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The nature of history
A study of the nature of history and its place in modern society.
- GenresHistoryPhilosophy
316 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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197 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Marwick
48 books8 followersArthur John Brereton Marwick (1936-2006) was a Scottish social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University. His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the twentieth century, and the relationship between war and social change.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 26, 2012
Arthur Marwick’s The Nature of History would make a pretty good primer on the history of history, if it were still 1970. Nonetheless, it is extremely interesting to read the view of history from 1970, before cliometrics, before Foucault and the explosion of Identity politics, hell, even before Fukuyama and the triumph of the financier over democracy, post-cold war.
In a basic way, I learned more about the course the discipline has taken over time in Marwick’s opening chapters than in Carr and Bloch and everyone else combined. This is the greatest value of the book. In very straightforward and conversational style, Marwick traces the western tradition admirably. Typical of British education, Marwick has an excellent, level-headed view of French, German, English and American historiographic tradition, but mentions “Chinese and Islamic” tradition once in passing. There, he might have thought, now this account is comprehensive. We are left with the illusion that the Western tradition is the important tradition, the one making real progress and the one grappling with the real problems of history.
Marwick does not turn up his nose at other traditions, for he is, in all honesty, well-intentioned. No, we simply don’t have time for these other traditions. That is the western tradition’s Achilles’ heel – it can only recognize itself. That may explain why the discipline of history is so often mired in partial explanations and muddy articulations about its own method.
But back on track – in brief, Marwick argues that historians up until the eighteenth century were individualists, and schools of history did not exist until then. Marwick skims a little too quickly over the Renaissance, which to me seems an ideal place to dwell when it comes to the development of western history. So too we might want to contemplate how religious texts preserved history, the importance of folk traditions in retaining history in centuries of meagre literacy, how there may have been schools of history in the ancient world, etc. An argument could be made that the Christian chroniclers of the medieval era are part of a school of thought concerning history, but it is certain that the idea of forces moving through history, and not simply being an accumulation of events, did not take off until the Enlightenment.
Marwick really shines in his description of 18th and 19th century history. The collection of sources from the Renaissance until the 18th century generated a great wealth of new historical knowledge, the philosophes took this and converted it into eloquence and story. The art flowered in the tillage of Renaissance work. But of course, it was a somewhat pompous flower, full of sweeping conclusions and indulgences. Hegel and Gibbon and Voltaire among others were bright thinkers, but as yet history had no method. As the 19th century wore on, the expansion of institutions of higher learning brought into being for the first time departments of history. Leopold von Ranke dominates the tradition of history in this period, and his desire to do nothing more than tell “what happened” – a so-called strictly factual history – was a revolution in attitude in the mid-19th century. Ranke’s great contribution was to provide not just an illustration of the past, but the skeleton of that illustration. Ranke’s ambition was to provide one work as an explanation and a companion with all the actual evidence and technical details. Tying the story to the evidence came about just as history was struggling more and more with the question of whether it was a science or not. To this day that question continues to plague it. “Just the facts” history lasts until the end of world war one. The madness of that war caused western intelligentsia to question its faith in progress, and Einstein’s theory of relativity caused a popular epiphany that the blustering empiricist of the 19th century, so full of objective facts, might in fact be a myopic buffoon (which he often was).
The relativism of the 30s was a reflective one, and a productive one. It was productive because the spirit of the age was creative and undeterred by the notion of subjectivity, a hallmark of a healthy intellect. By contrast, the postmodernism we currently suffer through is beset on the one hand by its proponents, who paralyze any effort to say anything unequivocal by accusing the sayer of absolute and complete projection, and beset by its critics on the other by rejecting subjectivity as a worthwhile consideration because it can only result in extremes of paralysis and relativism. Abandoning the tempering influence of subjectivity, they become hostile objectivists, resembling more the empiricists of the late 19th century than the scientific inquirers of the 20th century they admire. Both the postmodern critique and the rationalists suffer from the same human mistake of trying to apply the same answer to every question. Perhaps more than anyone, the historian is in the best position to see that different problems have different solutions and require different faculties to be understood. This may explain why history has gone through so many movements, none of which ever really catch on, even in their own time.
Marwick does a good job to show throughout the work the tension between history as an art and history as an inquiry – that is, a science. While humorously acknowledging the tedium of this debate, at the same time he explores the importance of the question. The question reveals more than anything that there is no formal method to history. History is done by individuals who absorb masses of evidence and process them through their own capacity to sift the information, more like a judge than a scientist.
In a basic way, I learned more about the course the discipline has taken over time in Marwick’s opening chapters than in Carr and Bloch and everyone else combined. This is the greatest value of the book. In very straightforward and conversational style, Marwick traces the western tradition admirably. Typical of British education, Marwick has an excellent, level-headed view of French, German, English and American historiographic tradition, but mentions “Chinese and Islamic” tradition once in passing. There, he might have thought, now this account is comprehensive. We are left with the illusion that the Western tradition is the important tradition, the one making real progress and the one grappling with the real problems of history.
Marwick does not turn up his nose at other traditions, for he is, in all honesty, well-intentioned. No, we simply don’t have time for these other traditions. That is the western tradition’s Achilles’ heel – it can only recognize itself. That may explain why the discipline of history is so often mired in partial explanations and muddy articulations about its own method.
But back on track – in brief, Marwick argues that historians up until the eighteenth century were individualists, and schools of history did not exist until then. Marwick skims a little too quickly over the Renaissance, which to me seems an ideal place to dwell when it comes to the development of western history. So too we might want to contemplate how religious texts preserved history, the importance of folk traditions in retaining history in centuries of meagre literacy, how there may have been schools of history in the ancient world, etc. An argument could be made that the Christian chroniclers of the medieval era are part of a school of thought concerning history, but it is certain that the idea of forces moving through history, and not simply being an accumulation of events, did not take off until the Enlightenment.
Marwick really shines in his description of 18th and 19th century history. The collection of sources from the Renaissance until the 18th century generated a great wealth of new historical knowledge, the philosophes took this and converted it into eloquence and story. The art flowered in the tillage of Renaissance work. But of course, it was a somewhat pompous flower, full of sweeping conclusions and indulgences. Hegel and Gibbon and Voltaire among others were bright thinkers, but as yet history had no method. As the 19th century wore on, the expansion of institutions of higher learning brought into being for the first time departments of history. Leopold von Ranke dominates the tradition of history in this period, and his desire to do nothing more than tell “what happened” – a so-called strictly factual history – was a revolution in attitude in the mid-19th century. Ranke’s great contribution was to provide not just an illustration of the past, but the skeleton of that illustration. Ranke’s ambition was to provide one work as an explanation and a companion with all the actual evidence and technical details. Tying the story to the evidence came about just as history was struggling more and more with the question of whether it was a science or not. To this day that question continues to plague it. “Just the facts” history lasts until the end of world war one. The madness of that war caused western intelligentsia to question its faith in progress, and Einstein’s theory of relativity caused a popular epiphany that the blustering empiricist of the 19th century, so full of objective facts, might in fact be a myopic buffoon (which he often was).
The relativism of the 30s was a reflective one, and a productive one. It was productive because the spirit of the age was creative and undeterred by the notion of subjectivity, a hallmark of a healthy intellect. By contrast, the postmodernism we currently suffer through is beset on the one hand by its proponents, who paralyze any effort to say anything unequivocal by accusing the sayer of absolute and complete projection, and beset by its critics on the other by rejecting subjectivity as a worthwhile consideration because it can only result in extremes of paralysis and relativism. Abandoning the tempering influence of subjectivity, they become hostile objectivists, resembling more the empiricists of the late 19th century than the scientific inquirers of the 20th century they admire. Both the postmodern critique and the rationalists suffer from the same human mistake of trying to apply the same answer to every question. Perhaps more than anyone, the historian is in the best position to see that different problems have different solutions and require different faculties to be understood. This may explain why history has gone through so many movements, none of which ever really catch on, even in their own time.
Marwick does a good job to show throughout the work the tension between history as an art and history as an inquiry – that is, a science. While humorously acknowledging the tedium of this debate, at the same time he explores the importance of the question. The question reveals more than anything that there is no formal method to history. History is done by individuals who absorb masses of evidence and process them through their own capacity to sift the information, more like a judge than a scientist.
January 22, 2021
My first reading
February 9, 2011
Good, had to read it for my BA.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews