A New Philosophy of History

Frank Ankersmit, Hans Kellner, Frank Ankersmit, Hans Kellner

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780231624
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What is history? From Thucydides to Toynbee historians and nonhistorians alike have wondered how to answer this question. A New Philosophy of History reflects on developments over the last two decades in historical writing, not least the renewed interest in the status of narrative itself and the presence of the authorial "voice." Subjects include the problems of Grand Narrative, multiple voices and the personal presence of the historian in his text, the ambitions of the French Annales school and the so-called "Grand Chronicler, " and the relevance of non-literary models—museum presentations and picturings—regarding historical discourse.The range of approaches found in A New Philosophy of History ensures that this book will establish itself as required reading not only for historians, but for everyone interested in literary theory, philosophy, or cultural studies.This volume presents essays by Hans Kellner, Nancy F. Partner, Richard T. Vann, Arthur C. Danto, Linda Orr, Philippe Carrard, Ann Rigney, Allan Megill, Robert Berkhofer, Stephen Bann, and Frank Ankersmit.

References

Hans Kellner: Introduction: Describing Redescriptions

1 Richard Lanham, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. 45–6.

2 The phrase linguistic turn’ was originally coined to describe Wittgenstein’s reflection on ordinary language, as opposed to ideal philosophic language; this distinction foreshadows the division in the 1960s of narrativist from covering-law models of historical inquiry. The first use known to me of this phrase is in Gustav Bergmann’s essay of 1953, ‘Logical Positivism, Language, and the Reconstruction of Metaphysics’, reprinted in Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, (Chicago and London, 1967), pp. 63–71. Neither Bergmann nor other users of the phrase seem to have noted that a ‘linguistic turn’ is ‘literally’ a trope, or figure of speech.

3 Precisely such a venture was attempted in The Historians’ History of the World, published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica in five editions between 1904 and 1926. In twenty-odd volumes, classic and authoritative histories were spliced together with so little indication of boundaries that the editors could write that ‘the casual reader might scan chapter after chapter without suspecting that the whole is not the work of a single writer’. On this work, see my ‘Beautifying the Nightmare: The Aesthetics of Postmodern History’, in Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, V/4–5 (1991), pp. 300–303.

4 Carrard’s Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore and London, 1992) describes in a thoroughly original way the uses of historical language in recent French practice. Few works demonstrate more dramatically the change in the grounds of historiographical discussion.

5 Barthes’ Michelet par lui-même (Paris, 1954) inaugurated the reawakened interest in the representational revolution of romantic historiography. Hayden White’s Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973), with its discussions of Michelet, Tocqueville, Marx and Burckhardt, carried forward the literary interest in the Golden Age. More recently, Bann’s The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984) and Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester, 1990), Linda Orr’s Jules Michelet: Nature, History, Language (Ithaca, 1976) and Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution (Ithaca, 1990), Lionel Gossman’s Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1990), Hans Kellner’s Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, 1989), Ann Rigney’s The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990) and Jörn Rüsen’s ‘Rhetoric and Aesthetics of History: Leopold von Ranke’ in History and Theory, XXIX/2 (1990), all extend the list of topics to be explored in this area.

6 Ankersmit develops the consequences of this distinction in Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague, 1983).

7 Rorty has noted the association of pictures and metaphor: ‘It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions.’ See his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), p. 12.

8 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), p. 89.

9 Russell Jacoby, ‘A New Intellectual History?’, American Historical Review, XCVII/2 (1992), p. 424.

10 Perez Zagorin, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations’, History and Theory, XXIX/3 (1990), 271.

11 See Gossman, op. cit., p. 303.

12 Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Ellis (New York, 1966), pp. 84–5.

13 Ibid., p. 92.

14 Ibid., p. 116.

15 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London, 1987), p. 45.

16 Schiller, op. cit., pp. 111–2.

17 White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978), p. 118.

18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967), section 428. The revival of interest in the Sophists marks the recent work of Susan Jarratt, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos and Edward Schiappa. Roger Moss’s essay ‘The Case for Sophistry’ (in Rhetoric Revealed, ed. B. Vickers, Binghamton, NY, 1982) presents a good account of the reasons for reconsidering their status, as do several of the essays in Rethinking the History of Rhetoric: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. T. Poulakos, Boulder, 1993).

19 Susan Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale, 1991).

20 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), pp. 78–9.

21 The telescope metaphor is detailed in Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, 1982).

22 The phrase seems to originate in Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations [1874], trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1983). Sande Cohen has critically examined the modern implications in Historical Culture (1986).

23 Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT, 1983).

24 Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind [1791], abr. F. Manuel (Chicago, 1968), pp. 57–8.

25 Leopold von Ranke’s famous comment that ‘every epoch is immediate to God’ was made in 1854; see Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. G. Iggers and K. v. Moltke (Indianapolis, 1973), p. 53.

26 White, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 276.

27 Wilhelm von Humboldt [1821], in Ranke, op. cit., pp. 22–3.

28 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 79.

29 Rorty writes that the culture critic ‘is the person who tells you how all the ways of making things hang together hang together’; see ‘Pragmatism and Philosophy’, in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy (Cambridge, MA, 1987), p. 58.

30 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 599–607.

31 After Philosophy (see n. 29), includes essays by a number of postmodern philosophers, including Alasdair MacIntyre, whose publications include After Virtue (South Bend, IN, 1984). The ‘End of History’ debate was sparked by an article by Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest (1989); the book in which Fukuyama develops his ideas is called, typically, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).

32 On existentialism and Metahistory, see Kellner, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 212.

33 Jean-Paul Sartre, cited in Novick, op. cit., p. 629.

34 Nietzsche, op. cit. (n. 18), section 312.

35 The essay of 1931 is included in Carl Becker’s collection Everyman his Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (Chicago, 1966).

36 See, for instance, Carol Berkin’s article ‘“Dangerous Courtesies” Assault Women’s History’, Chronicle of Higher Education (11 December 1991), p. A44. Of feminist, Marxist and minority historians, Berkin notes, ‘[t]heir attempts to redefine and reinterpret what should be taught and studied now has been met with a counter-attack from supporters of the established canon’. Her essay, however, stresses the enormous amount of discourse and professional advancement of these groups. How could opposing points of view possibly remain unexpressed? What she seems to be lamenting, in fact, is the absence of an established canon which the ‘new perspectives’ can change or dominate.

1 Nancy F. Partner: Historicity in an Age of Reality-Fictions

1 For the discipline of history, awareness of the full claims of language and literary form to a major, intrinsic role in historical writing was prompted mainly by Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). This presented ideas and modes of analysis which W...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction: Describing Redescriptions
• RUBRICS OF STYLE
• VOICES
• ARGUMENTS
• IMAGES
• References
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index