The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism

Rolf Torstendahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317627722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This book examines the evolution of historical professionalism, with the development of an international community that shares a set of values regarding both methodological minimum demands and what constitutes new results. Historical professionalism is not a fixed set of skills, but a concept with varying import and meaning at different times depending on changing norms. Torstendahl covers the propagation of these different ideals and of new educational forms from the late 18th century to the present, from Ranke's state-centrism to a historiography borne by social theories.

1
History-Writing, Fragmentation, and Professionalism

In Europe much of what is fundamental in scholarship and science goes back to the ancient Greek tradition. There, two words stand for the basic principles of all knowledge: philosophia and historein. Philosophy, the first of these terms, denoted the love of knowledge and wisdom, which comprised both epistemology and moral behaviour. Historein meant ‘investigate’, and the content of the term was only later monopolized for ‘history’ as we understand the term. Plato was a philosopher in the original sense, whereas Aristotle gave place to empirical investigations, which were the core of historein. The grand systems of wisdom became the objects of a reverence that was not given to empirical investigations. Philosophy, including mathematics, geometry and epistemology, moral and aesthetic considerations, and principles of government, thus had a higher status than empirical investigations. History (in our sense) was of the latter type. This evaluation remained from Antiquity at least to the Enlightenment and is sometimes heard even today.

History the Mother-Discipline

It should be said from the beginning that this book is limiting its perspective to European history-writing up to the twentieth century. What was understood as writing on history in other parts of the world than the European region before 1900 is only occasionally hinted at. The reason for this exclusivity is that, as far as I know, there are no signs of an emerging historical professionalism (as this concept is defined later in this chapter) in any other cultural context before it was launched at European universities in the nineteenth century; further, no ideas of what ought to be looked into by historians and by what means historical investigations ought to be performed were transmitted from any non-European cultural context into the European and North American academic culture before 1900. Other ways of understanding what history is and how it should be cultivated are well worth study, and a glimpse of the variations may be found in the recently published five volumes of The Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011–12), though this work, too, may be somewhat biased in favour of the European (and North American) understanding of history, as few of the authors who treat non-European historical traditions are insiders of these cultures.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries something new happened in the relation between history as a subject of learning and the many disciplines that work with a time aspect on humans and human culture. Some of these have had or still have the word ‘history’ in their names, such as the history of literature, history of art, history of science, economic history, social history, etc. Not only do some of them tend to leave out ‘history of’ in their names, but many of them also seek another identity than the one provided by their historical aspect. Literature without history is a text-analysing branch of knowledge, where the ‘deconstruction’ of the content is not the only option, although, when it was introduced, it caused a break with the past with an audible crack that earlier efforts to liberate the discipline from its historical perspectives had not managed to effectuate. However, there are other disciplines which have had a close connection to the discipline of history without any appeal to history in their names. First of all this is true of archaeology but also of many of its regional sub-branches, such as Egyptology, or sub-branches focused on specific materials, such as ‘vaseology’ or ‘megalitology’, denoting systematized knowledge of ceramic vases and large-stone monuments respectively.

What has happened in the relation between the discipline of history and many of its former sub-disciplines is not only that they have liberated themselves in a formal way. They have become established disciplines in their own right. One of the consequences of this development is that they do not, as they once did, look to history for a lead in their professional attitude. Nowadays, professionalism in archaeology is not directly related to professionalism in history. As we will see in Chapter 7 of this book it was an ambition in the early phase of the international historical congresses to gather representatives of all disciplines with a historical aspect at these congresses. The ambition behind this understanding of history as a kind of studies forming an umbrella over several disciplines was never quite explicit, but it had something to do with a notion that all studies of the past had one type of reasoning in common. This notion implied some general intellectual grounds of history, shared by all who worked on human manifestations in the past and thus partaking in a wide historical professionalism.

Historical professionalism relates the individual historical researcher to a collectivity of historians, the academic community of historians. The connections between this community and the university system were changing in the early nineteenth century. At that time the idea of an all-embracing background of studies in all disciplines in the philosophical faculty was still obligatory for further studies in the ‘higher’ faculties in order to become a professional practitioner in the Church, in the court-room, or in the hospital. During the nineteenth century this high evaluation of a common intellectual heritage in all qualified professional work dissolved. At the same time a quite new interest in research appeared in the humanities, and this was a basic condition for the rise of new disciplines and at the same time of researchers’ professionalism in each of these disciplines and specialities. The process of fragmentation of history is thus one of the objects of study in this book; another is the ambition to maintain a common professionalism within the discipline delimited in one way or another. The fragmentation occurs not only through the appearance of new disciplines from the bosom of history but also in a change of priorities among historians, who want to see history as their profession. This is something that I will have reason to revert to frequently.

Fragmentation of history thus is an important side issue of this study. Whereas professionalism mainly worked as a centripetal force of the discipline, giving the impetus to scholars to keep together around certain norms, fragmentation was a centrifugal force, creating specialities. Some of them did not give priority to a common set of norms for historians, which in turn led to dissolution and diversity. Other specialities, however, did not object to being part of the discipline of history with its general norms. Thus, differentiation and fragmentation have taken different shapes. What I have been calling ‘forces’ here is, of course, nothing but the ambitions of individual historians. When several individual historians by education or persuasion share the same norms, it may seem like a ‘force’ that is driving the discipline in one direction or the other.

From Antiquity, history has played the role of mother-discipline for a series of new disciplines. This was a natural process as long as the original meaning of the Greek work historein, ‘investigate’ (or ‘ask’ or ‘tell’), was vivid in the minds of researchers. Herodotus and Thucydides were the masters of such investigations that European historians long tried to imitate. However, there was no terminological opposition between being a historian writing history (in our limited sense), on the one hand, and being a researcher pursuing any sort of empirical investigation, on the other. Natural history in this sense of ‘history’ was created as a word for the big taxonomic work of some learned men in Antiquity, who tried to create an overview of the ‘natural’ world, i.e. all living beings besides humankind. The most well-known author of this tradition is Pliny the Elder, probably partly because of his use of the term Naturalis historia for his main work. There were others with similar purposes before Pliny, such as Strabo, who is known as a geographer but was in fact an observer of the same kind as Pliny. Both tried to classify a mass of knowledge into an encyclopaedic system about the world.

When ‘history’ (as a concept for the seeking of knowledge about the past) in the late Roman era and during the Middle Ages became a term primarily for narratives of wars and accounts of circumstances and events in states and state-like formations, it became closely connected with politics. Writers of this kind of history most often had an ambition to justify their own deeds or were commissioned to show the just cause that had been the driving force behind the commissioner’s actions. Caesar’s De bello gallico is a well-known example of this kind, and bishop Gregory of Tours’s Decem libri historiarum is a later example, depicting the turmoil in the late Merovingian kingdom of France in the late sixth century.

In the following centuries chronicles and annals came to dominate the historical literature. There were real masters of the art of writing chronicles already from the tenth century and onwards. Men like Widukind and Liutprand (both from the tenth century) chose their topics both to entertain the reader (or listener, as most early historical works were read aloud) and to show who was right in past political struggles.¹ All those who wrote chronicles were not masters, and sometimes chronicles bordered closely on annals, which were based on chronology and presented an enumeration of dates and a number of ‘facts’, each under its date, without any ambitions to make clear any eventual connections between the events that were taken down. Chronicles normally gave more than such dry listings of events, and a ‘modern’ kind of European historiography can be said to have its origin in the chronicles of the Middle Ages. A much-admired example of a rich and varied narrative chronicle is the one authored by Froissart in the fourteenth century. His chronicles, in four books, cover the years 1322–1400. For part of this period Froissart was employed as the official historiographer of Philippa of Hainault (the Queen Consort of Edward III of England) and other royalties, but it is questionable how well these offices were paid. His detailed accounts of events and habits give vivid pictures of what was going on in France. His stories not only were celebrated by contemporaries and occasional historians but have formed the backbone of Barbara Tuchman’s celebrated and popular book on late medieval culture.²

The authors of some chronicles became renowned, and, when famous, they were often employed by kings or princes to embellish their activities in political matters, in many cases including wars. They did not normally regard their fellow chroniclers as colleagues with whom they could share experiences and sources and discuss matters of history-writing, but in the Renaissance they started to cite each other’s works both as confirmation of their own opinions and for polemical purposes. In the Humanism of European universities of the sixteenth century this common culture among chroniclers and historical authors gradually deepened, and something like a learned discipline of history emerged with historians as its practitioners. In the seventeenth century historians often engaged in active research into the past. They also engaged in debates with other historians as they wanted to know about earlier works treating their subject, and they did not shrink from acknowledging the merits of their predecessors.

It is often said—though less often nowadays than fifty to a hundred years ago—that the Enlightenment was using history for moral purposes and trying to extract lessons for princes and peoples from the past, which made historians disregard history for its own sake. It is true that some of the most celebrated eighteenth-century historians, e.g. Gibbon and Voltaire, wanted to illustrate what bad government might lead to, but this is also the time when German universities began to employ historians who wrote and lectured about the best way of getting good knowledge about past events. In this respect the Göttingen professors distinguished themselves. Most famous among them was August Ludwig von Schlözer, who had several later well-known historians as students, such as Arnold Heeren, Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, and Johannes von Müller. Whereas the Göttingen circle became famous for its methods, historians at other universities, for instance Johann Martin Chladenius in Erlangen, were rather occupied with the philosophy of history, and Chladenius especially with hermeneutics. In spite of the flourishing of learned activities at the German universities, no common conception of the purpose and means of studying history was developed. Rather, almost every university created a school of its own in regard to historical studies and research.

This brief overview of the development of history-writing in Europe before 1800 is intended only to show that it took a long time before a learned culture with history as its subject came into existence. From having been an instrument of politics and, in a broad tradition from Antiquity, of moral and political reflection, history gradually took its place as a branch of learning for the sake of knowledge about the past. The main concern of this book is not history-writing as such but historical professionalism, and this is also something that can be traced back in the history of historiography.

There are two different senses of ‘professional’ which have to be kept apart from each other, even if they overlap. In the first sense a professional historian is one who is employed and paid for writing history; in the second sense a professional historian is recognized by other historians (the community of historians) to be admitted among them. Professionalism in the second sense is the main subject of this entire book. Before going into that matter I will develop briefly the history of professionalism in the first sense, for it has a long history.

Historical Professionalism: Sense 1

Long before the nineteenth century there were historians who were employed to do research on history and to write historical works, which means that they were ‘professional historians’ in the first sense of the term. This sense of ‘professional’—which permits one also to talk about professional politicians, professional hockey players, professional plumbers, and so on—designates that the indicated persons are paid for using their specific skills and that they are able to live by their earnings from the activity. It is important that there must be some specific skill that is used by ‘professionals’ in this sense and also that they are paid at least enough for using their skill that they need not rely on substantial side incomes for their livelihood. Some are paid much more than others—this does not matter. They are all professionals as opposed to amateurs, the latter being persons who claim to practise the same skill but only in their spare time and for free or in return for small sums that force them to have an occupation or fortune which provides their main income.

Professional historians in this sense may have existed in ancient China, and it is known that Sima Qian, who lived in the second century BCE, was employed as Grand Historian (or Grand Scribe) by Emperor Wu in the year 105 BCE. He wrote a major historical work, the Shiji, which required extensive archival research.³ As he was a productive person he wrote several books or parts of the same work, among them a theoretical discourse on history and important annals in one part and biographies in another. It is very difficult to see how he could have managed this historical production without being able to devote all his time to it, and it is even difficult to imagine that he could have done all of it single-handedly. There seem to be no traces of direct support. Later dynastic historians in China had an office with clerks at their disposal, but this is several hundreds of years after Sima’s lifetime. In the years 940–45 Ban Gu was employed to write the history of the Tan dynasty, and this was labelled as one of the exemplary histories that had an official stamp. Sima’s work seems to have been much more of his personal choice and composed according to his own ideas.⁴ It is also evident from the monograph by Iurii L. Krol’ on Sima’s work that Sima lived in a cultural environment and related his work to that of other authors. The reputation of Sima Qian was early and lasting. His work is remarkable, for there are no known counterparts in other countries to such an employment as a historian until many centuries later. The first Korean historians, in the eighth century, were politicians who wrote history to further their own interests. In other cultures professional historians in this sense appeared even later. In India the Hindu culture with its cyclical time pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 History-Writing, Fragmentation, and Professionalism
• 2 History-Writing as Professional Production of Knowledge
• 3 Historical Professionalism: A Changing Product of Communities within the Discipline
• 4 A Return of Historismus? Neo-institutionalism and the Historical Turn of the Social Sciences
• 5 Disputations, Seminars, and the Professional Community: The Break with All-Round Education for Professional Historians
• 6 Fact, Truth, and Text: The Quest for a Firm Basis for Historical Knowledge around 1900
• 7 Integration and Fragmentation of History: The International Historical Congresses
• 8 Global Professionalism and Global History
• 9 Entertainment, Narratives, Micro, and Macro—versus Problems
• 10 ‘New Results’ and ‘Scientific Revolutions’ in History
• 11 Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography and Primary Material
• Index