s, seemingly cursory, masterstroke.

Understanding concerns intentions; explanation, causes. They would be indistinguishable only if

events were always the outcome of human intentions, which they are not. Bloch was

programmatically committed to a priority of understanding, though of course in his greatest

works, French Rural History and Feudal Society, he offered many powerful explanations. The

paradox of Strange Defeat is that the object of his analysis required, more obviously than any

previous topic he addressed, above all objective explanation; while his approach to it relied,

unlike any previous book-length study of his, all but exclusively on subjective understanding.

The misfit between object and method is so marked that only his attitude to the First World War

would account for it.

The Royal Touch, which was a favourite of Momigliano too, is another matter. It is small

mystery that it should have inspired the young Ginzburg to become a historian. What he

developed from Bloch’s example was the innovation he calls the ‘case’. In this context, the word

does not mean a ‘case-study’, as we normally use that term, but something closer to its opposite:

in German, from which this usage comes, not Fall, but Kasus. Ginzburg’s reference is to a

remarkable work, Einfache Formen – ‘Simple Forms’ – by the distinguished Dutch philologist

who became a Nazi, André Jolles. Its argument was that it is out of certain elementary forms of

language, themselves not yet literary, that literature arises. For Jolles, these were legend, saga,

myth, riddle, saying, memorabile, fairy story, joke – and case. What he meant by ‘case’ is what

was once explored by the Roman church under the rubric of ‘casuistry’: that is, an event, actual

or hypothetical, defying straightforward application of a moral or logical rule to it, and requiring

a delicate act of judgment, or special intellectual ingenuity, to classify or resolve. Jolles’s

illustrations of this kind of simple form came, successively, from faits divers in the 20th-century

press, medieval minstrelsies, recursive tales in 11th-century Kashmir, late 16th-century theology.

What all involve is an antinomy of some kind, unsettling established norms.

Cases in the sense Ginzburg intends are, virtually by definition, anomalous rather than typical:

the two-tongued Nicodemists, the night-walking Benandanti, the miller of Friuli, werewolves of

the Baltic. In his studies of these, there is always a reconstruction of the subjective universe of

the anomalous agent, a feat requiring just the kind of understanding Bloch would have saluted as

the ‘beacon light’ of the historian. In each case, the identification of an anomaly subverts, as

Ginzburg puts it, a previous rule, or the reigning historiographic hierarchy, by prompting a new

generalisation – the persistence of millennial traditions of shamanism, or the existence of

underground currents of materialism, in the popular cultures of early modern Europe. These

findings are based on the discoveries of the historian. Does their generalisation also bring with it

causation? For lack of evidence, in the nature of these cases, that is less clear: why did

shamanism persist, and why eventually fade? Or where did popular materialism come from, and

why was it so patchy? Answers are not to hand, perhaps not available. Revelation and

interpretation are the spades and the hearts of this kind of research; explanation, the diamonds or

clubs.

What are the implications for micro-history, as practised by Ginzburg? Recalling that coinage of

the term came from the microscope, he remarks that the prefix alludes to the intensity of scrutiny,

not the scale of what is scrutinised. But a microscope, if it is to be of any purpose, has to be

focused on what is very small. It is no use gazing at the heavens through one. Other instruments

are needed for that. Nor, one might add, is the subversion of historiographic hierarchies a special

capacity of the microscope. In its own way, no less striking an overthrow has occurred in the

same period at the most macroscopic of levels, in the work of arguably the greatest living

American historian, Paul Schroeder, whose Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848, and

associated essays, have revolutionised one of the most disgraced of all fields in the discipline, for

long close to the bottom of the hierarchy of which Ginzburg speaks, and the one against which

the Annalistes reacted most radically: diplomatic history. What Schroeder has done is rewrite the

logic of 18th and 19th-century statecrafts into a new form of international history, that now

stands close to the most challenging heights of the discipline, conceptual and empirical. It is no

accident that it should be this conservative historian, viewing the run-up to 1914 from the optical

angle of Vienna, rather than Berlin, Paris, London or St Petersburg, who has offered far the best

single explanation, worked out through an arresting set of counterfactuals, of the First World

War. Here causes, not cases, are in command.

We do not have to choose between the two. The craft of the historian allows for as many kinds of

research as painting, styles of imagery. The tremendous Italian critic of art Roberto Longhi,

another key reference for Ginzburg, detested Tiepolo, whom he accused of abandoning black and

white for a technicolor worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, and killing Italian painting for a century. But

even he, composing a dialogue between Tiepolo and Caravaggio, one of his idols, allowed

Tiepolo a final word. The taverns of the one and the triumphs of the other are not incompatible.

What, finally, are the politics of Ginzburg’s oeuvre? At first glance, the query might seem

misplaced. Micro-history was in good measure inspired by the Annales of the interwar years,

which polemicised against political or military history, pursuing the excavation of profounder

structures of society. Of these, the most important for micro-history were popular mentalities – to

be studied, however, in new intensive close-up. It might be thought, too, that the emphasis on

what is very longlasting and often unconscious in Ginzburg’s version of micro-history,

unchanging constituents of human nature as received by Warburg or Lévi-Strauss, must tend to

diminish the significance of politics greatly, as the realm par excellence of conscious, active

change. A look at Ginzburg’s recent essays, however, is enough to dispel the impression that this

is an unpolitical historian. It would be surprising if it were otherwise, in a society as politicised

as postwar Italy. But how should that politics be defined? It moves by oblique suggestion and

allusion, not assertion. But where it suggests, often in the signature swerves at the end of the

texts, the implications are plain. The issues to which Ginzburg alludes include: the Shoah, the

attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the war on Iraq, the regime of Berlusconi,

the possibility of nuclear annihilation, cloning, the destruction of the environment. The list in one

sense speaks for itself. Like any politics, it is selective. Not included are related topics: the

Nakba, the war on Yugoslavia, the law in Italy, the nuclear oligarchy, the dominion of financial

markets, the civilisation of capital. What is clear, however, is that the primary impulse in this

historian’s reaction to public events in the contemporary world is an ethical one.

To say that requires an immediate specification. No posture is more foreign to Ginzburg than

moralism of any kind. The most extended expression of his political outlook can be found in a

dialogue with Vittorio Foa – a friend of his father, and a long-time leader of the Italian left –

published in 2003. In it, he remarks that he is attracted to casuistics, because it is not preacherly.

Casuistry was perfected by the Jesuits, and Ginzburg’s liking of it takes us to one of the nodes of

his politics. No believer himself, he is a respecter of religions, welcoming their multicultural

coexistence and flexible reinterpretation in the light of contemporary developments. Jesuits were

past-masters of such ‘accommodation’, and to be admired for it, whatever the scriptural accuracy

of their treatments of Christian or other holy writ. But religion – in nominalist mood, he

sometimes doubts whether the term has any constructive meaning at all – is one thing, the church

another. Towards the institution responsible for the Inquisition, and a Vatican whose power

remains pervasive in Italy, Ginzburg has never concealed his hostility. The importance of the

Enlightenment as a central reference for his later writing comes in good part from this. The

campaigns, direct or indirect, of Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot or Hume against persecution and

intolerance stand in his eyes as the heritage that immigrants to Europe from other shores and

faiths are entitled to expect from it in our own time, and to which the church from Montini to

Ratzinger has yet fully to live up: in its moral courage and imagination, that Enlightenment

remains exemplary for us today.

Ginzburg’s sense of the debt we owe the minds of that age is a deep undercurrent in much of his

later work. But it may be significant that – so far at least – Montesquieu and Rousseau have had

less place in it. These were the great political theorists of the time. Might their relative absence

from the roll-call suggest some unease with each? The deletion of Persian Letters from the

genealogy of estrangement is noticeable enough. The Spirit of the Laws? Is it too systematic a

work, for one who resists systems of thought, to have earned Ginzburg’s attention, or simply, too

focused on political structures of the kind Annalistes turned away from? Rousseau, confined to

an ominous passage from Emile, is perhaps the more pregnant omission. Too preacherly, too

revolutionary? We must wait and see.

How then should the political side of this historian be described? In a review of Ecstasies, the

eminent Italian poet and critic Franco Fortini, who knew Ginzburg, found it the work of a liberal

conservative. He was using the terms not in their American but European meaning, where no

oxymoron is involved. At the time, the description seemed misplaced. But there is an honourable

sense of each that can be accepted as some indication of where Ginzburg might stand today:

liberal as far as tolerance and fundamental liberties go, conservative as far as nature and the

environment go. What then of the term which twenty years ago looked preferable to either of

these: ‘populist’? This is one to which Ginzburg himself refers in sketching the background to

his first writings, and which Franco Venturi used of his father, whom he saw as an Italian

equivalent of a Narodnik. Like liberal and conservative, the term has some application, in the

sense that all Ginzburg’s work is informed by a strong sympathy and solidarity with popular life

– micro-history he once described as a ‘prosopography from below’. But ‘populism’ is also an

ambiguous term, with too many other connotations – the Northern League is populist, but so too

in the eyes of the European establishments is any revolt against them -– to more than gesture at

his outlook.

Ginzburg dislikes labels of every kind, and evades any ready capture by them. Can anything

more exact be attempted? Maybe this. If we look at what has moved him to comment, directly or

indirectly, on issues of the day, it is nearly always some danger to life or liberty. It is a defensive

politics. In his dialogue with Foa, Ginzburg pressed his friend to shed, as he puts it, ‘the dead

leaves of radicalism’. Radicalism – Rousseau was one of its embodiments – has, however, a way

of sprouting new leaves, typically somewhat brighter than the evergreen of moderation: not least

in Italy, ever since a Jacobin tree was planted in Rome in Year Six of the Revolution. Radicalism

is a spirit of attack, not of defence. Both have their place in a wider politics. Ginzburg’s defence

of his friend Sofri can stand for his practice as a whole: to prevent an injustice, not to implicate

this justice – based on legal reward for delation, and protection of bought witness – as a system

that should be abolished. Hopes and aims should not be set too high. The ending of perhaps the

most powerful of all his essays, ‘Killing a Chinese Mandarin’, on the numbing of our feelings

that comes from remoteness, reads: ‘To express compassion for those distant fellow human

beings would be, I suspect, an act of mere rhetoric. Our power to pollute and destroy the present,

the past and the future is incomparably greater than our feeble moral imagination.’

[1] First published by Einaudi in 1989.

[2] ‘The Sword and the Lightbulb: A Reading of Guernica’ in Disturbing Remains, edited by

Michael Roth and Charles Salas (2001).

[3] ‘Our Words and Theirs’ has not yet been published but there is a video of Ginzburg

delivering the lecture at video.ias.edu/ginzburg.

[4] Published as Apologie pour l’histoire, ou métier d’historien in 1949.

[5] There is more than a little irony in the fact that Bloch, who devoted such vivid pages of The

Historian’s Craft to the problem of forgeries in history, should himself have become the victim

of one: no fewer than three times in his account of the fall of France does he cite as a source,

without questioning it, Hermann Rauschning’s fake conversations with Hitler.

Vol. 34 No. 8 · 26 April 2012 » Perry Anderson » The Force of the Anomaly (print version)

pages 3-13 | 9323 words

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Ltd., 1997-2012

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