The older historical school, whose growth has recently been so well described by the German historian Meinecke, though under the misleading name of Historismus7.1 arose mainly in opposition to certain generalizing and ``pragmatic'' tendencies of some, particularly French, eighteenth-century views. Its emphasis was on the singular or unique (individuell) character of all historical phenomena which could be understood only genetically as the joint result of many forces working through long stretches of time. Its strong opposition to the ``pragmatic'' interpretation, which regards social institutions as the product of conscious design, implies in fact the use of a ``Compositive'' theory which explains how such institutions can arise as the unintended result of the separate actions of many individuals. It is significant that among the fathers of this view Edmund Burke is one of the most important and Adam Smith occupies an honorable place.
Yet, although this historical method implies theory, that is, an understanding of the principles of structural coherence of the social wholes, the historians who employed it not only did not systematically develop such theories and were hardly aware that they used them; but their just dislike of any generalization about historical developments also tended to give their teaching an antitheoretical bias which, although originally aimed only against the wrong kind of theory, yet created the impression that the main difference between the methods appropriate to the study of natural and to that of social phenomena was the same as that between theory and history. This opposition to theory of the largest body of students of social phenomena made it appear as if the difference between the theoretical and the historical treatment was a necessary consequence of the differences between the objects of the natural and the social sciences; and the belief that the search for general rules must be confined to the study of natural phenomena, while in the study of the social world the historical method must rule, became the foundation on which later historicism grew up. But while historicism retained the claim for the preeminence of historical research in this field, it almost reversed the attitude to history of the older historical school, and under the influence of the scientistic currents of the age came to represent history as the empirical study of society from which ultimately generalization would emerge. History was to be the source from which a new science of society would spring, a science which should at the same time be historical and yet produce what theoretical knowledge we could hope to gain about society.
We are here not concerned with the actual steps in that process of transition from the older historical school to the historicism of the younger. It may just be noticed that historicism in the sense in which the term is used here, was created not by historians but by students of the specialized social sciences, particularly economists, who hoped thereby to gain an empirical road to the theory of their subject. But to trace this development in detail and to show how the men responsible for it were actually guided by the scientistic views of their generation must be left to the later historical account.7.2
The first point we must briefly consider is the nature of the distinction between the historical and the theoretical treatment of any subject which in fact makes it a contradiction in terms to demand that history should become a theoretical science or that theory should ever be ``historical.'' If we understand that distinction, it will become clear that it has no necessary connection with the difference of the concrete objects with which the two methods of approach deal, and that for the understanding of any concrete phenomenon, be it in nature or in society, both kinds of knowledge are equally required.
That human history deals with events or situations which are unique or singular when we consider all aspects which are relevant for the answer of a particular question which we may ask about them, is, of course, not peculiar to human history. It is equally true of any attempt to explain a concrete phenomenon if we only take into account a sufficient number of aspects--or, to put it differently, so long as we do not deliberately select only such aspects of reality as fall within the sphere of any one of the systems of connected propositions which we regard as distinct theoretical sciences. If I watch and record the process by which a plot in my garden that I leave untouched for months is gradually covered with weeds, I am describing a process which in all its detail is no less unique than any event in human history. If I want to explain any particular configuration of different plants which may appear at any stage of that process, I can do so only by giving an account of all the relevant influences which have affected different parts of my plot at different times. I shall have to consider what I can find out about the differences of the soil in different parts of the plot, about differences in the radiation of the sun, of moisture, of the air currents, etc., etc.; and in order to explain the effects of all these factors I shall have to use, apart from the knowledge of all these particular facts, various parts of the theory of physics, of chemistry, biology, meteorology, and so on. The result of all this will be the explanation of a particular phenomenon, but not a theoretical science of how garden plots are covered with weeds.
In an instance like this the particular sequence of events, their causes and consequences, will probably not be of sufficient general interest to make it worth while to produce a written account of them or to develop their study into a distinct discipline. But there are large fields of natural knowledge, represented by recognized disciplines, which in their methodological character are no different from this. In geography, for example, and at least in a large part of geology and astronomy, we are mainly concerned with particular situations, either of the earth or of the universe; we aim at explaining a unique situation by showing how it has been produced by the operation of many forces subject to the general laws studied by the theoretical sciences. In the specific sense of a body of general rules in which the term science is often used,7.3 these disciplines are not sciences, that is, they are not theoretical sciences but endeavors to apply the laws found by the theoretical sciences to the explanation of particular ``historical'' situations.
The distinction between the search for generic principles and the explanation of concrete phenomena has thus no necessary connection with the distinction between the study of nature and the study of society. In both fields we need generalizations in order to explain concrete and unique events. Whenever we attempt to explain or understand a particular phenomenon we can do so only by recognizing it or its parts as members of certain classes of phenomena, and the explanation of the particular phenomenon presupposes the existence of general rules.
There are very good reasons, however, for a marked difference in emphasis, reasons why, generally speaking, in the natural sciences the search for general laws has the pride of place, with their application to particular events usually little discussed and of small general interest, while with social phenomena the explanation of the particular and unique situation is as important as, and often of much greater interest than, any generalization. In most natural sciences the particular situation or event is generally one of a very large number of similar events, which as particular events are only of local and temporary interest and scarcely worth public discussion (except as evidence of the truth of the general rule). The important thing for them is the general law applicable to all the recurrent events of a particular kind. In the social field, on the other hand, a particular or unique event is often of such general interest and at the same time so complex and so difficult to see in all its important aspects, that its explanation and discussion constitute a major task requiring the whole energy of a specialist. We study here particular events because they have contributed to create the particular environment in which we live or because they are part of that environment. The creation and dissolution of the Roman Empire or the Crusades, the French Revolution or the growth of modern industry--these are unique complexes of events which have helped to produce the particular circumstances in which we live and whose explanation is therefore of great interest.
It is necessary, however, to consider briefly the logical nature of these singular or unique objects of study. Probably the majority of the numerous disputes and confusions which have arisen in this connection are due to the vagueness of the common notion of what can constitute one object of thought--and particularly to the misconception that the totality (that is, all possible aspects) of a particular situation can ever constitute one single object of thought. We can touch here only on a very few of the logical problems which this belief raises.
The first point which we must remember is that, strictly speaking, all thought must be to some degree abstract. We have seen before that all perception of reality, including the simplest sensations, involves a classification of the object according to some property or properties. The same complex of phenomena which we may be able to discover within given temporal and spatial limits may in this sense be considered under many different aspects; and the principles according to which we classify or group the events may differ from each other not merely in one but in several different ways. The various theoretical sciences deal only with those aspects of the phenomena which can be fitted into a single body of connected propositions. It is necessary to emphasize that this is no less true of the theoretical sciences of nature than of the theoretical sciences of society, since an alleged tendency of the natural sciences to deal with the ``whole'' or the totality of the real things is often quoted by writers inclined to historicism as a justification for doing the same in the social field.7.4 Any discipline of knowledge, whether theoretical or historical, however, can deal only with certain selected aspects of the real world; and in the theoretical sciences the principle of selection is the possibility of subsuming these aspects under a logically connected body of rules. The same thing may be for one science a pendulum, for another a lump of brass, and for a third a convex mirror. We have already seen that the fact that a pendulum possesses chemical and optical properties does not mean that in studying laws of pendulums we must study them by the methods of chemistry and optics--though when we apply these laws to a particular pendulum we may well have to take into account certain laws of chemistry or optics. Similarly, as has been pointed out, the fact that all social phenomena have physical properties does not mean that we must study them by the methods of the physical sciences.
The selection of the aspects of a complex of phenomena which can be explained by means of a connected body of rules is, however, not the only method of selection or abstraction which the scientist will have to use. Where investigation is directed, not at establishing rules of general applicability, but at answering a particular question raised by the events in the world about him, he will have to select those features that are relevant to the particular question. The important point, however, is that he still must select a limited number from the infinite variety of phenomena which he can find at the given time and place. We may, in such cases, sometimes speak as if he considered the ``whole'' situation as he found it. But what we mean is not the inexhaustible totality of everything that can be observed within certain spatiotemporal limits, but certain features thought to be relevant to the question asked. If I ask why the weeds in my garden have grown in this particular pattern, no single theoretical science will provide the answer. This, however, does not mean that to answer it we must know everything that can be known about the space-time interval in which the phenomenon occurred. While the question we ask designates the phenomena to be explained, it is only by means of the laws of the theoretical sciences that we are able to select the other phenomena which are relevant for its explanation. The object of scientific study is never the totality of all the phenomena observable at a given time and place, but always only certain selected aspects: and according to the question we ask the same spatiotemporal situation may contain any number of different objects of study. The human mind indeed can never grasp a ``whole'' in the sense of all the different aspects of a real situation.
The application of these considerations to the phenomena of human history leads to very important consequences. It means nothing less than that a historical process or period is never a single definite object of thought but becomes such only by the question we ask about it; and that, according to the question we ask, what we are accustomed to regard as a single historical event can become any number of different objects of thought.
It is confusion on this point which is mainly responsible for the doctrine now so much in vogue that all historical knowledge is necessarily relative, determined by our ``standpoint'' and bound to change with the lapse of time.7.5 This view is a natural consequence of the belief that the commonly used names for historical periods or complexes of events, such as the Napoleonic Wars, or ``France during the Revolution,'' or the Commonwealth period, stand for definitely given objects, unique individuals7.6 which are given to us in the same manner as the natural units in which biological specimens or planets present themselves. Those names of historical phenomena define in fact little more than a period and a place and there is scarcely a limit to the number of different questions which we can ask about events which occurred during the period and within the region to which they refer. It is only the question that we ask, however, which will define our object; and there are, of course, many reasons why at different times people will ask different questions about the same period.7.7 But this does not mean that history will at different times and on the basis of the same information give different answers to the same question. Only this, however, would entitle us to assert that historical knowledge is relative. The kernel of truth in the assertion about the relativity of historical knowledge is that historians will at different times be interested in different objects, but not that they will necessarily hold different views about the same object.
We must dwell a little longer on the nature of the wholes which the historian studies, though much of what we have to say is merely an application of what has been said before about the wholes which some authors regard as objects of theoretical generalizations. What we said then is just as true of the wholes which the historian studies. They are never given to him as wholes, but always reconstructed by him from their elements which alone can be directly perceived. Whether he speaks about the government that existed or the trade that was carried on, the army that moved, or the knowledge that was preserved or disseminated, he is never referring to a constant collection of physical attributes that can be directly observed, but always to a system of relationships between some of the observed elements which can be merely inferred. Words like government, trade, army, and knowledge stand not for single observable things but for structures of relationships which can be described only by a schematic representation or ``theory'' of the persistent system of relationships between the ever-changing elements.7.8These ``wholes,'' in other words, do not exist for us apart from the theory by which we constitute them, apart from the mental technique by which we can reconstruct the connections between the observed elements and follow up the implications of this particular combination.
The place of theory in historical knowledge is thus in forming or constituting the wholes to which history refers; it is prior to these wholes which do not become visible except by following up the system of relations which connects the parts. The generalizations of theory, however, do not refer, and cannot refer, as has been mistakenly believed by the older historians (who for that reason opposed theory), to the concrete wholes, the particular constellations of the elements, with which history is concerned. The models of wholes, of structural connections, which theory provides ready-made for the historian to use (though even these are not the given elements about which theory generalizes but the results of theoretical activity), are not identical with the wholes which the historian considers. The models provided by any one theoretical science of society consist necessarily of elements of one kind, elements which are selected because their connection can be explained by a coherent body of principles and not because they help to answer a particular question about concrete phenomena. For the latter purpose the historian will regularly have to use generalizations belonging to different theoretical spheres. His work, thus, as is true of all attempts to explain particular phenomena, presupposes theory; it is, as is all thinking about concrete phenomena, an application of generic concepts to the explanation of particular phenomena.
If the dependence of the historical study of social phenomena on theory is not always recognized, this is mainly due to the very simple nature of the majority of theoretical schemes which the historian will employ and which brings it about that there will be no dispute about the conclusions reached by their help, and little awareness that he has used theoretical reasoning at all. But this does not alter the fact that in their methodological character and validity the concepts of social phenomena which the historian has to employ are essentially of the same kind as the more elaborate models produced by the systematic social sciences. All the unique objects of history which he studies are in fact either constant patterns of relations, or repeatable processes in which the elements are of a generic character. When the historian speaks of a state or a battle, a town or a market, these words cover coherent structures of individual phenomena which we can comprehend only by understanding the intentions of the acting individuals. If the historian speaks of a certain system, say the feudal system, persisting over a period of time, he means that a certain pattern of relationships continued, a certain type of actions was regularly repeated, structures whose connection he can understand only by mental reproduction of the individual attitudes of which they were made up. The unique wholes which the historian studies, in short, are not given to him as individuals,7.9 as natural units of which he can find out by observation what features belong to them, but constructions made by the kind of technique that is systematically developed by the theoretical sciences of society. Whether he endeavors to give a genetic account of how a particular institution arose, or a descriptive account of how it functioned, he cannot do so except by a combination of generic considerations applying to the elements from which the unique situation is composed. Though in this work of reconstruction he cannot use any elements except those he empirically finds, not observation but only the ``theoretical'' work of reconstruction can tell him which among those that he can find are part of a connected whole.
Theoretical and historical labors are thus logically distinct but complementary activities. If their task is rightly understood, there can be no conflict between them. And though they have distinct tasks, neither is of much use without the other. But this does not alter the fact that neither can theory be historical nor history theoretical. Though the general is of interest only because it explains the particular, and though the particular can be explained only in generic terms, the particular can never be the general and the general never the particular. The unfortunate misunderstandings that have arisen between historians and theorists largely trace to the name ``historical school,'' which has been usurped by the mongrel view better described as historicism and which is indeed neither history nor theory.
The naive view which regards the complexes which history studies as given wholes naturally leads to the belief that their observation can reveal ``laws'' of the development of these wholes. This belief is one of the most characteristic features of that scientistic history which under the name of historicism was trying to find an empirical basis for a theory of history or (using the term philosophy in its old sense of ``theory'') a ``philosophy of history,'' and to establish necessary successions of definite ``stages'' or ``phases,'' ``systems'' or ``styles,'' following each other in historical development. This view on the one hand endeavors to find laws where in the nature of the case they cannot be found, in the succession of the unique and singular historical phenomena, and on the other hand denies the possibility of the kind of theory which alone can help us to understand unique wholes, the theory which shows the different ways in which the familiar elements can be combined to produce the unique combinations we find in the real world. The empiricist prejudice thus led to an inversion of the only procedure by which we can comprehend historical wholes, their reconstruction from the parts; it induced scholars to treat as if they were objective facts vague conceptions of wholes which were merely intuitively comprehended; and it finally produced the view that the elements, which are the only thing that we can directly comprehend and from which we must reconstruct the wholes, on the contrary, could be understood only from the whole, which had to be known before we could understand the elements.
The belief that human history, which is the result of the interaction of innumerable human minds, must yet be subject to simple laws accessible to human minds is now so widely held that few people are at all aware what an astonishing claim it really implies. Instead of working patiently at the humble task of rebuilding from the directly known elements the complex and unique structures which we find in the world, and of tracing from the changes in the relations between the elements the changes in the wholes, the authors of these pseudotheories of history pretend to be able to arrive by a kind of mental shortcut at a direct insight into the laws of succession of the immediately apprehended wholes. However doubtful their status, these theories of development have achieved a hold on public imagination much greater than any of the results of genuine systematic study. ``Philosophies'' or ``theories''7.10 of history (or ``historical theories'') have indeed become the characteristic feature, the ``darling vice''7.11 of the nineteenth century. From Hegel and Comte, and particularly Marx, down to Sombart and Spengler these spurious theories came to be regarded as representative results of social science; and through the belief that one kind of ``system'' must as a matter of historical necessity be superseded by a new and different system, they have even exercised a profound influence on social evolution. This they achieved mainly because they looked like the kind of laws which the natural sciences produced; and in an age when these sciences set the standard by which all intellectual effort was measured, the claim of these theories of history to be able to predict future developments was regarded as evidence of their preeminently scientific character. Though merely one among many characteristic nineteenth-century products of this kind, Marxism more than any of the others has become the vehicle through which this result of scientism has gained so wide an influence that many of the opponents of Marxism equally with its adherents are thinking in its terms.
Apart from setting up a new ideal this development had, however, also the negative effect of discrediting the existing theory on which past understanding of social phenomena had been based. Since it was supposed that we could directly observe the changes in the whole of society or of any particular changed social phenomenon, and that everything within the whole must necessarily change with it, is was concluded that there could be no timeless generalizations about the elements from which these wholes were built up, no universal theories about the ways in which they might be combined into wholes. All social theory, it was said, was necessarily historical, zeitgebunden, true only of particular historical phases or systems.
All concepts of individual phenomena, according to this strict historicism, are to be regarded as merely historical categories, valid only in a particular historical context. A price in the twelfth century or a monopoly in the Egypt of 400 B.C., it is argued, is not the same ``thing'' as a price or a monopoly today, and any attempt to explain that price or the policy of that monopolist by the same theory which we would use to explain a price or a monopoly of today is therefore vain and bound to fail. This argument is based on a complete misapprehension of the function of theory. Of course, if we ask why a particular price was charged at a particular date, or why a monopolist then acted in a particular manner, this is a historical question which cannot be fully answered by any one theoretical discipline; to answer it we must take into account the particular circumstances of time and place. But this does not mean that we must not, in selecting the factors relevant to the explanation of the particular price, etc., use precisely the same theoretical reasoning as we would with regard to a price of today.
What this contention overlooks is that price and monopoly are not names for definite ``things,'' fixed collections of physical attributes which we recognize by some of these attributes as members of the same class and whose further attributes we ascertain by observation; rather, they are objects which can be defined only in terms of certain relations between human beings and which cannot possess any attributes except those which follow from the relations by which they are defined. They can be recognized by us as prices or monopolies only because, and insofar as, we can recognize these individual attitudes, and from these as elements compose the structural pattern which we call a price or monopoly. Of course, the ``whole'' situation, or even the ``whole'' of the men who act, will greatly differ from place to place and from time to time. But it is solely our capacity to recognize the familiar elements from which the unique situation is made up which enables us to attach any meaning to the phenomena. Either we cannot thus recognize the meaning of the individual actions--they are nothing but physical facts to us, the handing over of certain material things, etc.--or we must place them in the mental categories familiar to us but not definable in physical terms. If the first contention were true this would mean that we could not know the facts of the past at all, because in that case we could not understand the documents from which we derive all knowledge of them.7.12
Consistently pursued historicism necessarily leads to the view that the human mind is itself variable and that not only are most or all manifestations of the human mind unintelligible to us apart from their historical setting, but that from our knowledge of how the whole situations succeed each other we can learn to recognize the laws according to which the human mind changes, and that it is the knowledge of these laws which alone puts us in a position to understand any particular manifestation of the human mind. Historicism, because of its refusal to recognize a Compositive theory of universal applicability unable to see how different configurations of the same elements may produce altogether different complexes, and unable, for the same reason, to comprehend how the wholes can ever be anything but what the human mind consciously designed, was bound to seek the cause `of the changes in the social structures in changes of the human mind itself--changes which it claims to understand and explain from changes in the directly apprehended wholes. From the extreme assertion of some sociologists that logic itself is variable, and the belief in the ``prelogical'' character of the thinking of primitive people, to the more sophisticated contentions of the modern ``sociology of knowledge,'' this approach has become one of the most characteristic features of modern sociology. It has raised the old question of the ``constancy of the human mind'' in a more radical form than has ever been done before.
This phrase is, of course, so vague that any dispute about it without giving it further precision is futile. That not only any human individual in its historically given complexity, but also certain types predominant in particular ages or localities, differ in significant respects from other individuals or types is, of course, beyond dispute. But this does not alter the fact that in order that we should be able to recognize or understand them at all as human beings or minds, there must be certain invariable features present. We cannot recognize ``mind'' in the abstract. When we speak of mind what we mean is that certain phenomena can be successfully interpreted on the analogy of our own mind, that the use of the familiar categories of our own thinking provides a satisfactory working explanation of what we observe. But this means that to recognize something as mind is to recognize it as something similar to our own mind, and that the possibility of recognizing mind is limited to what is similar to our own mind. To speak of a mind with a structure fundamentally different from our own, or to claim that we can observe changes in the basic structure of the human mind is not only to claim what is impossible: it is a meaningless statement. Whether the human mind is in this sense constant can never become a problem--because to recognize mind cannot mean anything but to recognize something as operating in the same way as our own thinking.
To recognize the existence of a mind always implies that we add something to what we perceive with our senses, that we interpret the phenomena in the light of our own mind, or find that they fit into the ready pattern of our own thinking. This kind of interpretation of human actions may not be always successful, and, what is even more embarrassing, we may never be absolutely certain that it is correct in any particular case; all we know is that it works in the overwhelming number of cases. Yet it is the only basis on which we ever understand what we call other people's intentions, or the meaning of their actions; and certainly the only basis of all our historical knowledge since this is all derived from the understanding of signs or documents. As we pass from men of our own kind to different types of beings we may, of course, find that what we can thus understand becomes less and less. And we can't exclude the possibility that one day we may find beings who, though perhaps physically resembling men, behave in a way which is entirely unintelligible to us. With regard to them we should indeed be reduced to the ``objective'' study which the behaviorists want us to adopt toward men in general. But there would be no sense in ascribing to these beings a mind different from our own. We should know nothing of them which we could call mind, we should indeed know nothing about them but physical facts. Any interpretation of their actions in terms of such categories as intention or purpose or will, would be meaningless. A mind about which we can intelligibly speak must be like our own.
The whole idea of the variability of the human mind is a direct result of the erroneous belief that mind is an object which we observe as we observe physical facts. The sole difference between mind and physical objects, however, which entitles us to speak of mind at all, is precisely that wherever we speak of mind we interpret what we observe in terms of categories which we know only because they are the categories in which our own mind operates. There is nothing paradoxical in the claim that all mind must run in terms of certain universal categories of thought, because where we speak of mind this means that we can successfully interpret what we observe by arranging it in these categories. And anything which can be comprehended through our understanding of other minds, anything which we recognize as specifically human, must be comprehensible in terms of these categories.
Through the theory of the variability of the human mind, to which the consistent development of historicism leads, it cuts, in effect, the ground under its own feet: it is led to the self-contradictory position of generalizing about facts which, if the theory were true, could not be known. If the human mind were really variable so that, as the extreme adherents of historicism assert, we could not directly understand what people of other ages meant by a particular statement, history would be inaccessible to us. The wholes from which we are supposed to understand the elements would never become visible to us. And even if we disregard this fundamental difficulty created by the impossibility of understanding the documents from which we derive all historical knowledge, without first understanding the individual actions and intentions the historian could never combine them into wholes and never explicitly state what these wholes are. He would, as indeed is true of so many of the adherents of historicism, be reduced to talking about wholes which are intuitively comprehended, to making uncertain and vague generalizations about styles or systems whose character could not be precisely defined.
It follows indeed from the nature of the evidence on which all our historical knowledge is based that history can never carry us beyond the stage where we can understand the working of the minds of the acting people because they are similar to our own. Where we cease to understand, where we can no longer recognize categories of thought similar to those in terms of which we think, history ceases to be human history. And precisely at that point, and only at that point, do the general theories of the social sciences cease to be valid. Since history and social theory are based on the same knowledge of the working of the human mind, the same capacity to `understand other people, their range and scope are necessarily coterminous. Particular propositions of social theory may have no application at certain times, because the combination of elements to which they refer do not occur.7.13 But they remain nevertheless true. There can be no different theories for different ages, though at some times certain parts and at others different parts of the same body of theory may be required to explain the observed facts, just as, for example, generalizations about the effect of very low temperatures on vegetation may be irrelevant in the tropics but still true. Any true theoretical statement of the social sciences will cease to be valid only where history ceases to be human history. If we conceive of somebody observing and recording the doings of another race, unintelligible to him and to us, his records would in a sense be history, such as, for example, the history of an ant heap. Such history would have to be written in purely objective, physical terms. It would be the sort of history which corresponds to the positivist ideal, such as the proverbial observer from another planet might write of the human race. But such history could not help us to understand any of the events recorded by it in the sense in which we understand human history.
When we speak of man we necessarily imply the
presence of certain familiar mental categories. It is not
the lumps of flesh of a certain shape which we mean,
nor any units performing definite functions which we
could define in physical terms. The completely insane,
none of whose actions we can understand, is not a man
to us--he could not figure in human history except as
the object of other people's acting and thinking. When
we speak of man we refer to one whose actions we can
understand. As old Democritus said:``
''
7.14