Global history?

A question that arises in historiography and the philosophy of history is that of the status of the notion of "global history."  I've addressed the topic several times here in a limited way -- often by making the case for Eurasian history rather than French history or Japanese history (post). There the view is that expanding the scope of vision from the separate nation states of Europe or Asia to the broader panoply of multiple peoples, cultures, and structures is helpful when it comes to understanding the past four hundred years.  But what are some of the more general concerns that make thinking about global history an interesting or important topic?

One important reason for thinking globally as an historian is the fact that the history discipline -- since the Greeks! -- has tended to be eurocentric in its choice of topics, framing assumptions, and methods.  Economic and political history, for example, often privileges the industrial revolution in England and the creation of the modern bureaucratic state in France, Britain, and Germany, as being exemplars of "modern" development in economics and politics.  This has led to a tendency to look at other countries' development as non-standard or stunted.  So global history is, in part, a framework within which the historian avoids privileging one regional center as primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong makes this point very strongly in China Transformed.

Second is the apparent fact that when Western historical thinkers -- for example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu -- have turned their attention to Asia, they have often engaged in a high degree of stereotyping without much factual historical knowledge.  The ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation, and Chinese stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the intricate and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of thought.  This is one of the points of Edward Said's critique of orientalism (Orientalism).  So doing "global" history means paying rigorous attention to the specificities of social, political, and cultural arrangements in other parts of the world besides Europe.

So a global history can be expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more open to discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in the experiences of India (and its many regional differences), China, Indochina, the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire, and Sub-saharan Africa.  Variation and complexity are what we should expect, not stereotyped simplicity.  (Geertz's historical reconstruction of the "theatre state" of Bali is a case in point -- he uncovers a complex system of governance, symbol, value, and hierarchy that represents a substantially different structure of politics than the models derived from the emergence of bureaucratic states in early modern Europe; Negara: The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali.) A global history needs to free itself from eurocentrism.

This step away from eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically interesting.  So a global history ought to be global and trans-national in its selection of topics -- even while recognizing the fact that all historical research is selective.  A globally oriented historian will recognize that the political systems of classical India are as interesting and complex as the organization of the Roman Republic.

Another aspect of global history falls more on the side of how some historians have thought about historical structures and causes since the 1960s. History itself is a "global" process, in which events and systems occur that involve activities in many parts of the world simultaneously. Immanuel Wallerstein is first among these, with his framework of "world systems" (The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, With a New Prologue).  But the basic idea is a compelling one.  An effort to explain the English industrial revolution by only referring to factors, influences, and experiences that occur within England or on its edges (western Europe) is inadequate on its face.  International trade, the flow of technologies from Asia to Europe, and the flows of ideas and peoples from Asia, Africa, and the Americas have plain consequences for the domestic economy of England in 1800 and the development of machine and power technologies. And a "globally minded" historian will pay close attention to these trans-national influences and interdependencies.  This aspect of the interest of global history falls within the area of thinking about the scope of the causal factors that influence more local developments.

An important current underlying much work in global history is the reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and nation building in the 1960s and 1970s.  "The world" was important in the capitals of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium because those nations exerted colonial rule in various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America.  So there was a specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those societies -- in order to better govern them and exploit them.  And post-colonial states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global historiography in their own universities and knowledge systems, in order to better understand and better critique the forming relations of the past.

Then there is the issue of climate and climate change.  The "little ice age" had major consequences for population, nutrition, trade, and economic activity in western Europe; but the same climate processes also affected life in other quarters of the globe.  So to have a good understanding of the timing and pace of historical change, we often need to know some fairly detailed facts about the global environment.

A final way in which history needs to become "global" is to incorporate the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in non-western countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world developments.  Indian and Chinese historians have their own intellectual traditions in conducting historical research and explanation; a global history is one that pays attention to the insights and arguments of these traditions.

So global history has to do with --

• a broadened definition of the arena of historical change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas
• a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of institutions and systems in many parts of the world
• a recognition of the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents for at least four centuries
• a recognition of the complexity and distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography

Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some of these issues in Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World.  Sachsenmaier devotes much of his attention to the last point mentioned here, the "multiple global perspectives" point. He wants to take this idea seriously and try to discover some of the implications of different national traditions of academic historiography.  More than half his book is devoted to case studies of global historical research traditions and foci in three distinct national contexts -- Germany, the United States, and China.  How do historians trained and en-disciplined in these three traditions think about the core problems of transnational, global history? Sachsenmaier believes that these differences are real, and that they can be productive of future historical insights through more sustained dialogue.  But he also believes there are conceptual and methodological barriers to these dialogues, somewhat akin the the "paradigm incommensurability" ideas that Thomas Kuhn advanced for the physical sciences.

The idea that in the future, global history may experience more sustained dialogues between scholars from different world regions leads to deeper theoretical challenges than may be apparent at first sight.  Most importantly, there is the question of how to conceptualize "local" viewpoints in today's complex intellectual and academic landscapes. (11)

And he does a good job of articulating what some of these conceptual barriers involve:

In almost all world regions university-based historiography is at least partly an outcome of epistemological discontinuities, outside influences, and shared transformations.... These also had an impact on the conceptions of space underlying world historical scholarship in the widest sense. Prior to spread of history as a modern academic field, forms of border-crossing histories were typically written from a clear perspective of cultural, religious, or even ethical centricity, which means that they tended to be tied to distinct value claims. This situation changed decisively during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when either colonial rule or nation-building efforts had a profound impact on what elements were selected into the canon of academic historiography and many earlier forms of knowledge were rendered subaltern. (13) 

Certain hierarchies of knowledge became deeply engrained in the conceptual worlds of modern historiography. Approaching the realities and further possibilities of alternative approaches to global history thus requires us to critically examine changing dynamics and lasting hierarchies which typify historiography as a global professional environment. (17) 

It will become quite clear that in European societies the question of historiographical traditions tended to be answered in ways that were profoundly different from most academic communities in other parts of the world. (17)

So Sachsenmaier's attention is directed largely to the conceptual issues and disciplinary frameworks that are pertinent when we consider how different national traditions have done history.  What he has to say here is very useful and original.  But he also makes several of the points mentioned above as well -- the need to select different definitions of geography in doing history, the need to put aside the stereotypes of eurocentrism, and the value in understanding in depth the alternative traditions of historical understanding that exist in the world.

Beyond divergence

As I've noted in previous posts, there has been a major debate in economic history in the past 20 years about what to make of the contrasts between economic development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia since 1600. There had been a received view, tracing to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, that European "breakthrough" was the norm and Asian "stagnation" or "involution" were the dysfunctional cases. E. L. Jones represents this view among recent comparative economic historians (The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia).

Then Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong challenged this received view in a couple of important books. Pomeranz argued in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. that the premises were wrong. He argued that Chinese productivity and standard of living were roughly comparable to those of England up to roughly 1800, so China's economy was not backward. And he argued against the received view's main theories of Europe's breakthrough -- the idea that European economic institutions and property rights were superior, or the idea that Europe had a normative or ideological advantage over China. Instead, he argued that Europe -- Britain, to be precise -- had contingent and situational advantages over Asia that permitted rapid growth and industrialization around the end of the eighteenth century. These advantages included large and accessible coal deposits -- crucial for modern steam technology -- and access to low cost labor in the Americas (hidden acreage). Bin Wong made complementary arguments in China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, where he addressed the parallel processes of development of political and economic institutions in the two sets of polities. Wong's most fundamental insight was that both processes were complex, and that balanced comparison between them is valuable.

Now the debate has taken a new turn with the publication of R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal's Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe. Rosenthal is an accomplished historian of European economic development, and Wong is an expert on Chinese economic, social, and political history. So their collaboration permits this book to bring together into one argument the full expertise available on both ends of Eurasia.

The book aims to unsettle the debate in fundamental ways. Wong and Rosenthal take issue with a point that is methodologically central to Pomeranz, concerning the units of comparison. Pomerantz wants to compare England with the lower Yangzi region in China, and he gives what are to me convincing arguments for why this makes sense. W&R want to compare Europe with China, making England a special case. And they too have good reasons for their choice.

Second, they disagree with the temporal framing that has generally been accepted within this debate, where economic historians have generally focused their research on the early modern period 1600-1900). Against this, they argue that the causes of divergence between Europe and China must be much earlier. They set their clock to the year 1000, and they examine the large features of political and economic development that started around that time.

Finally, they offer crippling objections to a number of standard hypotheses about Imperial China as a place to do business. They show that there were alternative credit institutions available in Ming and Qing China. They show that the Chinese state was sensitive to levels of taxation, and kept taxes low (generally comparable to European levels). And they show that Imperial social spending (the granary system, for example) was generally effective and well managed, contributing to economic prosperity. So the traditional explanations for Chinese "stagnation" don't work as causal explanations.

They find one major difference between Europe and Asia during the first part of the second millennium that seems to matter. That is the multiplicity of competing states in Europe and a largely hegemonic Imperial state in China and the scale of the relevant zones of political and economic activity. Chapter 4, "Warfare, Location of Manufacturing, and Economic Growth in China and Europe," lays out this argument. Here are the key points.

We believe that the most persuasive explanation for Europe's late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformations is best provided by comparing the politics of economic change within China and Europe in the centuries that preceded their visible economic divergence. (6)

To explain these differences in factor prices, we will stress conditions that are the outcomes, we will argue, of more basic differences in the spatial scale of polities in China and Eu rope. In this analysis we parallel Robert Allen's recent work on the progress of industrialization in England (2009a). Indeed, Allen puts special emphasis on relatively high wages and low fuel costs in explaining why the technologies we as-sociate with industrialization were developed and deployed in England. (7)

From the perspective of what individuals choose, we think that some of the most important factors influencing different likelihoods of economic change in the early modern era were unintended consequences of actions taken for reasons largely unrelated to improving the economy. (8)

Instead, we take the contrasting spatial scales of Chinese and Europe an polities as key factors that both let and led rulers in these regions to develop different political priorities and policies. (14)

The competing states of Europe were frequently drawn into conflict; and conflict often resulted in warfare. R&W argue that this fact of competition had a fateful unintended consequence. It made fortified cities much safer places than open countryside. And this in turn changed the calculation about where "manufacture" could occur at lowest cost. Labor costs were higher in cities, so absent warfare, producers were well advised to pursue a putting-out system involving peasant workers (proto-industrialization; link). But with the threat of marauding armies, European producers were pushed into urban locations. And this in turn gave them incentives to develop labor-saving, capital-intensive techniques. Putting the point bluntly: China didn't have an industrial revolution because it was too safe an environment for labor-intensive production.

Another important feature of Before and Beyond Divergence is its use of simple economy models to explore the incentive characteristics of various historical circumstances. For example, they provide a simple representation of the costs of contracting in China (76-77), the costs of warfare on manufacturing (108-109), and a mathematical analysis of credit and interest in China (135). Their perspective is one that essentially presupposes the idea of decision-making based on prudence, or a rough-and-ready rational choice framework. They believe that various historical circumstances change the price and opportunity environment for producers and consumers. So once we can estimate the magnitude of these changes, we can also gauge the approximate magnitude of the change in behavior that results. Or in other words, their approach is one of economic historians, not simply historians of economic institutions and behaviors. They are reluctant to consider cultural or normative sources of behavior.

Certainly this book too will generate a lot of critical response. It is an important contribution.

Beyond divergence

As I've noted in previous posts, there has been a major debate in economic history in the past 20 years about what to make of the contrasts between economic development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia since 1600. There had been a received view, tracing to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, that European "breakthrough" was the norm and Asian "stagnation" or "involution" were the dysfunctional cases. E. L. Jones represents this view among recent comparative economic historians (The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia).

Then Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong challenged this received view in a couple of important books. Pomeranz argued in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. that the premises were wrong. He argued that Chinese productivity and standard of living were roughly comparable to those of England up to roughly 1800, so China's economy was not backward. And he argued against the received view's main theories of Europe's breakthrough -- the idea that European economic institutions and property rights were superior, or the idea that Europe had a normative or ideological advantage over China. Instead, he argued that Europe -- Britain, to be precise -- had contingent and situational advantages over Asia that permitted rapid growth and industrialization around the end of the eighteenth century. These advantages included large and accessible coal deposits -- crucial for modern steam technology -- and access to low cost labor in the Americas (hidden acreage). Bin Wong made complementary arguments in China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, where he addressed the parallel processes of development of political and economic institutions in the two sets of polities. Wong's most fundamental insight was that both processes were complex, and that balanced comparison between them is valuable.

Now the debate has taken a new turn with the publication of R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal's Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe. Rosenthal is an accomplished historian of European economic development, and Wong is an expert on Chinese economic, social, and political history. So their collaboration permits this book to bring together into one argument the full expertise available on both ends of Eurasia.

The book aims to unsettle the debate in fundamental ways. Wong and Rosenthal take issue with a point that is methodologically central to Pomeranz, concerning the units of comparison. Pomerantz wants to compare England with the lower Yangzi region in China, and he gives what are to me convincing arguments for why this makes sense. W&R want to compare Europe with China, making England a special case. And they too have good reasons for their choice.

Second, they disagree with the temporal framing that has generally been accepted within this debate, where economic historians have generally focused their research on the early modern period 1600-1900). Against this, they argue that the causes of divergence between Europe and China must be much earlier. They set their clock to the year 1000, and they examine the large features of political and economic development that started around that time.

Finally, they offer crippling objections to a number of standard hypotheses about Imperial China as a place to do business. They show that there were alternative credit institutions available in Ming and Qing China. They show that the Chinese state was sensitive to levels of taxation, and kept taxes low (generally comparable to European levels). And they show that Imperial social spending (the granary system, for example) was generally effective and well managed, contributing to economic prosperity. So the traditional explanations for Chinese "stagnation" don't work as causal explanations.

They find one major difference between Europe and Asia during the first part of the second millennium that seems to matter. That is the multiplicity of competing states in Europe and a largely hegemonic Imperial state in China and the scale of the relevant zones of political and economic activity. Chapter 4, "Warfare, Location of Manufacturing, and Economic Growth in China and Europe," lays out this argument. Here are the key points.

We believe that the most persuasive explanation for Europe's late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformations is best provided by comparing the politics of economic change within China and Europe in the centuries that preceded their visible economic divergence. (6)

To explain these differences in factor prices, we will stress conditions that are the outcomes, we will argue, of more basic differences in the spatial scale of polities in China and Eu rope. In this analysis we parallel Robert Allen's recent work on the progress of industrialization in England (2009a). Indeed, Allen puts special emphasis on relatively high wages and low fuel costs in explaining why the technologies we as-sociate with industrialization were developed and deployed in England. (7)

From the perspective of what individuals choose, we think that some of the most important factors influencing different likelihoods of economic change in the early modern era were unintended consequences of actions taken for reasons largely unrelated to improving the economy. (8)

Instead, we take the contrasting spatial scales of Chinese and Europe an polities as key factors that both let and led rulers in these regions to develop different political priorities and policies. (14)

The competing states of Europe were frequently drawn into conflict; and conflict often resulted in warfare. R&W argue that this fact of competition had a fateful unintended consequence. It made fortified cities much safer places than open countryside. And this in turn changed the calculation about where "manufacture" could occur at lowest cost. Labor costs were higher in cities, so absent warfare, producers were well advised to pursue a putting-out system involving peasant workers (proto-industrialization; link). But with the threat of marauding armies, European producers were pushed into urban locations. And this in turn gave them incentives to develop labor-saving, capital-intensive techniques. Putting the point bluntly: China didn't have an industrial revolution because it was too safe an environment for labor-intensive production.

Another important feature of Before and Beyond Divergence is its use of simple economy models to explore the incentive characteristics of various historical circumstances. For example, they provide a simple representation of the costs of contracting in China (76-77), the costs of warfare on manufacturing (108-109), and a mathematical analysis of credit and interest in China (135). Their perspective is one that essentially presupposes the idea of decision-making based on prudence, or a rough-and-ready rational choice framework. They believe that various historical circumstances change the price and opportunity environment for producers and consumers. So once we can estimate the magnitude of these changes, we can also gauge the approximate magnitude of the change in behavior that results. Or in other words, their approach is one of economic historians, not simply historians of economic institutions and behaviors. They are reluctant to consider cultural or normative sources of behavior.

Certainly this book too will generate a lot of critical response. It is an important contribution.

Beyond divergence

As I've noted in previous posts, there has been a major debate in economic history in the past 20 years about what to make of the contrasts between economic development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia since 1600. There had been a received view, tracing to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, that European "breakthrough" was the norm and Asian "stagnation" or "involution" were the dysfunctional cases. E. L. Jones represents this view among recent comparative economic historians (The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia).

Then Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong challenged this received view in a couple of important books. Pomeranz argued in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. that the premises were wrong. He argued that Chinese productivity and standard of living were roughly comparable to those of England up to roughly 1800, so China's economy was not backward. And he argued against the received view's main theories of Europe's breakthrough -- the idea that European economic institutions and property rights were superior, or the idea that Europe had a normative or ideological advantage over China. Instead, he argued that Europe -- Britain, to be precise -- had contingent and situational advantages over Asia that permitted rapid growth and industrialization around the end of the eighteenth century. These advantages included large and accessible coal deposits -- crucial for modern steam technology -- and access to low cost labor in the Americas (hidden acreage). Bin Wong made complementary arguments in China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, where he addressed the parallel processes of development of political and economic institutions in the two sets of polities. Wong's most fundamental insight was that both processes were complex, and that balanced comparison between them is valuable.

Now the debate has taken a new turn with the publication of R. Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal's Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe. Rosenthal is an accomplished historian of European economic development, and Wong is an expert on Chinese economic, social, and political history. So their collaboration permits this book to bring together into one argument the full expertise available on both ends of Eurasia.

The book aims to unsettle the debate in fundamental ways. Wong and Rosenthal take issue with a point that is methodologically central to Pomeranz, concerning the units of comparison. Pomerantz wants to compare England with the lower Yangzi region in China, and he gives what are to me convincing arguments for why this makes sense. W&R want to compare Europe with China, making England a special case. And they too have good reasons for their choice.

Second, they disagree with the temporal framing that has generally been accepted within this debate, where economic historians have generally focused their research on the early modern period 1600-1900). Against this, they argue that the causes of divergence between Europe and China must be much earlier. They set their clock to the year 1000, and they examine the large features of political and economic development that started around that time.

Finally, they offer crippling objections to a number of standard hypotheses about Imperial China as a place to do business. They show that there were alternative credit institutions available in Ming and Qing China. They show that the Chinese state was sensitive to levels of taxation, and kept taxes low (generally comparable to European levels). And they show that Imperial social spending (the granary system, for example) was generally effective and well managed, contributing to economic prosperity. So the traditional explanations for Chinese "stagnation" don't work as causal explanations.

They find one major difference between Europe and Asia during the first part of the second millennium that seems to matter. That is the multiplicity of competing states in Europe and a largely hegemonic Imperial state in China and the scale of the relevant zones of political and economic activity. Chapter 4, "Warfare, Location of Manufacturing, and Economic Growth in China and Europe," lays out this argument. Here are the key points.

We believe that the most persuasive explanation for Europe's late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformations is best provided by comparing the politics of economic change within China and Europe in the centuries that preceded their visible economic divergence. (6)

To explain these differences in factor prices, we will stress conditions that are the outcomes, we will argue, of more basic differences in the spatial scale of polities in China and Eu rope. In this analysis we parallel Robert Allen's recent work on the progress of industrialization in England (2009a). Indeed, Allen puts special emphasis on relatively high wages and low fuel costs in explaining why the technologies we as-sociate with industrialization were developed and deployed in England. (7)

From the perspective of what individuals choose, we think that some of the most important factors influencing different likelihoods of economic change in the early modern era were unintended consequences of actions taken for reasons largely unrelated to improving the economy. (8)

Instead, we take the contrasting spatial scales of Chinese and Europe an polities as key factors that both let and led rulers in these regions to develop different political priorities and policies. (14)

The competing states of Europe were frequently drawn into conflict; and conflict often resulted in warfare. R&W argue that this fact of competition had a fateful unintended consequence. It made fortified cities much safer places than open countryside. And this in turn changed the calculation about where "manufacture" could occur at lowest cost. Labor costs were higher in cities, so absent warfare, producers were well advised to pursue a putting-out system involving peasant workers (proto-industrialization; link). But with the threat of marauding armies, European producers were pushed into urban locations. And this in turn gave them incentives to develop labor-saving, capital-intensive techniques. Putting the point bluntly: China didn't have an industrial revolution because it was too safe an environment for labor-intensive production.

Another important feature of Before and Beyond Divergence is its use of simple economy models to explore the incentive characteristics of various historical circumstances. For example, they provide a simple representation of the costs of contracting in China (76-77), the costs of warfare on manufacturing (108-109), and a mathematical analysis of credit and interest in China (135). Their perspective is one that essentially presupposes the idea of decision-making based on prudence, or a rough-and-ready rational choice framework. They believe that various historical circumstances change the price and opportunity environment for producers and consumers. So once we can estimate the magnitude of these changes, we can also gauge the approximate magnitude of the change in behavior that results. Or in other words, their approach is one of economic historians, not simply historians of economic institutions and behaviors. They are reluctant to consider cultural or normative sources of behavior.

Certainly this book too will generate a lot of critical response. It is an important contribution.

Historiography and the philosophy of history

The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history?

Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and "experts" evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards. So one task we always have is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing.

Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those claims based on the reasoning they present. So a major aspect of the study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by standards of scientific rationality. (Simon Schama challenges some of these ideas in Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations.) So the apprentice practitioner wants to gain knowledge of the practices of his/her elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling argument, how to assess a body of archival evidence, how to offer or criticize an interpretation of complex events that necessarily exceeds the available evidence. The historiographer has a related task: he/she would like to be able to codify the main methods and standards of one historical school or another.

There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian's work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or school.

A full historiographic "scan" of a given historian might include:

• What methods of discovery does he/she use?
• What models of explanation?
• What paradigm of presentation?
• What standards of style and rhetoric?
• What interpretive assumptions?

A historical "school" might be defined as a group of interrelated historians who share a significant number of specific assumptions about evidence, explanation, and narrative.

Historiography becomes itself historical when we recognize that these frameworks of assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself an interesting subject. How did historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and presentation of history? Under this rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German romanticism. This kind of reflection has a lot in common with literary history or art history; the historiographer is seeking to identify "styles" of historical thinking in various times, as well as recognizing the distinctive contributions of particular historians. Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient historians fall in this category (The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography). Here is a tantalizing set of questions that Momigliano raises with respect to ancient history-writing:

If these preliminary considerations are valid there is some justification for asking the following six questions: (1) What have Greek and Jewish historiographies in common and why and to what extent did Greek historiography ultimately prevail? (2) Why did Thucydides rather than Herodotus become the most authoritative historian of Antiquity? (3) What part did the antiquarians play in historical research? (4) How was Greek historiography imported into Rome and what did the romanisation of Greek historiography entail? (5) What is the place of Tacitus in historical thought? (6) Why and in what way has ecclesiastical historiography a tradition of its own? (2)

These six questions become the focus of the six chapters of the book. In a nutshell, Momigliano is looking at the several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set of normative practices that can be dissected and understood in their specificity and their cultural contexts. Here is a description that illustrates some of Momigliano's orienting assumptions:

What I think is typically Greek is the critical attitude towards the recording of events, that is, the development of critical methods enabling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of my knowledge no historiography eralier than the Greek or independent of it developed these critical methods; and we have inherited the Greek methods. (30)

A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more present-oriented and more methodological. It involves the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. How do contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the past? Here we can talk about the historiographical challenges that confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy in the 1920s and 1930s (The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China), or the historiographical issues raised in Robert Darnton's telling of the Great Cat Massacre (The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History). Sometimes these issues have to do with the scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical records (for example, the fact that much of what Huang refers to about the village economy of North China was gathered by the research teams of the occupying Japanese army). Sometimes they have to do with the difficulty of interpreting historical sources (for example, the unavoidable necessity Darnton faced of providing meaningful interpretation of a range of documented events that did not bear their meanings on their sleeves). And sometimes the historiographic question has to do with the mode of presentation chosen by the historian (for example, Darnton's choice of presenting the notebooks of Joseph d'Hemery, the police inspector of the book trade in Montpelier, as a sociological source).

For example, there has been substantial disagreement among historians of China about the status of the Chinese rural economy in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians who give credence to travelers' reports conclude that conditions were awful (R. H. Tawney, Land and labour in China). Historians who maintain that only validated quantitative data constitute a relevant way of answering the question come to a diametrically opposed judgment (Loren Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870-1937). This is a historiographic disagreement, centered on the issue of what counts as credible evidence.

We might ask, finally, what is the relationship between historiography and the philosophy of history. There is a degree of overlap between the two fields in the fact that both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are used in various historical traditions. That said, historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics of research and writing than is the philosophy of history.

Historiography and the philosophy of history

The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history?

Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and "experts" evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards. So one task we always have is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing.

Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those claims based on the reasoning they present. So a major aspect of the study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by standards of scientific rationality. (Simon Schama challenges some of these ideas in Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations.) So the apprentice practitioner wants to gain knowledge of the practices of his/her elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling argument, how to assess a body of archival evidence, how to offer or criticize an interpretation of complex events that necessarily exceeds the available evidence. The historiographer has a related task: he/she would like to be able to codify the main methods and standards of one historical school or another.

There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian's work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or school.

A full historiographic "scan" of a given historian might include:

• What methods of discovery does he/she use?
• What models of explanation?
• What paradigm of presentation?
• What standards of style and rhetoric?
• What interpretive assumptions?

A historical "school" might be defined as a group of interrelated historians who share a significant number of specific assumptions about evidence, explanation, and narrative.

Historiography becomes itself historical when we recognize that these frameworks of assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself an interesting subject. How did historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and presentation of history? Under this rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German romanticism. This kind of reflection has a lot in common with literary history or art history; the historiographer is seeking to identify "styles" of historical thinking in various times, as well as recognizing the distinctive contributions of particular historians. Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient historians fall in this category (The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography). Here is a tantalizing set of questions that Momigliano raises with respect to ancient history-writing:

If these preliminary considerations are valid there is some justification for asking the following six questions: (1) What have Greek and Jewish historiographies in common and why and to what extent did Greek historiography ultimately prevail? (2) Why did Thucydides rather than Herodotus become the most authoritative historian of Antiquity? (3) What part did the antiquarians play in historical research? (4) How was Greek historiography imported into Rome and what did the romanisation of Greek historiography entail? (5) What is the place of Tacitus in historical thought? (6) Why and in what way has ecclesiastical historiography a tradition of its own? (2)

These six questions become the focus of the six chapters of the book. In a nutshell, Momigliano is looking at the several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set of normative practices that can be dissected and understood in their specificity and their cultural contexts. Here is a description that illustrates some of Momigliano's orienting assumptions:

What I think is typically Greek is the critical attitude towards the recording of events, that is, the development of critical methods enabling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of my knowledge no historiography eralier than the Greek or independent of it developed these critical methods; and we have inherited the Greek methods. (30)

A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more present-oriented and more methodological. It involves the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. How do contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the past? Here we can talk about the historiographical challenges that confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy in the 1920s and 1930s (The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China), or the historiographical issues raised in Robert Darnton's telling of the Great Cat Massacre (The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History). Sometimes these issues have to do with the scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical records (for example, the fact that much of what Huang refers to about the village economy of North China was gathered by the research teams of the occupying Japanese army). Sometimes they have to do with the difficulty of interpreting historical sources (for example, the unavoidable necessity Darnton faced of providing meaningful interpretation of a range of documented events that did not bear their meanings on their sleeves). And sometimes the historiographic question has to do with the mode of presentation chosen by the historian (for example, Darnton's choice of presenting the notebooks of Joseph d'Hemery, the police inspector of the book trade in Montpelier, as a sociological source).

For example, there has been substantial disagreement among historians of China about the status of the Chinese rural economy in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians who give credence to travelers' reports conclude that conditions were awful (R. H. Tawney, Land and labour in China). Historians who maintain that only validated quantitative data constitute a relevant way of answering the question come to a diametrically opposed judgment (Loren Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870-1937). This is a historiographic disagreement, centered on the issue of what counts as credible evidence.

We might ask, finally, what is the relationship between historiography and the philosophy of history. There is a degree of overlap between the two fields in the fact that both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are used in various historical traditions. That said, historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics of research and writing than is the philosophy of history.

Historiography and the philosophy of history

The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history?

Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and "experts" evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards. So one task we always have is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing.

Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those claims based on the reasoning they present. So a major aspect of the study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by standards of scientific rationality. (Simon Schama challenges some of these ideas in Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations.) So the apprentice practitioner wants to gain knowledge of the practices of his/her elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling argument, how to assess a body of archival evidence, how to offer or criticize an interpretation of complex events that necessarily exceeds the available evidence. The historiographer has a related task: he/she would like to be able to codify the main methods and standards of one historical school or another.

There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian's work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or school.

A full historiographic "scan" of a given historian might include:

• What methods of discovery does he/she use?
• What models of explanation?
• What paradigm of presentation?
• What standards of style and rhetoric?
• What interpretive assumptions?

A historical "school" might be defined as a group of interrelated historians who share a significant number of specific assumptions about evidence, explanation, and narrative.

Historiography becomes itself historical when we recognize that these frameworks of assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself an interesting subject. How did historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and presentation of history? Under this rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German romanticism. This kind of reflection has a lot in common with literary history or art history; the historiographer is seeking to identify "styles" of historical thinking in various times, as well as recognizing the distinctive contributions of particular historians. Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient historians fall in this category (The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography). Here is a tantalizing set of questions that Momigliano raises with respect to ancient history-writing:

If these preliminary considerations are valid there is some justification for asking the following six questions: (1) What have Greek and Jewish historiographies in common and why and to what extent did Greek historiography ultimately prevail? (2) Why did Thucydides rather than Herodotus become the most authoritative historian of Antiquity? (3) What part did the antiquarians play in historical research? (4) How was Greek historiography imported into Rome and what did the romanisation of Greek historiography entail? (5) What is the place of Tacitus in historical thought? (6) Why and in what way has ecclesiastical historiography a tradition of its own? (2)

These six questions become the focus of the six chapters of the book. In a nutshell, Momigliano is looking at the several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set of normative practices that can be dissected and understood in their specificity and their cultural contexts. Here is a description that illustrates some of Momigliano's orienting assumptions:

What I think is typically Greek is the critical attitude towards the recording of events, that is, the development of critical methods enabling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of my knowledge no historiography eralier than the Greek or independent of it developed these critical methods; and we have inherited the Greek methods. (30)

A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more present-oriented and more methodological. It involves the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. How do contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the past? Here we can talk about the historiographical challenges that confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy in the 1920s and 1930s (The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China), or the historiographical issues raised in Robert Darnton's telling of the Great Cat Massacre (The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History). Sometimes these issues have to do with the scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical records (for example, the fact that much of what Huang refers to about the village economy of North China was gathered by the research teams of the occupying Japanese army). Sometimes they have to do with the difficulty of interpreting historical sources (for example, the unavoidable necessity Darnton faced of providing meaningful interpretation of a range of documented events that did not bear their meanings on their sleeves). And sometimes the historiographic question has to do with the mode of presentation chosen by the historian (for example, Darnton's choice of presenting the notebooks of Joseph d'Hemery, the police inspector of the book trade in Montpelier, as a sociological source).

For example, there has been substantial disagreement among historians of China about the status of the Chinese rural economy in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians who give credence to travelers' reports conclude that conditions were awful (R. H. Tawney, Land and labour in China). Historians who maintain that only validated quantitative data constitute a relevant way of answering the question come to a diametrically opposed judgment (Loren Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870-1937). This is a historiographic disagreement, centered on the issue of what counts as credible evidence.

We might ask, finally, what is the relationship between historiography and the philosophy of history. There is a degree of overlap between the two fields in the fact that both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are used in various historical traditions. That said, historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics of research and writing than is the philosophy of history.

Re-mapping the philosophy of history

The prior post offered a schematic description of the tasks involved in arriving at historical knowledge. Here I want to ask a related question: what is the work that we can hope to do with a philosophy of history? We don't have a philosophy of office furniture; we do have a philosophy of technology. So what is it about history that supports philosophical inquiry? Why is the enterprise of investigating, documenting, and explaining facts about the past amenable to philosophical study? What makes the effort to arrive at knowledge of facts about the past an area of philosophical concern?

There are a couple of matters that are relatively clear. First, the domain of historical knowledge is a familiar subject for philosophical inquiry. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge generally. Philosophy of science is the careful analysis of the methods and justification of scientific knowledge. And philosophy of historical knowledge is likewise an epistemic and methodological domain: How do we know about the past? Are there limits to our possible knowledge about the past? What is involved in explaining a historical fact? Answers to these questions and others in the same vein may be difficult and controversial; but it is clear how they fit into existing conceptions of philosophical inquiry.

If the philosophy of history were limited to these sorts of questions, then it would be a variant of epistemology or the philosophy of science. However, some philosophers have felt that substantive history itself raises questions that do not reduce to questions about knowledge of this domain.

Here is one possibility: perhaps we need a metaphysics of history -- an account of the kinds of things, forces, and structures that exist in the realm of history. Perhaps the metaphysics of history can shed light on what kinds of structures and entities travel through history, and what kinds of causal processes and dynamical systems propel change in the structures and entities.

For example: Marx wrote that "history is the history of class conflict." This implies that classes are historical objects -- they exist in the flow of historical events. Other historians have said things like this: classical slavery gave way to feudalism, which was followed by capitalism. This formulation presupposes that large social-economic systems -- for example, social property systems -- exist in history and conform to some set of dynamics. And yet others have tried to analyze world history into a set of more or less distinct civilizations -- bodies of values, ideas, identities, and institutions that differ significantly one from the other.

We might say, however, that none of these questions pertains to a metaphysics of history, but rather a metaphysics of the social world. History is about change and transformation; but the subject of change is social structures, cultures, and agents that exist within the social world at a period of time. So classes, social-property systems, ideologies, and religions are all social arrangements that change over time. If there is such a thing as a "civilization", this is a fact about society at a certain time, not a fact about the structure of history. History has to do with events and dynamic properties; the social world encompasses everything that is happening at a moment in time. We might consider an analogy with fluids -- "history" is the waves, society is the water.

We might be more inclined to recognize a metaphysics of history if we thought there were temporal structures that could be discovered in substantive history -- perhaps the business cycle, the Kondratiev long-wave economic cycle, or the rise and fall of civilizations. In other words, if we thought that events and changes conformed to a higher-level pattern of temporal change, we might want to say that the meta-temporal pattern is a metaphysical characteristic of history. But it would also be tempting to say: these patterns of change too represent nothing more than empirical characteristics of social phenomena over time. They need to be explained using the tools of the social sciences and are not properly the subject of apriori investigation.
This suggests two important conclusions: There is no such thing as an historical ontology as such but only a social ontology; and there is no such thing as an historical theory of change as such but only social theories of change. The ontologies and theories that historians employ are strictly speaking features of social science knowledge rather than historical knowledge. So, properly understood, there is no legitimate place for an investigation of the "metaphysics" of history; that space is filled entirely by an understanding of the metaphysics of the social world. tIn this case, the philosophy of history is no more than a component of the philosophy of social science, with no distinctive questions or answers of its own other than the epistemological issues mentioned above.

This discussion suggests a few rather deflationary conclusions about the possible scope of research in the philosophy of history:

• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the epistemology and methodology of historical knowledge is straightforward but limited.
• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the metaphysical underpinnings of "history" will be disappointing; those foundations exist within the domain of the philosophy of the social sciences rather than the philosophy of history.
• The dynamics of historical change are properly the subject matter of the social sciences rather than the philosopher of history.
• It is true that some historical investigation requires "hermeneutic" interpretation of meanings; but these efforts always fall at the level of interpreting the meaning of historical actions and cultural settings.

This analysis suggests there isn't a lot of scope for the philosophy of history beyond the function of serving as a counterpart to the philosophy of science. We might say that there are basically three relevant activities in the realm of historical thinking. There is first-order research into facts about the past based on currently available evidence. There is analysis and explanation of those facts, including methods ranging from ethnography to process-tracing to application of findings from the social sciences. These two parts of historical research are guided by ensembles of historical methods and practices (historiography). And there is philosophical reflection on the logic and limitations of these processes of inquiry and inference, the narrowly epistemic version of the philosophy of history. This aspect of the discussion includes as well the conceptual work that philosophers are well qualified for -- posing and answering questions like "What is history?", "What is a cause?", or "What is involved in expressing a meaningful action?". On this scenario there is no room at all for substantive or metaphysical philosophy of history.

The title of Ian Hacking's book, Historical Ontology, suggests that he thinks otherwise, and that there is such a thing as an ontology of history. However, the sense of the title is different: he is interested in the history of ontologies -- the ways that our conceptual systems have changed over time -- rather than the ontology of history.

(I should say that this is a pretty limited view of the scope of the philosophy of history, so it should be taken as provisional.)

Re-mapping the philosophy of history

The prior post offered a schematic description of the tasks involved in arriving at historical knowledge. Here I want to ask a related question: what is the work that we can hope to do with a philosophy of history? We don't have a philosophy of office furniture; we do have a philosophy of technology. So what is it about history that supports philosophical inquiry? Why is the enterprise of investigating, documenting, and explaining facts about the past amenable to philosophical study? What makes the effort to arrive at knowledge of facts about the past an area of philosophical concern?

There are a couple of matters that are relatively clear. First, the domain of historical knowledge is a familiar subject for philosophical inquiry. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge generally. Philosophy of science is the careful analysis of the methods and justification of scientific knowledge. And philosophy of historical knowledge is likewise an epistemic and methodological domain: How do we know about the past? Are there limits to our possible knowledge about the past? What is involved in explaining a historical fact? Answers to these questions and others in the same vein may be difficult and controversial; but it is clear how they fit into existing conceptions of philosophical inquiry.

If the philosophy of history were limited to these sorts of questions, then it would be a variant of epistemology or the philosophy of science. However, some philosophers have felt that substantive history itself raises questions that do not reduce to questions about knowledge of this domain.

Here is one possibility: perhaps we need a metaphysics of history -- an account of the kinds of things, forces, and structures that exist in the realm of history. Perhaps the metaphysics of history can shed light on what kinds of structures and entities travel through history, and what kinds of causal processes and dynamical systems propel change in the structures and entities.

For example: Marx wrote that "history is the history of class conflict." This implies that classes are historical objects -- they exist in the flow of historical events. Other historians have said things like this: classical slavery gave way to feudalism, which was followed by capitalism. This formulation presupposes that large social-economic systems -- for example, social property systems -- exist in history and conform to some set of dynamics. And yet others have tried to analyze world history into a set of more or less distinct civilizations -- bodies of values, ideas, identities, and institutions that differ significantly one from the other.

We might say, however, that none of these questions pertains to a metaphysics of history, but rather a metaphysics of the social world. History is about change and transformation; but the subject of change is social structures, cultures, and agents that exist within the social world at a period of time. So classes, social-property systems, ideologies, and religions are all social arrangements that change over time. If there is such a thing as a "civilization", this is a fact about society at a certain time, not a fact about the structure of history. History has to do with events and dynamic properties; the social world encompasses everything that is happening at a moment in time. We might consider an analogy with fluids -- "history" is the waves, society is the water.

We might be more inclined to recognize a metaphysics of history if we thought there were temporal structures that could be discovered in substantive history -- perhaps the business cycle, the Kondratiev long-wave economic cycle, or the rise and fall of civilizations. In other words, if we thought that events and changes conformed to a higher-level pattern of temporal change, we might want to say that the meta-temporal pattern is a metaphysical characteristic of history. But it would also be tempting to say: these patterns of change too represent nothing more than empirical characteristics of social phenomena over time. They need to be explained using the tools of the social sciences and are not properly the subject of apriori investigation.
This suggests two important conclusions: There is no such thing as an historical ontology as such but only a social ontology; and there is no such thing as an historical theory of change as such but only social theories of change. The ontologies and theories that historians employ are strictly speaking features of social science knowledge rather than historical knowledge. So, properly understood, there is no legitimate place for an investigation of the "metaphysics" of history; that space is filled entirely by an understanding of the metaphysics of the social world. tIn this case, the philosophy of history is no more than a component of the philosophy of social science, with no distinctive questions or answers of its own other than the epistemological issues mentioned above.

This discussion suggests a few rather deflationary conclusions about the possible scope of research in the philosophy of history:

• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the epistemology and methodology of historical knowledge is straightforward but limited.
• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the metaphysical underpinnings of "history" will be disappointing; those foundations exist within the domain of the philosophy of the social sciences rather than the philosophy of history.
• The dynamics of historical change are properly the subject matter of the social sciences rather than the philosopher of history.
• It is true that some historical investigation requires "hermeneutic" interpretation of meanings; but these efforts always fall at the level of interpreting the meaning of historical actions and cultural settings.

This analysis suggests there isn't a lot of scope for the philosophy of history beyond the function of serving as a counterpart to the philosophy of science. We might say that there are basically three relevant activities in the realm of historical thinking. There is first-order research into facts about the past based on currently available evidence. There is analysis and explanation of those facts, including methods ranging from ethnography to process-tracing to application of findings from the social sciences. These two parts of historical research are guided by ensembles of historical methods and practices (historiography). And there is philosophical reflection on the logic and limitations of these processes of inquiry and inference, the narrowly epistemic version of the philosophy of history. This aspect of the discussion includes as well the conceptual work that philosophers are well qualified for -- posing and answering questions like "What is history?", "What is a cause?", or "What is involved in expressing a meaningful action?". On this scenario there is no room at all for substantive or metaphysical philosophy of history.

The title of Ian Hacking's book, Historical Ontology, suggests that he thinks otherwise, and that there is such a thing as an ontology of history. However, the sense of the title is different: he is interested in the history of ontologies -- the ways that our conceptual systems have changed over time -- rather than the ontology of history.

(I should say that this is a pretty limited view of the scope of the philosophy of history, so it should be taken as provisional.)

Re-mapping the philosophy of history

The prior post offered a schematic description of the tasks involved in arriving at historical knowledge. Here I want to ask a related question: what is the work that we can hope to do with a philosophy of history? We don't have a philosophy of office furniture; we do have a philosophy of technology. So what is it about history that supports philosophical inquiry? Why is the enterprise of investigating, documenting, and explaining facts about the past amenable to philosophical study? What makes the effort to arrive at knowledge of facts about the past an area of philosophical concern?

There are a couple of matters that are relatively clear. First, the domain of historical knowledge is a familiar subject for philosophical inquiry. Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge generally. Philosophy of science is the careful analysis of the methods and justification of scientific knowledge. And philosophy of historical knowledge is likewise an epistemic and methodological domain: How do we know about the past? Are there limits to our possible knowledge about the past? What is involved in explaining a historical fact? Answers to these questions and others in the same vein may be difficult and controversial; but it is clear how they fit into existing conceptions of philosophical inquiry.

If the philosophy of history were limited to these sorts of questions, then it would be a variant of epistemology or the philosophy of science. However, some philosophers have felt that substantive history itself raises questions that do not reduce to questions about knowledge of this domain.

Here is one possibility: perhaps we need a metaphysics of history -- an account of the kinds of things, forces, and structures that exist in the realm of history. Perhaps the metaphysics of history can shed light on what kinds of structures and entities travel through history, and what kinds of causal processes and dynamical systems propel change in the structures and entities.

For example: Marx wrote that "history is the history of class conflict." This implies that classes are historical objects -- they exist in the flow of historical events. Other historians have said things like this: classical slavery gave way to feudalism, which was followed by capitalism. This formulation presupposes that large social-economic systems -- for example, social property systems -- exist in history and conform to some set of dynamics. And yet others have tried to analyze world history into a set of more or less distinct civilizations -- bodies of values, ideas, identities, and institutions that differ significantly one from the other.

We might say, however, that none of these questions pertains to a metaphysics of history, but rather a metaphysics of the social world. History is about change and transformation; but the subject of change is social structures, cultures, and agents that exist within the social world at a period of time. So classes, social-property systems, ideologies, and religions are all social arrangements that change over time. If there is such a thing as a "civilization", this is a fact about society at a certain time, not a fact about the structure of history. History has to do with events and dynamic properties; the social world encompasses everything that is happening at a moment in time. We might consider an analogy with fluids -- "history" is the waves, society is the water.

We might be more inclined to recognize a metaphysics of history if we thought there were temporal structures that could be discovered in substantive history -- perhaps the business cycle, the Kondratiev long-wave economic cycle, or the rise and fall of civilizations. In other words, if we thought that events and changes conformed to a higher-level pattern of temporal change, we might want to say that the meta-temporal pattern is a metaphysical characteristic of history. But it would also be tempting to say: these patterns of change too represent nothing more than empirical characteristics of social phenomena over time. They need to be explained using the tools of the social sciences and are not properly the subject of apriori investigation.
This suggests two important conclusions: There is no such thing as an historical ontology as such but only a social ontology; and there is no such thing as an historical theory of change as such but only social theories of change. The ontologies and theories that historians employ are strictly speaking features of social science knowledge rather than historical knowledge. So, properly understood, there is no legitimate place for an investigation of the "metaphysics" of history; that space is filled entirely by an understanding of the metaphysics of the social world. tIn this case, the philosophy of history is no more than a component of the philosophy of social science, with no distinctive questions or answers of its own other than the epistemological issues mentioned above.

This discussion suggests a few rather deflationary conclusions about the possible scope of research in the philosophy of history:

• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the epistemology and methodology of historical knowledge is straightforward but limited.
• Philosophical work directed towards elucidating the metaphysical underpinnings of "history" will be disappointing; those foundations exist within the domain of the philosophy of the social sciences rather than the philosophy of history.
• The dynamics of historical change are properly the subject matter of the social sciences rather than the philosopher of history.
• It is true that some historical investigation requires "hermeneutic" interpretation of meanings; but these efforts always fall at the level of interpreting the meaning of historical actions and cultural settings.

This analysis suggests there isn't a lot of scope for the philosophy of history beyond the function of serving as a counterpart to the philosophy of science. We might say that there are basically three relevant activities in the realm of historical thinking. There is first-order research into facts about the past based on currently available evidence. There is analysis and explanation of those facts, including methods ranging from ethnography to process-tracing to application of findings from the social sciences. These two parts of historical research are guided by ensembles of historical methods and practices (historiography). And there is philosophical reflection on the logic and limitations of these processes of inquiry and inference, the narrowly epistemic version of the philosophy of history. This aspect of the discussion includes as well the conceptual work that philosophers are well qualified for -- posing and answering questions like "What is history?", "What is a cause?", or "What is involved in expressing a meaningful action?". On this scenario there is no room at all for substantive or metaphysical philosophy of history.

The title of Ian Hacking's book, Historical Ontology, suggests that he thinks otherwise, and that there is such a thing as an ontology of history. However, the sense of the title is different: he is interested in the history of ontologies -- the ways that our conceptual systems have changed over time -- rather than the ontology of history.

(I should say that this is a pretty limited view of the scope of the philosophy of history, so it should be taken as provisional.)