The Liberal Approach to the Past

A Reader

Michael J. Douma

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948647830
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historiographie

What do we mean by liberalism or liberal history? It seems that every scholar in the social sciences would like to define liberalism in their own way. Certainly there is plenty of room for differences of opinion on this matter. But defining any "-ism" requires circumscribing a set of beliefs or drawing lines in such a way as to connect ideas that we believe form a coherent tradition.

Liberal history is primarily concerned with ideas and with the reasons why individuals acted as they did in the past. Liberal historians prefer to study themes of power and liberty, particularly as they relate to the rise and fall of political systems that protect liberties and individual rights. As the selections in this reader show, the liberal approach to the past is generally skeptical of laws of history and suggestions of historical determinism.

1

James Anthony Froude

“The Science of History,” a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, February 5, 1864, reprint, Ten Cent Pocket Series no. 175, Haldeman-Julius Company, Girard, KS (undated, probably early 1920s)

James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) was a novelist, lecturer, editor, and historian. Educated at Oxford, he served as the Regius Professor of Modern History from 1892 to 1894, following Edward Augustus Freeman, Froude’s adversary. He wrote biographies of Luther, Erasmus, Caesar, Bunyan, Disraeli, and Thomas Carlyle; historical and travel accounts of English colonies; and a 12-volume history of England to which he devoted 20 years of research and writing. In his politics and in his writing, Froude was a polemicist, a friend and follower of Thomas Carlyle, whose idea of the hero in history had much influence on Froude. Froude himself has been the subject of a number of biographies, but his fame and impact in his own day appear to have been much greater than his legacy.⁹

In this essay, Froude squares off against Henry Thomas Buckle’s cause-and-effect naturalism, in which man acts only from nature, like an animal, subject only to natural laws. Buckle was himself a liberal in religion and a supporter of laissez faire economics who, as a historian, was interested in themes of progress and liberty. It is telling that Froude’s methodological argument here was against another liberal, since liberals then dominated historical writing.

Liberal history was of course not codified, and never has been, so liberals then and now could disagree on some points of historical method and theory. At question in Froude’s mind was whether history could become a science, with laws or at least general tendencies. By the end of the 19th century, this was decidedly the view of the positivists and it dominated sociological thinking. But liberals, standing opposite the socialists and the planners, moved in the other direction, more in support of Froude than Buckle, it seems.

Men, Froude declares, are more than just products of their environments. They have volition, and with volition, there can be no science of history, at least not a science of prediction. Some of Froude’s statements anticipate Ludwig von Mises and others in this tradition: “History is but the record of individual action”; and “All actions arise from self-interest,” citing Adam Smith in support. Froude provides criticism of historical determinism and the grand philosophies of history, which come and go in fashion. He defends individual action and choice against the reducibility of all behavior to laws.

But in this speech, his own theory of history remains a bit obscured, hidden behind poetry and references to characters from literature. And yet that seems to have been Froude’s intention, to show that history is more an art than a science, more concerned with sympathy for characters than predictions of nature.

Among late 19th-century English liberals, Froude was far from the only writer to debate whether history could approach a science.¹⁰ His lecture, however, appears to have been among the better-known examples of the period. A common response is that Froude overstated Buckle’s historical determinism, and that history did have the possibility to be or perhaps become a science with general but not exact predictions.

Ladies and Gentlemen,—I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on what is called the science of history. I fear it is a dry subject, and there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of such words as science and history. It is as if we were to talk of the color of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in things long past, which comes to us only through books? It often seems to me as if history was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.

First, however, I wish to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected with this way of looking at history, and whose premature death struck us all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr. Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an hour without a note,—never repeating himself, never wasting words; laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr. Buckle’s views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon power; and he had qualities also—qualities to which he, perhaps, himself attached little value—as rare as they were admirable.

Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thoughts which made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then, at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the dove-cotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.

Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done any thing remarkable there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from doing it again. He is feasted, feted, caressed; his time is stolen from him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found shattered by his labors. He had but time to show us how large a man he was; time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted. Almost his last conscious words were: “My book, my book! I shall never finish my book!” He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.

But his labor had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might, the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought. But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of genius: he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and, on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination. They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.

Mr. Buckle’s general theory was something of this kind: When human creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in, there seemed to be no order in any thing. Days and nights were not the same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the stars rose and set like the sun; some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men’s feet; and they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.

Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive; and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem inclined to burn a bad man’s house down than a good man’s, provided the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse, instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon and earth. The comets become bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By degrees caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to penetrate,—the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.

There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion, conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist. Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of conditions the consequences necessarily followed. With man the word “law” changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could not choose but follow, it become a moral precept, which he might disobey if he dared.

This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully. Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but, to do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it; he draws men like trees or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better taught, he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective, and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favorable soil, where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the largeness and variety of man’s capacities; and in this special capacity, that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favorable to his own growth, and can apply them for himself, yet, again, with this condition,—that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.

And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn. His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind, his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear relations of cause and effect.

If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the character of Julius or Tiberius Caesar, but we could know well enough the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of the chalk or the coal measures.

And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms, obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been much the same.

As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new science of political economy. Here already was a large area of human activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would fix prices by what they consider things ought to cost; they encouraged one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well have tried to work a steamengine on moral reasons. The great statesmen whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed in the conditions of things; and to contend against them was the old battle of the Titans against the gods.

As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the troubles which people fell into in old times because they were ignorant of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them, would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil, and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and, in the exquisite air, exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful. Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.

True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards are superstitious because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief in any supernatural agency whatsoever.

Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human obligations and responsibilities.

That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth, is quite certain, were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language: he learns to think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children. There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well ascertained by which characters are influenced; and, clearly enough, it is no mere matter for a boy’s free will whether he turns out well or ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command. These are what are termed the advantages of good education; and if we fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.

In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like. In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a complexion to their whole after-character. When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the overthrow of a monarchy, or the establishment of a creed, they do but half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; the existing beliefs, their existing moral and political condition.

In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future, in the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility, not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our children from bad associations or friends, we admit that external circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.

But are circumstances every thing? That is the whole question. A science of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as in all others; that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. James Anthony Froude: “The Science of History,” a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, February 5, 1864, reprint, Ten Cent Pocket Series no. 175, Haldeman-Julius Company, Girard, KS (undated, probably early 1920s)
• 2. Frederic William Maitland: Extract from “The Body Politic,” in Frederic William Maitland, A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, c. 2000)
• 3. William Torrey Harris: Preface to B. A. Hinsdale, How to Study and Teach History, with Particular Reference to the History of the United States (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912 [originally published 1893])
• 4. Anonymous: “Preface,” History and Biography of Washington County and the Town of Queensbury, New York (New York: Gresham Publishing, 1894)
• 5. Heinrich Rickert: Selection from Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962 [original German 1899])
• 6. Charles George Crump: Selection from The Logic of History (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919)
• 7. Benedetto Croce: Selections from History as the Story of Liberty (New York: Meridian Books, 1955 [original Italian 1938])
• 8. Maurice Mandelbaum: Selection from The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1938)
• 9. R. G. Collingwood: Selection from The Idea of History, rev. ed., edited with an introduction by Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [originally published 1946])
• 10. F. A. Hayek: “The Historicism of the Scientistic Approach,” in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979 [originally published 1952])
• 11. Pieter Geyl: Selection from Pieter Geyl, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949)
• 12. Herbert Butterfield: Selection from Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 [originally published 1955])
• 13. Ludwig von Mises: Selection from Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957)
• 14. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff: Selections from The Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962 [originally published 1957])
• 15. Henry Steele Commager: Selection from The Nature and The Study of History (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984 [originally published 1965])
• 16. J. H. Hexter: Selection from The History Primer (New York: Basic Books, 1971)
• 17. Roy A. Childs Jr: Selection from “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” Reason magazine, February 1971 and March 1971 issues
• 18. R. M. Hartwell: History and Ideology (pamphlet published by the Institute for Humane Studies, Arlington, VA, 1974)
• 19. Sheilagh Ogilvie: “Towards a Critical Classical Liberal History,” Humane Studies Review 4, no. 2 (1987)
• Notes
• About The Editor
• Cato Institute