Classical Historicism and American Traditions of Social History

Classical Historicism

• Early 19th Century Transformation: History underwent a significant shift, evolving into a professional discipline with roots in both learned/antiquarian and literary traditions.
  • German universities became central to this transformation, emphasizing rigorous learning while maintaining literary quality.
  • There was a tension between the scientific pursuit of history, demanding objectivity, and its political function, which often took existing social orders for granted.
• University of Berlin as Prototype: Founded in 1810, it exemplified the fusion of Wissenschaft (science) and Bildung (cultural formation) aimed at creating informed citizens.
  • The reforms led by Wilhelm von Humboldt were not democratic but sought to educate a class of higher public servants.
  • The university emphasized research-informed teaching.
• Leopold Ranke's Contribution: Called to the University of Berlin in 1825, Ranke advocated for history as a rigorous science based on critical examination of primary sources.
  • He aimed to combine trustworthy reconstruction of the past with literary elegance and believed history should be written by specialists for a broad, educated public.
  • Ranke's approach was characterized by a tension between objective research and implicit philosophical and political assumptions.
• Ranke's Methodological Approach: Ranke emphasized:
  • Critical Method: Thorough training in philological criticism.
  • Seminars: Introduced seminars for training in critical examination of medieval documents; adopted by all German-speaking universities by 1848.
  • Abstinence from Value Judgments: Historians should focus on "showing how things actually happened" without judging the past.
  • Rejection of Positivism: Establishing facts was not the sole task; history reflected a world of meaning and values.
  • Connection to the Divine: "History recognizes something infinite in every existence: in every condition, in every being, something eternal, coming from God."
• History vs. Philosophy: History replaced philosophy as a source of insights into the meaning of the human world.
  • Ranke argued that impartial observation reveals the ethical character of social institutions.
  • He supported established political and social institutions, viewing challenges to them as violations of the historical spirit.
  • Ranke's approach legitimized the existing order, seeing it as divinely ordained, aligning with Hegel's view of states as "moral energies."
  • The state was central to Ranke's conception of history, influenced by the political and religious context of Restoration Prussia.
• Professionalization of Historical Scholarship: Ranke's model became dominant in the 19th century; however, before 1848, the Enlightenment tradition of cultural history was still alive.
  • Large-scale projects were launched to edit and publish sources of national history (e.g., Monumenta Germaniae Historica).
  • Institutions like the Ecole des Chartes were founded to train historians and archivists.
  • Historians in France, Great Britain, and the United States wrote for a broad public, with figures like Guizot, Macaulay, and Bancroft playing significant roles in public life.
• Divergence between Germany and France: Historical studies in France were less professionalized and more connected to the general public, possibly due to differing political cultures.
  • French historians were more open to social issues compared to the German focus on political and diplomatic history.
• Professionalization After 1848/1870: Historical studies underwent professionalization, following the German model with the introduction of Ph.D. programs and research-focused institutions (e.g., Johns Hopkins, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes).
  • Seminars supplemented lectures; journals propagated new methods of scientific scholarship.
  • The shift often meant a retreat from broader cultural history to a focus on politics.
• Ideologization of Historical Writing: Despite the demand for objectivity, historical scholarship was closely related to the political and social setting, with state-sponsored universities and a recruitment process ensuring conformity.
  • Historians sought evidence to support nationalistic and class preconceptions, giving them scientific authority.
• Historicism (Historismus): The new historical outlook involved a total philosophy of life, combining a conception of science and the political/social order.
  • It posited that "Man has no nature; what he has is… history" (Ortega y Gasset).
  • History became the primary way of studying human affairs and was considered the highest point in understanding human existence (Meinecke).
• Limitations of Historicism: Despite its intent to open up human activity to historical study, it both widened and restricted the historical perspective.
  • German historical scholarship assumed its modern form before industrialization and democratization, bearing the stamp of its time.
  • The German pattern became a model for professional studies elsewhere, but the underlying philosophical and political convictions were not always fully understood or adopted.
  • Ranke was often misunderstood as a positivist focused solely on facts.
• Unequal Focus on Epochs: Ranke's view that "every epoch is immediate to God" did not translate to equal interest in all epochs.
  • He focused on the history of Germanic and Latin peoples in Central and Western Europe, largely ignoring India and China.
  • After Ranke, the focus narrowed to nations and their political life, with historians often ignoring administrative, economic, and social data in archives.
  • Women were almost totally absent from the profession.
• Crisis of Historicism: By the turn of the century, Ernst Troeltsch spoke of a "crisis of historicism," with historical studies demonstrating the relativity of all values and the meaninglessness of existence.
  • The philosophical assumptions of the early/mid-19th century were out of step with 20th-century realities.
  • There was a risk to historicism, the worldview rooted in German classical culture, the culture of the German Bürgertum, and its ideal of Bildung.
  • Historical scholarship lost relevance in public life as teaching, research, and specialization became progressively institutionalized.

American Traditions of Social History

• Divergence from Classical German Historicism: While Marx and Weber critiqued the idealistic foundations of classical German historicism, they maintained the historicist viewpoint that social sciences should progress historically.
  • In English-speaking countries, historical studies were influenced by intellectual traditions that mirrored a social structure distinct from that of continental Europe.
  • Bureaucratization was notably less pronounced in England and the United States compared to the European continent, resulting in a greater autonomy of "civil society" from governmental influence.
• Reluctance to embrace grand explanations: English and American historians and social scientists exhibited a greater hesitation to adopt overarching explanations for occurrences compared to their counterparts in France and Germany.
• The New History: Around the turn of the century, discussions regarding methodologies implied that conventional historical science in universities was no longer suitable for the demands of a modern, democratic, industrial society.
  • Participants in these discussions concluded that historical research at American universities, previously centered on politics after 1870, needed to broaden its scope to encompass a comprehensive depiction of society.
  • The "New History" in the United States differed fundamentally from Riehl's cultural history. The former affirmed modernity and a democratic social order.
  • The New Historians emphasized the break with the premodern European past and focused on America as a country of immigrants that defined the character of the rural "frontier" and the urban "cities in the East"
  • The sciences that interested the New Historians were primarily economics and sociology, but also psychology.
• Common Denominator: It is difficult to reduce the New History to a common denominator.
  • The faith in an American consensus was replaced by a new outlook, more aware of differences that divided the American population without denying the elements that contributed to a sense of national community.
  • Charles Beard saw economic and social conflicts as the decisive factors in American history, whereas James H. Robinson, Vernon Parrington, and Carl Becker emphasized the role of ideas and Perry Miller that of religion.
  • The New Historians formulated a historical problem that presupposed a theoretical framework.
  • The New Historians did not want to transform history into a systematic social science. Their relationship to the social sciences was loose and eclectic.
• Progressive Historians: In the first two decades after World War II:
  • The political and scientific assumptions of the "Progressive Historians" were called into question and a new national consensus was discovered by American historians in the Cold War.
  • America appeared as a truly classless society, free of ideological divisions, which with the exception of the Civil War had been free of serious conflicts.
  • An expansive capitalistic market economy had eliminated the final elements of class conflict.
  • American history and American society were increasingly held up as a model for the "free world."
  • A society that had achieved industrial efficiency and created a mass consumer market required a history and a social science adequate to the realities of a modern world.
• Quantifying Methods:
  • Increasingly, quantifying methods were introduced into historical research not only in America, but also in England, France, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, even in the socialist countries.
  • Quantification strengthened the claims of the social sciences to be scientific disciplines.
  • With developing computer technology, quantitative studies began to multiply in the fifties in the United States in different areas of research such as:
    • Political history: electoral behavior began to be correlated with social variables
    • Historical demography: established itself as a quantitative discipline, especially in France and England
    • Social mobility: was examined with the help of the censuses that had been conducted every ten years since 1790
    • Analyses of economic processes
• Quantitative Studies:
  • Historical demography: Parish records in France and England were analyzed with the help of computers to reveal information about family constitution, births, marriages, deaths, and property (the basis of historical demography).
    • Data on the age of marriage and on illegitimacy afforded insight into sexual behavior and thus information about the ideas of morality of the people included in the registers.
    • The examination of thousands of wills yielded information about changing attitudes toward death and religion and thus about the extent of desecularization.
• Highly quantitative research: That played an important role in historical studies in the 1970s, often presupposed a concept of science that historical studies could only satisfy if they formulated their findings in quantifiable language.
  • $Emmanuel \ Le \ Roy \ Ladurie$ commented in 1973 that "history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific."
  • An example of the electronic processing of mass data was the gigantic "Philadelphia Social History Project."
  • A not entirely dissimilar approach to social history was the histoire sérielle in France.
• Theoritical Assumptions:
  • There are generally valid laws governing economic behavior, essentially corresponding to those formulated by $Adam \ Smith$ and $David \ Ricardo$.
• Constant growth: The capitalist economy is characterized by constant growth, which takes on similar forms in all modern and modernizing societies.
  • $Marx's$ formulation: "The country which is industrially more developed only shows the less developed one the picture of its own future," also holds for Rostow (Against this assumption $Alexander \ Gerschenkron$ argued that other countries began to industrialize later and under different political and social conditions than England and therefore were not fully comparable).
    • The quantitative method can be applied not only to economic but also to social processes.

The History of Everyday Life

• Questioning Social Science History (1970s-1980s): Historians began to challenge the assumptions of social science history, particularly the belief in modernization as a positive force.

  • $Francis \ Fukuyama$ argued technological society based on capitalist free market principles signified the achievement of a rational order of things as the outcome of historical development.
  • The collapse of Nazism and Marxist-Leninist systems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union confirm the point of critical historical social science function to point at the atavistic aspects of social orders.

• Decline of Macrohistorical Conceptions: For Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, two of the most important representatives of microhistory in Italy, the key reason for the decline of macrohistorical conceptions and with them of social science approaches to history was to be found in the loss of faith in optimistic view of the beneficial social and political fruits of technological progress

  • The arguments made against macrohistorical social science approaches were based on political and ethical grounds (social science history methodological critique).
  • The human cost of modernization was a key objection.
    History should turn to the conditions of everyday life as they are experienced by common people.

• Role of Political Beliefs: Political beliefs shape scholarship in political historiography, social history, Marxism, and microhistorical studies of everyday life.

  • Historians of everyday life shifted focus from the "center" of power to the "margins," emphasizing the disadvantaged and exploited.
  • The "many" should not be viewed as a crowd. History is a multifaceted flow with many individual centers.
  • An epistemology is needed that allows knowledge of the concrete rather than the abstract.

• Evolution of Historical Focus:

  • A history that anchored culture in a firm political, social, and economic context had been prepared in great works.
  • Studies of popular culture became more frequent

• Microhistory vs Social Science History: A vigorous debate took place in the 1980s in Germany between advocates of a social science history and everyday history, for whom these guidelines meant the death knell for lived experiences, which they ardently believed should be the true subject matter of history.

  • Cultural anthropology as a model for historical research. The semeiotic approach is pursued in Geertz's conception of a "thick description"
  • One cannot have coherent insight into reality if one does not proceed with explicit questions that help us to locate what we are looking for in the immense multitude of experiences
    Medick (Alltagsgeschichte): history should move from concern with "central" institutions to the margins, where individuals who do not conform to the established norms are to be found. The individual can only be understood as part of a larger cultural whole

• Protoindustrialization Project:

  • The focus was on a small unit, the peasant household.
  • Cottage industries in a period of increasing demand for textiles led to an early form of industrialization and furthered the increase of population, with earlier marriages and more children, to meet the need for labor.
  • The focus is on one village or locality over a period of approximately two hundred years, from the old regime to the latter part of the 19th century.
  • Geertzian conception of a culture as an integrated semiotic system vs differentation and conflict.

• Italian Microstoria:

  • Carlo Ginzburg, Carlo Poni, Giovanni Levi, and Edoardo Grendi reacted against Marxism, the macrohistorical conceptions, analytical social sciences and the Annales.
  • 3 Marxist orientations preserved:
    • Social inequality is a central characteristic of all historical societies.
    • The role production and reproduction play in the formation of cultures.
    • Historical study must be based on rigorous method and empirical analysis.

• German vs Italian: While the Italians remain skeptical of Geertz's methodological irrationalism, they too, particularly Carlo Ginzburg, move in their historical narratives to a position close to Geertz's thick description. Conversely, the Germans worked from the start closely with social science methods involving computer analyses of long series.

• Journal Quaderni Storici place in Italy similar to the Annales in France/Past in Great Britain, because it presented a broad spectrum of historical approaches. Geschichte und Gesellschaft: German journal role/viewpoint of micro-history and historical anthropology.

• Microstoria commitment: “To open history to peoples who would be left out by other methods" and "to elucidate historical causation on the level of small groups where most of life takes place."

• Contradiction: Microstoria stresses the methodological need of testing their constructs against existing reality on a small scale. Microhistory does not reject the empirical social sciences in toto. 

  *Two of main works in the microstoria tradition:
  *Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms:
  The cosmos of a sixteenth century miller/ Giovanni Levi Inheriting power
  the story of an exorcist