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I

HISTORIANS of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern. To say this is not necessarily to subscribe to any form of Hegelian dogma about the dominant role of laws and metaphysical principles in history--a view increasingly influential in our time--according to which there is some single explanation of the order and attributes of persons, things, and events. Usually this consists in the advocacy of some fundamental category or principle which claims to act as an infallible guide both to the past and to the future, a magic lens revealing `inner', inexorable, all-pervasive historical laws, invisible to the naked eye of the mere recorder of events, but capable, when understood, of giving the historian a unique sense of certainty-- certainty not only of what in fact occurred, but of the reason why it could not have occurred otherwise, affording a secure knowledge which the mere empirical investigator, with his collections of data, his insecure structure of painstakingly accumulated evidence, his tentative approximations and perpetual liability to error and reassessment, can never hope to attain.1.1

The notion of `laws' of this kind is rightly condemned as a species of metaphysical fantasy; but the contrary notion of bare facts--facts which are nothing but facts, hard, inescapable, untainted by interpretation - or arrangement in man-made patterns--is equally mythological. To comprehend and contrast and classify and arrange, to see in patterns of lesser: or greater complexity, is not a peculiar kind of thinking, it is thinking itself. We accuse historians of exaggeration, distortion, ignorance, bias, or departure from the facts, not because they select, compare, and set forth in a context and order which are in part; at least, of their own choosing, in part conditioned by the circumstances of their material and social environment or their character or purpose--we accuse them only when the result deviates too far, contrasts too harshly with the accepted canons of verification and interpretation which belong to their own time and place and society. These canons and methods and categories are those of the normal rational outlook of a given period and culture, at their best a sharpened, highly trained form of this outlook, which takes cognizance of all the relevant scientific techniques available, but is itself not one of them. All the criticisms directed against this or that writer for an excess of bias or fancy, or too weak a sense of evidence, or too limited a perception of connexions between events, are based not upon some absolute standard of truth, of strict `factuality', of a rigid adherence to a permanently fixed ideal method of `scientifically' discovering the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, in contrast with mere theories about it, for there is in the last analysis no meaning in the notion of 'objective' criticism in this timeless sense. They rest rather on the most refined concept of accuracy and objectivity and scrupulous `fidelity to the facts' which obtain in a given society at a given period, within the subject in question.

When the great romantic revolution in the writing of history transferred emphasis from the achievements of individuals to the growth and influence of institutions conceived in much less personal terms, the degree of `fidelity to the facts' was not thereby automatically altered. The new kind of history, the account of the development, let us say, of public and private law, or government , or literature, or social habits during some given period of time, was not necessarily less or more accurate or `objective' than earlier accounts of the acts and fate of Alcibiades or Marcus Aurelius or Calvin or Louis XIV. Thucydides or Tacitus or Voltaire were not subjective or vague or fanciful in a sense in which Ranke or Savigny or Michelet were not. The new history was merely written from what is nowadays called a different `angle'. The kinds of fact the new history was intended to record were different, the emphasis was different, a shift of interest had occurred in the questions asked and consequently in the methods used. The concepts and terminology reflect an altered view of what constitutes evidence and therefore, in the end, of what are the `facts'. When the `romances' of chroniclers were criticized by `scientific' historians, at least part of the implied reproach lay in the alleged discrepancies in the work of the older writers from the findings of the most admired and trusted sciences of a later period; and these were in their turn due to the change in the prevalent conceptions of the patterns of human development--to the change in the models in terms of which the past was perceived, those artistic, theological, mechanical, biological, or psychological models which were reflected in the fields of inquiry, in the new questions asked and the new types of technique used, to answer questions felt to be more interesting or important than those which had become outmoded.

The history of these changes of `models' is to a large degree the history of human thought. The `organic' or the Marxist methods of investigating history certainly owed part of their vogue to the prestige of the particular natural sciences, or the particular artistic techniques; upon whose model they were supposedly or genuinely constructed; the increased interest, for example, both in biology and in music, from which many basic metaphors and analogies derived, is relevant to the historical writing of the nineteenth century, as the new interest in physics and mathematics is to the philosophy and history of the eighteenth; and the deflationary methods and ironical temper of the historians who wrote after the war of 1914-18 were conspicuously influenced by-and accepted in terms of--the new psychological and sociological techniques which had gained public confidence during this period. The relative dominance of, say, social, economic, and political concepts and presuppositions in a once admired historical work throws more light upon the general characteristics of its time and for this reason is a more reliable index to the standards adopted, the questions asked, the respective roles of `facts' and `interpretation', and, in effect, to the entire social and political outlook of an age, than the putative distance of the work in question from some imaginary, fixed, unaltering ideal of absolute truth, metaphysical or scientific, empirical ora priori. It is in terms of such shifts in the methods of treating the past (or the present or the future) and of idioms and catchwords, the doubts and hopes, fears and exhortations which they expressed, that the development of political ideas and the conceptual apparatus of a society and of its most gifted and articulate representatives can best be judged. No doubt the Concepts in terms of which people speak and think may be symptoms and effects of other processes social, psychological, physical, the discovery of which is the task of this or that empirical science. But this does not detract from their importance and paramount interest for those who wish to know what constitutes the conscious experience of the most characteristic men of an age or a society, whatever its causes and whatever its fate. And we are, of course, for obvious reasons of perspective, in a better situation to determine this in the case of past societies than for our own. The historical approach is inescapable: the very sense of contrast and dissimilarity with which the past affects us provides the only relevant background against which the features peculiar to our own experience stand out in sufficient relief to be adequately discerned and described.

The student of the political ideas of, for example, the mid-nineteenth century must indeed be blind if he does not, sooner or later, become aware of the profound differences in ideas and terminology, in the general view of things--the ways in which the elements of experience are conceived to be related to one another--which divide that not very distant age from our own. He understands neither that time nor his own if he does not perceive the contrast between what was common to Comte and Mill, Mazzini and Michelet, Herzen and Marx, on the one hand, and to Max Weber and William James, Tawney and Beard, Lytton Strachiey and Namier, on the other; the continuity of the European intellectual tradition without which no historical understanding at all would be possible is, at shorter range, a succession of specific discontinuities and dissimilarities. consequently, the remarks which follow deliberately ignore the similarities in favour of the specific differences in political outlook which characterize our own time, and to a large degree, solely our own.


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