'History, theories and methods', in: Neil Smelser and Paul Baltus (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences volume 10, 6869 - 6876, Elsevier Publishers: Oxford 2001. (original) (raw)

AI-generated Abstract

The exploration of the role of methods and theories in the academic discipline of history reveals a historical pattern where periods of uncertainty and crisis trigger intense debates among historians. Such reflections often coincide with competitive struggles for academic legitimacy, highlighting the connection between methodological discussions and the quest for objective knowledge within the field of history.

Manuals on Historical Method: A Genre of Polemical Reflection on the Aims of Science

Manuals on historical method from around 1900 are like neo-scholastic philosophy textbooks: books that are supposed to be so dull and dreary that only few scholars dare venture into them. At least, that is the impression offered by the spare secondary literature on late nineteenth-century methodology books. This, however, is to overlook that methodology books could serve as cannons or swords in heated debates over the aims of historical scholarship. Virtually unnoticed in the literature so far is that manuals on historical method could serve as polemical interventions in debates on the nature and implications of a scholar’s vocation. This is true for historical manuals, but especially also for manuals in fields plagued by insoluble disagreement over the need for scholarly asceticism with regard to religious beliefs, aesthetic taste, or moral judgment. Reading Hans Tietze’s Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte (1913) and Guido Adler’s Methode der Musikgeschichte (1919), for instance, does not amount to entering a classroom where students are being initiated into the methodological foundations of their discipline; it amounts to entering a battlefield. For whatever their titles may suggest, these manuals did not merely deal with methods, that is, etymologically speaking, with a scholar’s ‘ways’ or ‘paths’, but also in particular with the goals to which such roads supposedly led. The books engaged in debate over ends at least as much as over means.

History and Related Disciplines

The paper attempts to justify the complementary role of disciplines in the social-sciences, natural sciences, physical sciences as well as human and biological sciences to the studying, writing and teaching of history. It should however be noted that, despite the fact that history as a discipline benefits immensely from the knowledge and expertise of said disciplines it does not amount to challenging whether History can sustain it's autonomy as a valid and viable discipline.

The idea of a philosophy of history

Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice

It has recently been argued that the philosophical study of professional history constitutes a subfield of epistemology. Consequently, the philosophy of history is cast as only one particular species of the general study of the relationship between evidence and theory in scientific practice. This view is based upon an absolute separation between substantive and critical philosophy of history. By such a separation, substantive philosophy of history is dismissed as speculative metaphysics, while critical philosophy of history is vindicated as a respectable branch of epistemology. The attempt to delineate a strictly epistemological realm of history was a central part of the programme for analytically styled philosophy of history in the 1950–1970s era. This programme has been resurrected by contemporary empiricist trends. In this essay, I will argue against the basic ideas of this programme through a reassessment of Hayden White’s so-called narrativist philosophy of history. As I will show, criticizing the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology in history is an essential and important feature of White’s contribution to the philosophy of history. This feature has, I claim, been overshadowed by formalist interpretations of White’s ‘narrativism’. In conclusion, I argue that White’s concept of prefiguration will fundamentally question the viability of current attempts to develop a purely epistemological philosophy of history.

What is the Objective of “Theory of History”?

2020

The article argues that the “theory of history” has gradually changed from being an analysis of what historians actually do or what historians ought to do into a discipline or art of its own. Historical theorists communicate with each other but rarely with historians. The making of “theory of history” into a discipline of its own is recent, even if the roots are perceptible in the philosophy of Kant and his successors, especially Fichte and Hegel. The community of theorists of history rarely accepts practicing historians as discussants. In the present analysis of six articles written by six different well-known historical theorists, (Hayden White, A.R. Louch, Gabrielle Spiegel, Herman Paul, Marek Tamm, and Chris Lorenz), the author points out the unanimity among them in considering “history” to be texts on the past and nothing else. When these historical theorists exemplify historical texts, they often use surveys and overviews of history instead of historical knowledge as an outcom...

HISTORIANS IN SEARCH OF NEW WAYS AT THE BORDER OF THE CENTURIES

Codrul Cosminului, 2013

The paper analyses the radical transformations that took place in the theoretical foundations, methodology and conceptual models of historical science at the border of the XX – XXI centuries. The changes in research strategies of recent historiography are considered as an outcome of the fruitful interaction of different disciplines in the common space of social sciences and humanities. The author estimates the cognitive potential of new theoretical models aiming to restore the integrity of historical vision of the past.

Tropisms of Intellectual History

Rethinking History, 2004

One incentive in my work is to explore complex issues and ideas with an intricacy that aspires to lucidity but resists ready summary or codification. Intellectual history in this sense not only provides understanding through contextualization but also examines how certain artefacts, processes and signifying practices pose critical challenges to their contexts of production, circulation and reception. Such artefacts, processes and practices also demand responsive understanding on the part of historians who bring them into present contexts with implications for the future. The goal of my early work was to argue for this approach to intellectual history and to carve out a place for it in professional historiography, which exists in close interaction with related disciplines, including both the social sciences and literary or cultural studies and philosophy. More recently, I have attempted to relate intellectual history to a broad understanding of cultural and social history, especially via such problems as the Holocaust, trauma, the sublime, and extreme events or experiences in general. Throughout my work, I have stressed the importance of the close reading of both texts and contexts and enquired into the relations between a self-reflective historiography, with critical perspective on its assumptions and procedures, and varieties of critical theory (including psychoanalysis). I have also argued against two forms of reductionism: the 'theoreticist' subsumption of history as a site of mere illustrations, signs or examples and the narrowly historicist or contextualist construction of historical understanding involving the denial of both a dialogic relation to the past and the transhistorical dimensions of problems, including the way they pose questions to-and may even place in question-historians and other enquirers in the present.

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