SPRING 1995
HISTORY 400
Crown 528, M
6:15-8:45
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
APPROACHES TO HISTORY
Zouhair Ghazzal
Crown
544, M: 5:00-6:00
(and
by appointment)
The purpose of this course is (1) to
investigate methods and styles in writing history; (2) to show that the enterprise of writing history
creates new concepts and horizons of thought; (3) to analyze the complex
relationships between history and the social sciences, in particular
anthropology and sociology; (4) to investigate how philosophical themes such as
the subject/individual, the public and the private, reason and madness, etc.
could be problematized within a historical perspective (see the works of
Foucault, Elias, and Habermas); (5) to study the creation of “social history”
as the dominant genre in academia today; particularly the impact of the Annales on twentieth-century historiography and
the transfer of the narrative from the political to the social; (6) an analysis
of the shortcomings of the Annales:
if “social history” as a “total history” is in crisis,
what are the new emerging trends?; (7) an exploration of some new ways in
writing history: “textual” history as a way of exploring
“documents” as totalities; anthropological history which focusses
on micro levels of the social and creates totalities out of the microscopic;
the awareness that there are several historical becomings (particularly in the
so-called Third World) despite the overwhelming dominance of the
Western-capitalistic-liberal system which serves as a model of progress,
individualism, democracy, and the success of science and technology (the
Western model imposes itself on the enterprise of writing history, even Third
World history: it is almost impossible, from a non-Western perspective, not to
question the history of the West as a civilization); (8) What is the
historiographical status of non-Western societies and civilizations? Are their
social and political structures “obsolete”? What can we learn from
them in terms of writing and thinking history?
What has thus far been referred to on many
occasions as the “crisis of the Annales” is nothing more
than the difficulty to conceive “social history” as a “total
history.” What has become problematic in modern historiography is the
“unit of analysis” itself. Perhaps the shift is best illustrated in
the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who, under the supervision of Braudel, did
his first work on the peasants of the Languedoc. His then bestselling book, Montaillou,
village occitan de 1294 à 1324, clearly shows the shift in the unit of
analysis: in Montaillou, the “village” becomes the unit of
analysis, that is, what gives the historian the possibility to explore a
totality in itself, while Ladurie’s earlier work on the Languedoc
followed Braudel’s footsteps in focussing on large units of analysis.
Like the anthropologist—and Ladurie’s initial training was in
ethnology—who sees totalities in the smallest of all objects, the
“village” is what opens the historian towards an understanding of
broader units of analysis—and society-as-a-whole in particular.
In short, this course is about the
enterprise of thinking history,
and the rejection of the notion that history is primarily descriptive and
factual. Two problems (at least) need to be addressed within the context of
this course and from the sample of readings we have at our disposal:
(i)
Historians do use
“texts” as a source
for their data, but they rarely question them critically, that is, first, and above all, as
texts. The
“data” that a historian usually pulls out of a document belongs to
the textual nature of this document, which, in turn, has an institutional and
ideological context which made its drafting possible. For example, a police
record from nineteenth-century Paris could provide us important information on
beggars, criminals, prostitutes, political activists, and other categories of
the social. But this is only an aspect of police records. What should be done
is the contextualization of these “data” into the institution of
the police, that is, how such an institution “thinks” and relates
to individuals and groups (Foucault’s notions of “discipline”
and “surveillance” could be quite enlightening). The same could be
said about other types of documents commonly used by historians: court-records,
psychiatric and medical records, newspapers, journals, etc. Foucault’s
distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices could be helpful in
bringing to historical analysis levels of the latter usually left out as too
fragmented or visual: bringing architectural, disciplinary, kinship, etc.,
practices to the level of “thought” (or the
“unthought”).
(ii)
One should meditate on and question the difficulty of the Annales in creating a historiography of the
“modern,” that is, for anything which is post-French Revolution.
Thus while the Annales
did well for the medieval period (with Bloch, Duby, and Le Goff) and the early
or pre-modern (Febvre, Ladurie, Braudel), it does less well for the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in particular. For the latter, historiographical
research weakens in favor of sociologists, philosophers, and other
intellectuals: Foucault, Elias, Thompson, Habermas and the Frankfurt School,
Bourdieu and his sociology school, and many others are the apostles of the
modern and post-modern. In short, the Annales fails whenever single systems of representation in the form of the Monarch, King, or
Prince cease to be present. The French Revolution could be considered as the
turning point in the European system of political representation: the
subject-individual-citizen takes over and becomes the focus—for the state
and its institutions. Once the monolithic system of representation breaks up,
individuals have to create their own, in the form of parties, newspapers,
assemblies, publications and journals, etc. Thompson provides a unique portrait
of the English “working class” making itself through a process of “class
consciousness.”
Problems,
Approaches, Objects
In conformity with previous offerings of
the same course, and to the outline provided in the last Graduate Bulletin, I
would suggest to start with the Annales literature and show how this historiographical school has
transferred the narrative dimension from the political to the social and
economic, in a first stage, and then, later on, with Braudel and Ladurie, went
beyond the purely descriptive level of the social. Thus Braudel worked out,
after the publication of his Méditerrannée, the three “time strata” of
historical analysis—the social and economic being at the bottom, because
they are subject to the slowest change—, while Ladurie, originally by
training an ethnographer, combined in a work like Montaillou the ethnographic with the historical.
(It should be noted that when Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded the Annales in the late 1920s, Marxism provided at
that time the general framework for an economic and social history, and what
the two Founding Fathers thus did was a kind of “secularization” of
Marxism, together with a broadening of the perspectives of the latter so that the
category of the “social” went with the Annales far beyond the usual class struggle
analysis.)
The
broad success of the Annales
did not go without problems, and a recent editorial of the notorious journal
celebrating its sixtieth birthday, pointed to lots of difficulties in the
current writing of history. What the 1989 editorial of the December issue
pointed out to was a general malaise among historians (and in particular those
belonging to the Annales)
due to the large infiltration of the practices of the social sciences (in
particular from literary criticism and cultural anthropology) in historical
writing. In short, we are now at a (historical) juncture where history seems to
be much more taking from other disciplines than creating anything by itself.
Thus history, always left at the unambitious level of being the “witness
of the past,” is now wondering what it could contribute to the rest of
the social sciences. In other words, the question could be formulated as
follows: How could historians write history in order to transform history into
a discipline that contributes to the rest of the social sciences?
New Approaches
“Social history,” in the way
it has been traditionally practiced by the Annales school in Europe and by Past and
Present in the
Anglo-Saxon world, implicitly assumed a “totality” to
“history” and “society” in the sense that there exists
a “reality” “outside” us that we can reconstruct
through the medium of language. This “reality” is something like a
“continuum” in space and time. Different historical periods not
only succeed each other in time in a linear fashion, but what comes
“after” is explained by what comes “before”: this
presupposes a continuity and “connection” between periods, and the
task of the historian would be to collect an infinite number of an infinitely
small number of “facts”—the totality constitutes the
“data.”
Historians
usually make use of “documents” to collect their data. Thus, police
records, court documents, and newspapers, among others, have become common type
of documents for European and North American history in particular, and when
such documents are available for Third World societies, they have been widely
used as well. The organization of such data usually follows the process of
facts-collection. In fact, the two steps of collection and organization are
closely inter-linked. Historians usually collect their data
with—explicitly or implicitly—something in mind as to how to
organize it. Furthermore, considering that the act of data-organization could
not be thought of independently of the act of writing, it turns out that data-collection, its
organization, and the act of writing are inseparable from one another. In my
view, the main purpose of “textual history” is to question the
entire process of collecting data, its organization and writing.
Data-collection
is probably the most vulnerable step of traditional “social
history,” and it is in the concept of “collecting” altogether
that “textual history” would like to demarcate itself from previous
approaches in historical writing. In fact, historians tend to isolate the
“fact” from the rest of the “document” because the
former is seen to have a value in itself independently from the
“context” of the “document” that created it. The
“fact” is seen as having a value-in-itself because of the implicit
belief of an “external reality” that the historian could
reconstruct through the artificial medium of language. “Reality,”
according to this view, is made up of an infinite number of discrete facts that
are part of this continuum usually referred to as “nature” or
“society” (usually “reality” is thought of as a
combination of both, “nature” and “society”). The facts
in themselves are discrete, disconnected, and without any particular meaning,
but when brought together, they could be part of a continuum or series that
makes sense. In fact, the series that brings meaning to an otherwise lifeless
fact(s) is an artificial reproduction of this other natural series-continuum,
that inherent in “reality” itself, i.e. the natural and social
worlds. Historians (and some of their fellows in the social sciences) have
always presupposed that the natural and social worlds are by definition
coherent, and continuous in the sense that events succeeding each other in time
and space are somehow naturally related to each other—even though the
facts in themselves are discrete entities, at least the way they are perceived
at first sight by the mind.
The
alternative that I would like to propose to the traditional social history approach as briefly outlined above would
be as follows. Historical events, institutions, social structures, etc. of the
past and present could only be “represented” to historians and
social scientists through the medium of language; or, in other words, events,
institutions, structures, and the like are only accessible to us through the
“documents” that make their existence possible. It doesn’t
make much sense then to speak of a “social reality”
“outside” the “documents” since the reconstruction of
an objective history is only possible through the documents that make the
latter possible. Thus any approach to history is by necessity
“textual” since what we usually refer to as the
“reality-outside-us” could only be represented through language, in
the form of documents, archives, legal codes, the arts and sciences, etc. It is
of course perfectly possible and legitimate to posit a “reality”
“outside” these socially constructed linguistic realities—a
kind of Kantian approach to the world where a “thing-in-itself” is
posited as outside the realm of understanding and judgment—, but this
“reality” is only accessible to us through language. If we accept
these basic assumptions, the next step would be to proceed in investigating the
nature of “documents” (and the like).
“Textual
history” considers documents (and the like) as “social
constructions” and as “discourses.” Any
“document” is a “social construction” for the
simple—and obvious—reason that language is socially constructed. In
fact, there are, to simplify, at least two levels in any human language. First,
and this is the most obvious level, words represent and denote objects (“things”) and
“ideas.” The accuracy of such representations is usually verified
by means of a set of empirical procedures: systematic investigations,
laboratories, comparisons, etc. But the aspect of language that is of interest
to us, within the context of the social sciences, is the second one. This level
presupposes that words, propositions, statements, etc. have meanings that are
socially constructed, hence the re-construction of such meanings could only be
done by contextualizing every aspect of a particular language within the
ideological and institutional frameworks that made this language possible. In
other words, language serves more than simply representing and denoting, or, in
addition to denoting something—a thing, an idea, etc.—it also
vehicles social representations. It is usually such social representations,
mediated by language, that are of interest to historians and social scientists.
If
we accept that documents (“archives”) are socially constructed,
then gender, sex, nations, etc. are also “social constructions.”
The problem now is what can we do with such an idea? Where can we go from here?
First,
the textualist approach puts an end to what has become a common practice to
social historians, namely the use of documents as sources of information and
data accumulation.
Social historians, instead of treating documents as “textual
totalities,” are more interested in the data provided in such sources
(“archives”). Thus, for example, a court document from
eighteenth-century France on land-properties would provide, in the eyes of
social historians, data about land production and tenure, and family
land-holdings, etc. Textual history, by contrast, would consider first the
logic of such documents: With what logic (rationale) were they written? For
what purpose? To what institution(s) do they belong (judicial, legal, literary,
scientific, etc.)? All these questions, among others, would help us to
determine the social contexts of these documents. In fact, to be more precise,
any document requires at least two levels of investigation, one that would
consider it as a discursive practice, i.e. as a “text” whose
rationale is determined by the discursive level in which it is situated—the
drafting of a legal document, for example, is primarily affected by the very
existence of judicial discourses to which it belongs. Discourses are
logocentric and require (impose) a logic of their own, and such requirements
come before anything social—supposing, of course, that an order of
priorities could be self-imposed. But this is only one aspect of these
documents/discourses. At another level, we have to understand the “social
logic” of these texts, in other words, their “contexts.”
The
search for “contexts” is an ad infinitum task. In fact, since events, structures,
and institutions could only be objectified through the medium of language,
there’s no “level” that would absolutely determine all
others. In other words, there’s no primary reference point, be it
economic, political or social. Discourses contextualize each other. For
example, court documents are structured, among others, by the judicial
discourse, but, another discourse set (say, police records) might reveal that
judges had a distorted image of some social problems and issues.
In
short, the consideration of documents as texts and the systematic study of
their social logic would lead us to some still hitherto unexplored ways of
writing (social) history. It would even undermine the logic of the latter
because it would be difficult within the textualist approach to perceive the
“social reality” in terms of “levels”—political,
economic, etc.—through which a “totality” of phenomena would
be possible to construct.
Perhaps
the contrast between the two approaches, that of traditional “social
history” and that of “textual history,” could best be
summarized by the former’s implicit use of language as that that denotes
and records something (an event, a fact, etc.), while the textualist approach
we’ve outlined above presupposes an institutional and social use of
language—one that makes
the social world by inscribing and giving meaning to words and actions. This is
why the reconstruction of such historical experiences and meanings is essential
in order to understand social praxis from the viewpoint of the actors that made
it possible.
Reading Texts
Knowing how to approach
“documents” or any other “textual” material should be
at the center of the historian’s activity and approached as such. Some
disciplines, such as philosophy and literary criticism, have explicitly posed
the problem of reading texts,
while in other disciplines—and history in particular—the question
is either totally eluded or, at best, marginally posed. Yet, historians use a
much greater variety of textual sources than, say, philosopher and literary
critics who usually limit themselves to the “great texts” in human
history. In addition to the “great texts,” historians usually
include police records, court-documents, legal codes, correspondences, personal
files, biographies, newspapers, to name only a few of the sources common to the
discipline of history. Here are some preliminary suggestions (“rules of
thumb”) to read documents as totalities, that is, as texts endowed with
“meaning” rather than as pure sources for collecting facts and
data. The notion of document-as-text-and-as-totality implies the following:
(i)
The notion of “text” or “discourse” (in the sense
implied by Foucault) presupposes that a “document” is more than a
combination of meaningful words, propositions, and statements. In fact,
“text” and “discourse” imply that
“documents” are drafted within an ideological and discursive
context which frames them within a structure, or matrix, or grid through which
they become readable. It is therefore the historian’s task to discover
(re-construct) and find “meaning” to such
“regularities” in the “texts” themselves, that is, to
discover what the general structures, forms, and rules of these discursive
formations are.
(ii)
Documents are usually so fragmented that they might look deceitful and
disappointing at first. One way to describe them would be to look at them as
“non-discursive” practices (again, in the sense of Foucault) or
more accurately as pre-discursive practices. If we limit the use of
“discourse” to a well established set of ideas, theories, and
concepts, then court-documents with their fragmented narratives, pieces of
evidence, and their links to “practice,” fall “below”
the usually accepted criteria for “discourses.” The historian,
however, should not look at this fact as a handicap or weakness. On the
contrary, due to their intermediary nature between discursive formations and
social practices, documents are important in unraveling the power-relations
within a particular social-context. Documents-as-text could provide us with a
body of knowledge very different from well-established discursive formations
such as philosophy, literature, and the sciences, which could signal, at a
particular historical moment, the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a
practice unknown to more rigid or formal discursive formations.
(iii)
The notion of “text-as-totality” does not necessarily imply that
documents should be read line-by-line or that the meaning of words, statements,
ambiguous propositions, etc., should be systematically studied. What is more
important than the historical meaning of individual words and statements is the
use of language by
all the social actors. Historians quite often approach documents as made up
exclusively of statements on a true or false basis. We should keep in mind,
however, that what we have left are “summaries” or transcriptions
of actual hearings or debates, which means that originally, that is, prior to their transcription
and editing in a written form,
the statements were performative utterances. This should force historians to look
beyond the usual truth-claims of statements into how effective were the
utterances of the social actors involved.
(iv)
The historian could proceed in the creation of specific themes such as gender,
kinship, property, and the like, which could serve as an underlying
“grid” in the reading of documents. Such themes, however, are not
to be found in the
text itself—a nineteenth century court-document could not possibly directly suggest to us to read it in terms of
gender or property—since what we commonly do is read such themes into the document. The idea here is that we
first read a document by placing it into the context of its own period, and we
then re-contextualize it for a second time in respect to our own period, and we
do so by referring the document-as-text to the themes which are most common (or
uncommon) to the social sciences.
(v)
What we are aiming at in the final analysis is an anthropological epistemology
of the documents-as-text: What kind of “thought” is implied in such
documents? What kind of discourse do documents reconstruct about society, its
institutions and practices, about the self and the other?
(vi)
The historian is thus left with a great deal of freedom to interpret, look for
themes, and reconstruct the general (global) meaning of the text. We should
keep in mind, however, that this freedom is limited by the structure of the text itself:
There is a logic to the text which we assume beforehand to be consistent and makes sense, which means that any
interpretation should be consistent in itself and in respect to the text it is
analyzing also.
Readings
It is obvious that the underlying
concepts of “textual history” could not have been possible without
the various post-modernist trends in literary criticism and philosophy, in
particular the works of Derrida and Foucault. This led since the early 1980s to
a textual trend in cultural anthropology (for an overview, see Marcus and
Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago University Press; and also the
work of James Clifford, Writing Culture, Harvard University Press). The work of Clifford Geertz was
also decisive for the notion of linguistic turn.
To
the best of my knowledge, it was only very recently that such notions, borrowed
from literary criticism and cultural anthropology, have started to show up in
historical research. At the origin of the debate in history was an article by
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the
Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 65(1990), 59-86, that immediately created a series of
criticisms and counter-criticisms in Past and Present; see in particular Lawrence Stone,
“History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present, 131(1991), 217-218, and also the series
of articles under the same title in issues 133 and 135 of the same journal, by
Patrick Joyce, Catriona Kelly, Lawrence Stone (second intervention), and the
final overall reply by Gabrielle Spiegel. The debate was summarized by Enrico
Artifoni, “Une logique sociale du texte?,” Liber, 95(1992), 14-15. See also in the same
issue Maria Luisa Pesante, “Un défi pour les historiens,”
16-17, which contains a commented bibliography of the most recent trends in
history. Gabrielle Spiegel has a book, Romancing the Past: The Rise of
Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993) in which she applies
her textual approach.
Since
this trend is still very recent, I shall limit myself in what follows to
historians who have shown interest in the effects of language on the writing of
history. Hayden White was probably among the first to have accepted the notion
of the linguistic turn
and its implications for history, see his Metahistory. The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Johns Hopkins, 1973).
Some
books from the German Begriffsgeschichte era (conceptual history and history of concepts) are now
available in English. Two works by Reinhart Koselleck are of particular
interest to us, Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of
Modern Society and Futures
Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time are both available at The MIT Press.
We
could also add to our highly selective bibliography some of the works to what
has been loosely known as the “School of Cambridge” that focuses on
the formation of “ideas” during a particular period: “What
were the available languages in this particular historical situation?”
John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought
and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
(Princeton, 1975), is one of the most well known works in this tradition. See
also his Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985).
Finally,
for those who are already bored with the idea that all of culture is
constructed in discourse and would like to get beyond this stage, see the
challenging and eccentric Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. A
Particular History of the Senses
(Routledge, 1993).
Course Requirements
The ten books listed below are compulsory
reading. The weekly sessions shall be mostly devoted to
detailed—“textual”—discussions of the readings. For
each session, two students will be responsible for presenting the material and
analyzing issues related to the enterprise of writing history (a list will be
circulated during our second meeting for you to sign for the presentations you
would like to perform). Class presentations and discussions will count as 50%
of the final grade. I would encourage you for informal presentations—that
is, avoid reading papers prepared in advance—and try to focus on specific
methodological issues relevant to the context of this course. Remember that by
the time you’ll start your presentation, we would already have gone
through a general framing of the book in question.
A term-paper will count for the remaining
50%. Term-papers could focus on any particular theme and/or twentieth-century
historian(s). Students are expected to discuss periodically their papers and
are requested, during the last session, for individual oral presentations.
Tentative Schedule
• Week 1: January 16, 1995:
Introduction
• Week 2: January 23: Cohen, Law,
Sexuality & Society;
• Week 3: January 30: Herrin, Formation
of Christendom;
• Week 4: February 6: Kantorowicz, King’s
Two Bodies;
• Weeks 5 & 6: February 13
& 20: Elias, Civilizing Process;
• Week 7: February 27: Habermas, Structural
Transformations of the Public Space;
Spring Break:
March 6 till March 12
• Week 8: March 13: Foucault, Discipline
& Punish;
First drafts
must be submitted on March 13
• Week 9: March 20: Thompson, Making
of the English Working Class;
• Week 10: March 27: White,
Metahistory;
• Weeks 11 & 12: April 3 &
10: Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, & The Wild Man;
Easter
Vacation: April 13 to April 17 (4:30 PM)
Please note
that Easter Vacation ends at 4:30 PM and that there will be a regular evening
class on April 17
• Week 13: April 17: Thomas, New
Historicism;
• Week 14: April 24: Concluding
Remarks—En guise de conclusion. Discussion of Term-Papers.
Final drafts
must be submitted on April 24
notes on the
reading list
This
is my third list for this course (the first two were in Spring 94 & Fall
94), and even though I’ve been subjecting each list to major alterations,
I’ve also kept the core of the course almost identical with the previous
two lists. Indeed, Kantorowicz, Elias, Habermas, Foucault, and Thompson form a
unit of their own. Such texts provide us with a history of modern Europe with
unique perspectives (all these texts should be thematically connected with each
other):
(i) European societies, around the
8th-10th centuries, were composed of warrior states whose territorial
expansions ensured their survival. The newly conquered lands were divided by
the warrior state among its various military feudal lords. When expansionism
became difficult, if not impossible, the revenues of the warrior state
decreased considerably. In the meantime, central Europe became re-populated
after a substantial loss of its populations since the fifth century—a
movement that was reversed by the eighth century.
(ii) The lack of expansionism, and the
inevitable weakness of the warrior state which followed, triggered the process
of early feudalization in central Europe by the tenth century. Feudalization
meant excessive territorial divisions under the supervision of competing lords
and seigneurs and their small feudal armies: expansionism, impossible on the
outside, turned inwards.
(iii) Both Kantorowicz and Elias argue
that the thirteenth century was a decisive period in many respects: First, the
feudal powers, exhausted from fighting against each other, aimed towards an
internal reconciliation towards a more centralized state. Second, and because
this semi-centralized state had to bargain for its power and existence, it
could not simply impose itself by brutal force (hence a main difference with
“Oriental despotism”): it created a complex judicial apparatus, and
the foundations of political power became “legalized” by the
thirteenth century—one of the many forms of the “King’s Two
Bodies” doctrine.
(iv) This led to the “Absolutist
State” and the beginnings of the “society of manners” which
Elias describes so well.
(v) One of the many forms of the
“King’s Two Bodies” doctrine, and its later elaborations, is
a division between “state” and “civil society.” The
latter had to protect itself from the former. To Habermas, the concept of
“civil society,” which was elaborated by Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau, is what makes possible, since the seventeenth century, the existence
of a “public sphere”: it is as if, in order to protect itself from
the omnipotent power of the “state apparatus” that “civil
society” created for itself a “public sphere”—a space
where discourse became accessible to “all.”
(vi) Following E. P. Thompson’s
arguments, one wonders whether was a “oneness” to Habermas’
“public sphere”: even though Habermas made it clear that this was a
bourgeois public
sphere, we cannot but pose the question whether there was another plebeian public sphere in competition with this
other, bourgeois space for communicative action.
I am perfectly aware that the reading
list is too complicated and too long, and embraces far too many themes and
approaches from what we can actually handle in a fourteen-week semester. I
certainly do not believe that bigger means better; on the contrary, a big
qualitative loss might follow from pouring too much material into the heads of
the students. There are basically two reasons for which I assigned that many
readings: First, I realized (without much surprise) that history students
generally start their graduate work without much experience in methodology and
historical writing and only seldom do they know some of the main social
thinkers of the last two centuries (Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in particular);
this actually is typical of American education where “history” is
looked upon more as a factual, descriptive discipline than a thought provoking
one (such as philosophy and anthropology). Second, and taking seriously the
first point into account, it is easier to understand what methodology is all
about by comparing various historical approaches with one another.
A final remark. Throughout this course, I
will use “history” very broadly: First, as any study which
encompasses social, political, economic, and intellectual structures for a
specific society (at least one). Second, in such studies time should be an
important factor. I have included European intellectuals such as Habermas and
Foucault, even though both are usually not regarded as professional historians,
because their research on the public sphere and the prison was done within a
historical perspective.
PAPERS
You are requested to write one major
research paper to be submitted during the last session, Monday, April 24, 1995.
You will have to submit, however, a first draft of this paper on Monday, March
13, 1995. The first draft should follow the same presentation and writing
guidelines as your final draft, but it won’t be graded. Only your
final draft will count as one-half of the total grade. The purpose of the first draft is to let
you assess your research and writing skills and improve the final version of
your paper. It is advisable that you choose a research topic and start
preparing a bibliography as soon as possible. I would strongly recommend that
you consult with me before making any final commitment. It would be preferable
to keep the same topic for both drafts. You will be allowed, however, after
prior consultation, to change your topic if you wish to do so.
It
is extremely important that you submit your first draft on time so that you could have a month left for
a re-write and/or revisions. If you submit only one draft towards the end of the semester
(more specifically, during the last week of classes), then this draft will be
considered as your first
(non-submitted) one: you will be then given the temporary incomplete grade of
(I) or (X) till you complete the second final draft. Outlines and short
papers of 5-6 pages are not considered as first drafts.
keep in mind the
following:
·
This is not
a course about a specific period, geographic area, or nation, but about
methodology and the writing of history. Your papers should therefore
concentrate on methodological issues: if, for example, you select
nineteenth-century urban America as a topic, your primary focus should be in
explaining how a
topic like “urban America” is methodologically constructed: If, for
example, a “city” is analyzed in terms of the aggregate of its
classes, neighborhoods, social groups (race, gender, sex, etc.), how is each
one of these categories constructed, and how do they articulate together?
(There are obviously several ways to tackle such a vast theme—I am simply
choosing the most common and frequently asked questions.)
·
There are
no restrictions as to the time period or geographic area you might choose. This
is not the most crucial issue here since what is important are the
methodological questions which you need to construct.
·
Because
methodology is the basic issue, start your paper with a short introduction of
two-three pages which clearly explains and delimits the themes you intend to
develop. Explain briefly, right from the beginning, what you think are the main
methodological issues for your topic, author(s), and set of books and articles.
Then clearly formulate the question you think is crucial for your paper—the
main question should be directly related to a methodological problem and
relevant to the process of writing history.
·
Many
students select a twentieth-century historian as a topic. In case you do so,
make sure that you read his/her main works (including some key articles and
interviews, if available) even if you’re not planning a full coverage of
the works in question. It is probably much simpler to select a single historian
rather than several—this is especially true if you are new to historical
methodology. If you therefore focus on a single historian, make sure that, in
the context of this course, the aim is not a summary of his/her works, but an
analysis of their historical writing. When you’re dealing with more than one work,
integrate them together into some common theme(s) and avoid presenting them
separately. Always check how the writing evolves from one work to another.
·
Concerning
formatting and other related problems, follow Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for
Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 5th ed., Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987, intended for students and other writers of papers not written for
publication, and has useful material on notes and bibliographies.
Please use the following guidelines in
preparing your papers:
-use 8x10 white paper (the size and color
of this paper). Do not use legal size or colored paper.
-use a typewriter, laser printer or a
good dot matrix printer and hand in the original.
-only type on one side of the paper.
-should be double spaced, with single
spaced footnotes at the end of each page and an annotated bibliography at the end (check the
following section for an example of an annotated bibliography).
-Keep ample left and right margins for
comments and corrections of at least 1.25 inches each.
-all pages should be numbered.
-the first page should include the
following: title, course number, name, your address and telephone number (with
fax and e-mail address, if you have one).
RECOMMENDED READING
Historiographical Methods
History & the Social Sciences
Jacques Rancière,
The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (University of
Minnesota Press, 1994). This is the best and most challenging book I have read in
recent years which describes very aggressivelly the current status of the most
recent historiographical methods. Rancière argues that Michelet was the
real precursor to the Annales school (something that Lucien Febvre
acknowledged and was the first to see clearly). First, Michelet was probably
the first to have voluntarily stepped out from a pure history of kings and
political events into some kind of “social history” and showed a
great interest into this category which he broadly defined as “Le Peuple”
(the people); second, Michelet was sensitive to the document as a starting point for
his analysis: he created this unique method of reading into a document by creating
his own narrative out of them and by listening to their silences. But Michelet
could only create a dynamics out of a narrative where the Hobbesian Monarch does
not play anymore the central role by transforming France as the real Subject of
history—something that the Annales could not keep up with anymore. The Annales in fact transformed its
historical “topics” into objects of research. In other
words, France, for example, becomes an object of research like European
feudalism or the Mediterranean. Thus by stating that every entity in the social
world is worth being an object of scientific research, the Annales has ipso facto robbed
traditional historiography, including that of Michelet, from its deepest
foundations. Which leaves us today, towards the end of an eventful twentieth
century, with a big problem: How can we rehabilitate the role of the subject—that
is, any
subject of democratic societies—in historical processes?
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The
New Cultural History.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. A collection of articles that
discusses the new “cultural history,” a recent trend that focuses
on the importance of language in understanding political and social
trends—the “linguistic turn.”
Momigliano, Arnaldo. The
Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991.
Palmer, Bryan D. Descent
into Discourse. The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990.
Reddy, William M. Money
and Liberty in Modern Europe. A Critique of Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987. A critical study on modern historiographical trends
related in particular to social and economic history.
Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender
and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Wallach relates
gender to history and language and thus joins the “linguistic turn”
school that focuses on the importance of language in structuring social and
economic movements.
B. H. Moss,
“Republican Socialism and the Making of the Working Class in Britain,
France, and the United States: A Critique of Thompsonian Culturalism,” Comparative
Study in Society and History, 35(2) 1993, 390-413. This essay is an attempt to
analyze the impact that had Thompson’s Making of the English Working
Class
on studies of labor movements in France, England, and the United States, on the
one hand, and the weaknesses of such “culturalist” analyses (as opposed
to the Marxist and neo-Marxist) on the other. Moss concludes that what these
studies have unknowingly confirmed is the traditional and Marxist view that
socialism arises when intellectuals bearing collectivist ideas join with
workers undergoing a process of proletarianization.
Carrard, Philippe. Poetics of the New
History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier. Parallax Re-visions of Culture and
Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Excellent
introduction to the Annales
tradition in historiography. More broadly, Carrard shows that the discipline of
history is now marked by fragmentation and that histoire totale (in the strong sense of the project) is
dead.
Editorial. “Histoire et sciences
sociales. Un tournant critique?” Annales É.S.C. 2 (April-March 1988): 291-293. A key
editorial of the Annales
in which a “crisis” in contemporary historiography was admitted for
the first time and a rapprochement with the rest of the social sciences is now
considered as essential for the writing of a new (more fragmented) history. The
notion of “document” is also questioned and a more
“textual” approach seem to be suggested. Some of the responses to
this editorial have been collected in the special issue of November-December
1989 celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Annales.
Dominick LaCapra, History &
Criticism (Cornell
University Press, 1985). With essays on Ginzburg, mentalité history, and the history of criticism,
LaCapra’s enterprise in providing a critical perspective on contemporary
historiography is probably the best in US academia today.
Greeks & Romans
Early Christians
Peter Brown, The Body and Society.
Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christanity (Columbia University Press, 1988). In
nineteen chapters, and basing himself on original manuscripts, Peter Brown is
very successful in describing attitudes of early Christians towards the body
and sexuality. Augustine, in the last chapter, provides the summa of the endless variations of the early
Christians and their erring: fulfillment is only achieved in the “city of
heaven.” What Christianity has introduced to the Greek and Roman
world-views is the duality between mind and body, a dualism we still live with
in different forms whether Cartesian or Freudian. The mind
“controls” the body, its appetites and drives, hence the mind
controls the body’s sexuality. To the early Christians, this meant sexual
renunciation and virginity in order to preserve the integrity of the soul.
Brown demarcates Roman sexuality from the Christian in his introductory
chapters: Roman sexuality looks at women, slaves, and barbarians as inferiors,
hence sex with women was riddled with anxieties and it was common for men to
have sex with their slaves. Brown, however, does not see Christian renunciation
as caused by Roman “tolerance” and he never provides his readers
with a sharp answer to the historical causes of Christian asceticism. Instead,
he provides us with the variations of the Christian model, and, with this, a
view of religion as an agglomeration of infinitesimal efforts comes up, or, in
other words, how disparate views become public and create an
institution—the Church. Brown also provides an account of a
religion—Christianity—as a social movement with no state control. Brown,
however, seems locked up in his texts and I would have wished more social
history on the Roman family and marriage, the social roots of the early
Christians, and the Church and its clergy. Brown’s tone seems also to
belong to the 1980s, under the influence of Veyne and Foucault, which looks at
sexuality as a discourse, or rather, as a discursive practice.
Medieval Europe
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of
Purgatory (Chicago
University Press, 1984 [1981 for the French Gallimard edition]). This is a longue
durée history of
the Purgatory, roughly from early Christianity till the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries when the Purgatory has achieved a more or less completed structure
(even in its poetic form through Dante). Le Goff, however, is eager not to make
his history “evolutionary,” that is, he insists that the history of
the Purgatory remains unpredictable despite early signs (with Augustine in
particular) of a desire to spacialize something between hell and heaven. This creation of an
additional space of judgment and repentance shall be expressed differently from
one period to another, but by the thirteenth century one thing is certain: the
Purgatory integrates well in the European societies where the judicial now
plays a dominating and intermediary role between the “body politic”
and “society” (or “civil society,” civitas). Le Goff’s method is very much
“textual,” and even though he does well in integrating his material
with the social trends of each period, one would have wished more social
history, in particular for the thirteenth century when several things seem to
come together: the political, religious, judicial, and economic.
Modern Europe:
Populations, Material life & the Economy
Fernand Braudel, The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân
Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1973 [first French edition published in
Paris by Armand Colin, 1949]). Picking up from where Marc Bloch and Lucien
Febvre (his “Maître de thèse”), Braudel constructs a
thesis around the Mediterranean as an object of study for what become the cult
book of the Annalistes: it’s not anymore Philip II who occupies the center of
the stage, but the Mediterranean as a complex object of geography, economics,
and cultures at the age of Philip II. Actually, Braudel dismisses the person of the
King altogether as someone who was not even conscious of the importance of the
Mediterranean: “I do not believe that the word Mediterranean itself ever
floated in his consciousness with the meaning we now give it, nor that it
conjured up for him the images of light and blue water it has for us.”
With this, Braudel created a fundamental rule for both historians and social
scientists: the historian does not have to identify with the “subjects”
of history anymore—distance from what shines at the surface has become
the golden rule (but wasn’t it so for Marx and Freud?). But the book,
half a century later, has also aged tremendously: Braudel never took seriously
the claim he has set up for himself and for the discipline of history as “La
Reine des sciences sociales,” and he never borrowed much anyhow from the
languages of the social sciences. The Mediterranean leaves us struggling
with an array of questions concerning the role of the “subject” and
“culture” in history.
Reddy, William M. The
Rise of Market Culture. The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984.
Scott, Joan Wallach. The
Glassworkers of Carmaux. French Craftsmen and Political Action in a
Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Eric Hobsbawm, The
Age of Capital
(1988).
Intellectual
Movements in Modern Europe
Latour, Bruno and Steven
Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London: Sage, 1979. A
book that belongs to what we now qualify as the new “anthropology of the
sciences,” i.e. a discipline (or sub-discipline) that focuses on how the
natural hard-core sciences are produced and manufactured within the
laboratories, élite teaching colleges, staff recruitment, and the
professional journals that transmit and conserve scientific knowledge. A big
step from the “idealized” Khunian paradigmatic view of the sciences
that became dominant in the last three decades.
Shapin, Steve and Simon
Schaffer. Leviathan and the Airpump. Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985. In the line of the “anthropology” of Bruno Latour,
this book tries to connect the political ideas of the father of
“Absolutism” in the Anglo-Saxon world with those of the natural
experimental sciences.
Ernst Cassirer, The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951). The enlightenment within a Kantian
perspective. A book that remains a classic.
Peter Gay, The
Cultivation of Hatred. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume 3 (New York: Norton,
1993). This is the third volume after “Education of the Senses”
(1984) and “The Tender Passion” (1986), and is fed by some rich
insights. Gay argues that the Victorians were prone to mix cruel aggression and
ferocious erotic pleasure; thus our Victorian legacy is a struggle to deal with
the joys of aggression. The book also ends with a subtle analysis of the
development of “professionalism” and the way all these finer
specialties became finely guarded. Unfortunately, the bulk of the book forgets
from time to time such rich insights and the reader is left with a bunch of
facts that ranges from the very obvious to the sophisticated.
Carlo Ginzburg, The
Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins, 1980).
Ginzburg argues that the heretical thoughts of Menocchio, his sixteenth-century
miller, are the effect of an old rural popular culture despite the fact that
Menocchio was an avid reader of some medieval texts. In a footnote added later
as a response to critics (pp. 154/5), Ginzburg claims a circularity—or
complementarity—between élite and popular cultures. Looked upon
retrospectively, two decades after the publication of the original Italian
edition, which made a sensation, Ginzburg’s thesis on popular culture is
neither convincing nor interesting. Going through Ginzburg’s 62 short
partitions, one is more puzzled by the Church’s insatiable willingness to
force Menocchio “confess” than by popular culture which we can
hardly see and perceive.
The French
Revolution
Edmund Burke, Reflections
on the Revolution in France, 1969. A great classic.
François Furet
& Mona Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard University
Press, 1989). A “dictionary” of the French Revolution organized in
thematic and biographic articles.
Roger Chartier, The
Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, 1990. Focuses on ideas and their
“public” circulation before and after 1789.
Alexis de Tocqueville, The
Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1955. A great classic by the author of Democracy
in America.
Tocqueville was among the first to argue that much of what is usually
attributed to the Revolution, namely the centralization of the state and its
bureaucracy; the advancement of the “bourgeoisie” as a class, etc.,
were already part of the policy of the old monarchical regime.
Sewell, William H., Jr. Work
and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980. A classic on the French guilds, manufactures and labor
force, and the first major historian to apply the Thompsonian problematic to
France. An attempt to explain the rise of socialism and the making of the
French working class. Sewell chose to highlight the culturalist theme and
argued that “socialism” was essentially a cultural reconstruction
of an eighteenth-century guild tradition of moral collectivism.
Sonenscher, Michael.
Work and Wages. Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French
Trades.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Robert Darnton, The
Literacy Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
Barry M. Shapiro, Revolutionary
Justice in Paris, 1789-1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), addresses the subject
of political crime in the first year of the French Revolution.
de Baecque, Antoine. Le corps de
l’histoire. Métaphores et politiques (1770-1800). Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993.
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the
French Revolution
(University of California Press, 1992), analyzes the images and familial models
that inhabited revolutionary France.
United States
Peter Kolchin, American
Slavery, 1619-1877
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), is an excellent introduction to the subject
of slavery with an annotated bibliography for further reading.
Charles A. Beard, An
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Free Press, 1963
[1913]). First published in 1913, Beard’s radical interpretation brought
the Constitution of the United States from its political “idealism”
to its economic roots. Scrutinizing the Constitution in light of economic forces,
he proposed for the first time that this politico-legal document was shaped by
a group of men whose commercial interests were best served by its provisions.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America.
Tocqueville’s analysis of the American democratic system remains my
favorite in its simplicity and complexity. The “democratic spirit”
is traced back to the first Europeans settlers who were suspicious of all the
monarchies they had left behind and were thus not that eager to replicate on
the new continent political systems which they saw as potentially corrupt
because based on rigid hierarchies between individuals, classes, and status
groups. Tocqueville then goes on to show that this basic idea of
democracy—that all men have the right to be
“equal”—is reproduced at every level. Thus, several laws were
promulgated in the 17th and 18th centuries in New England and the North-East in
particular forbidding large property holdings. In education, this meant the
focus on “practical” matters rather than on formal and abstract
issues, a major weakness, according to Tocqueville, because it weakens artistic
and scientific creativity. The legal system is analyzed in terms of the
“power of judges” to overrule previous decisions and interpret the
Constitution (another particularity of the American system is that a singles
Constitution frames both the political and judicial). But the greatness of
American democracy has its dark side too, and in a concluding chapter,
Tocqueville is more than cautious about a type of democracy, which despite all
its merits, also creates simple-minded individuals and mediocre spirits who
have no choice but to leave “government” to a group of
professionals.
J. C. D. Clark, The
Language of Liberty, 1660-1832. Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the
Anglo-American World
(Cambridge University Press, 1994). One of the latest attempts in the search
for “a deeper understanding of the causes” of the Revolution. Clark
makes three general claims: (i) that the years between 1776 and 1787 gave rise
to a new dissenting conception of liberty which was the principal source of the
ideas of popular sovereignty that some colonists employed against the
traditional idea of absolute sovereignty; (ii) that 1776 may be understood as a
revolution of natural law against common law; (iii) that the American
Revolution was in essence “a rebellion by groups within Protestant
Dissent against an Anglican hegemony.”
Carl J. Richard, The
Founders and the Classics. Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University
Press, 1994). Ever wondered the influence of Greece and Rome on the Founding
Fathers of the American Constitution? The addiction of the Founders to
classical allusion has never been denied, but in the work of many recent
historians its importance has been questioned. Richard’s book is a
refutation of such doubts. It was in America that the historical and the
legendary figures of antiquity could serve as real models for conduct rather
than oratorical embellishment. Though Greece and Rome were equal partners in
the colonial educational curriculum, it was to the Roman republic that the
Founders turned for a model when they came to frame their constitution.
Athenian democracy, criticized by Thucydides, condemned by Plato and
disapproved of by Aristotle, inspired in them a fear of the tyranny of the
majority. They favored instead what they believed was the “mixed
government” of the great days of Rome, the era of the Second Punic War.
Should we then be surprised that very few people participate in the democratic
process today?
Music & The
Arts
Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler.
A Musical Physiognomy
(Chicago University Press, 1993). A major study by one of the leading Frankfurt
School giants that focuses on one of the most important Viennese musicians at
the turn of this century. Adorno shows that Mahler’s music is the
expression, in its artistic form, of the “end” of the false
“totalities” that he found in metaphysics (by contrast, Beethoven
would look very much Hegelian). Knowledge of Mahler’s nine symphonies is,
of course, a must for understanding Adorno’s analysis. For a broader
account of modern music see Adorno’s Quasi Una Fantasia. Essays on
Modern Music
(Verso, 1993).
National Histories
Latest Trends & Fashions
Sexuality
History & The Social Sciences
Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron,
Monique de Saint Martin, et al, Academic Discourse (Oxford: Polity, 1994). The authors make
the claim that “academic discourse” is a rare commodity, some kind
of “cultural capital,” in the hands of professors-researchers who find
it contrary to their interests to propagate and “popularize”
especially among students and other faculty members who might not have access
to types of discourse unknown to them and who are thus left in the dark on
recent trends and discoveries in the arts and social sciences. Unlike other
critiques from the political left, the authors argue that universities exert a
conservative social influence not by transmitting an intellectual heritage but
by failing to transmit it. While the left and the right continue to bicker over
whether the academic culture students absorb is too traditional or too radical,
Bourdieu and his colleagues question whether students absorb the academic
culture at all. Thus, it is quite common for professors either to claim that their
students “cannot understand sophisticated theories,” or that it
would be better, in a class-context, “to avoid larky expressions and the
like,” or to pretend that “they are already ‘familiar’
with such-and-such an approach.” Academic discourse ends up a “cultural
capital” in the possession of the happy few who can afford it. The book,
written and published in the mid-sixties on the basis of extensive research on
the French educational system, needs to be “re-adapted” to an
American context. My impression is that in the United States, a particular kind
of academic discourse, which borrows extensively from the French gurus (among
them Bourdieu, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault), is more common in the Ivy
League and the top-twenty-colleges than in other, more provincial, higher
education institutions. But even in the Ivy League, it remains to be seen how
much of the academic discourse which Bourdieu and his colleagues have in mind
is transmitted and “absorbed.”
Labor Histories
Histories of Judicial Systems
The State
Bourdieu, Pierre.
“Esprits d’État. Genèse et structure du champs
bureaucratique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (96-97 1993): 49-62. A
brilliant exposition on the “origins” of the modern European state
from a historical and sociological perspectives.