Abstract
The contemporary historian Dominick La Capra in his influential text Rethinking Intellectual History observes that the consensus of intellectual historians is that their field is in a crisis so fundamental that the very nature and objectives of the discipline are in question.1 This essay will show one way of presenting the chief systematic and conceptual, as well as some of the historical reasons why that crisis was inevitable.
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Napoleon Bonaparte
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Notes
Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Text, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 23.
La Capra and Steven Kaplan edited an anthology designed to show the current state of the historiography of intellectual history. Its title is: Modern European Intellectual History, Reappraisals, & New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982). This text is a most pertinent illustration both of how various contemporary historians understand the crisis and of how theory has produced the dislocation.
John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ, Press, 1987). Caputo’s work traces the development of hermeneutics toward ever more nihilistic conclusions. Though his concerns and some of his claims are similar to mine, his focus is not on historiography.
A discussion which parallels my claims about (self) reflexivity can be found in Hilary Lawson’s book Reflexivity (La Salle: Open Court Press, 1985).
Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972).
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Peter McCormick & Frederick Elliston (ed.), Husserl, Shorter Works (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 203 ff. The text of “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” is also in this book, p. 166 ff.
We must always be on guard for what interests really motivate since resentment (ressentiment), which invi.
Both Hayden White and, especially, La Capra either diminish or ignore the importance of the Positivist tradition in historiography. La Capra, for example, has no references in the Index of Rethinking Intellectual History to Positivism nor to any of its advocates. The “European” slant of his view of intellectual history is rather convincingly indicated by the scarcity of reference to British and even American sources and figures. Perhaps we could include the Positivist tradition under White’s category of “reconstruction” though the meaning of that designation for him is rather more committal to pattern in history than the Positivists claimed could be found. In an odd kind of way, the Positivist historians from Hume forward, quite contrary to their proclaimed intent, would seem to be a prime example of the kind of interpretive license the present essay discusses. Someone as esteemed as the historian and critic Morse Peckham, advancing the Positivist line in the Introduction to his influential study of high culture at the end of the nineteenth cent. Beyond the Tragic Vision, could claim that the historian’s concern was only the artifacts of the present, e.g. the pottery shard, the manuscript, and that “… volumes of history are not narratives about the events of the past but theoretical constructs about the existing documents and artifacts…” (p. 24). He goes on, following his analogizing of historical investigation to scientific experimentation, to claim history is really a set of predictions about what will be found (in the future). Of course he was able to write brilliantly insightful, intriguing and entertaining narratives about the past somehow while, supposedly, just commenting on the pottery shard. Anyone interested in understanding the tortured anomalies of the Positivist view of historiography, especially as it is even more greatly potentiated in intellectual history should read Peckham’s Introduction, “The Problem of the Historian”. Beyond the Tragic Vision: (New York: George Braziller, 1962).
In 1915 the industrialist Henry Ford was alleged to have said “history is bunk”. Later that year, while being cross-examined at the trial of his suit against the Chicago Tribune, he rather vaguely denied having said it. But whatever the truth, the attribution has stuck.
Caputo, op. cit.
“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it”. Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge, ed. by R. C. March (New York: Capricorn Books, 1971), p. 193.
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Overvold, G.E. (1996). Radicalizing Theory and the Interpretive Crisis of Intellectual History. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Life in the Glory of Its Radiating Manifestations. Analecta Husserliana, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1602-9_35
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