The Muse of History and the Science of Culture

The Muse of History and the Science of Culture

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The Muse of History and the Science of Culture

Robert L. Carneiro American Museum of Natural History New York, New York

Kluwer Academic Publishers New York • Boston • Dordrecht • London • Moscow

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Preface

F

OR MANY years I have been fascinated by history. But it was not always the same kind of history. As I was growing up, my parents had at home Ridpath’s 10-volume History of the World, and even before I could read I loved to turn the pages of that work, admiring the steel engravings of the incomparable illustrator, Gustave Doré. On one page, I was confronted by Charles Martel, wielding his battle hammer and laying waste the infidels on all sides. On another an unknown Swiss soldier was seen wrapping his arms around the points of a dozen enemy lances, sacrificing himself to save his comrades. And then there were the crenelated walls of the Alcázar of Segovia, which I laboriously copied into my school notebook, stone by stone. The clash of arms and the storming of battlements—that was history to me in those days. Even in high school, where one of my textbooks was Countryman’s Edition of Morey’s Ancient Peoples, the history that stirred me was “drum and trumpet history,” as I later learned it was derisively called. Every so often, though, the textbook would call a halt to its description of military actions and devote an entire chapter to the cultural life of the period under study. These chapters I dutifully read, but they bored me. I couldn’t wait for them to end and for Caesar to resume his conquest of Gaul, and then to cross the Rubicon at the head of his legions. In college I minored in history and for the first time caught a glimpse of what history could be when studied from a different point of view—not as a succession of striking encounters but as the great unfolding of human events. Not until I was led to study anthropology, though, did I actually see history cast in this mold. The mighty deeds of kings and conquerors began to recede into the background, blurring and fusing to form a single, broad, flowing stream in which unique and

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spectacular occurrences were submerged, if not obliterated. At last I was beholding history as the march of culture. To be sure, this new history lacked the color and dash of a Richard the Lionhearted battling the Saracens in the Holy Land. In turn, though, it provided a broader perspective and a deeper understanding of human society, past and present. If I had lost the blood-and-guts history of my youth, I had substituted for it a quieter but more coherent and intelligible one. The exchange, I decided, was well worth it. The school of anthropology in which I was trained had as its hallmark a concern with such great questions as the origin and development of institutions. As I read further, I learned that at least some historians had also grappled with these great issues. They too, at times, embraced large chunks of history and sought to discern within them broad patterns and recurring themes. In a word, they were looking for meaning. This pursuit of a deeper understanding of events, this search for a “philosophy of history,” was, however, anathema to most historians. Indeed, the rank and file of the profession openly rejected it, preferring instead to unearth ever tinier details of the Coronation of Charles V or the murder of Thomas à Becket. Cultural anthropology, my professional field, and the discipline of history are often taken to be polar opposites. To most historians, history is a humanity, while anthropology (at least my brand of it) regards itself as a science. Each has staked out its own turf and is wary of interlopers. And whenever the boundaries overlap and the practitioners of the two disciplines are thrown together, the collision is often accompanied by a shower of sparks. This antagonism, though very familiar, is not inescapable, however. Practiced with sufficient amplitude, the two disciplines can interpenetrate harmoniously. After all, at their most far sighted, historians and anthropologists both concern themselves with the overarching structure of human events. Still, as we shall see, a common interest does not always guarantee a similarity of answers. The pages that follow, which are based on long years of scattered reading, attempt to survey what historians have said about many of the central issues of their field. Their assertions, of course, are not all of the same cloth. Like anthropologists, historians vary widely in their views. Nonetheless, there is a characteristic way in which historians view the past, and it differs sharply from the characteristic way in which anthropologists do so. In this work, I have chosen to focus on this difference in viewpoint and on the results of interpretation that flow from it. Historians may find my efforts to scrutinize their pronouncements

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both presumptuous and intrusive, and my assessment of their conclusions uncongenial. I have dared to chide them for not having done more with the data of history than they have, and—worse yet—I have pointed out what anthropologists could do—in fact, have done—with the same data. This, I am afraid, may leave historians more convinced than ever of the arrogance of their sister discipline. In surveying what historians have said about the major issues in their field, I have taken pains to quote their very words. If I have done so excessively, it is because I have an abiding fear of being charged with unsupported allegation. Thus, if historians are to be convicted of wrongdoing, let it be done out of their own mouths, or not at all. But there is yet another reason for my liberal use of quotations. Whatever their failings, historians are generally good writers. They say things more lucidly, and often more colorfully, than any paraphrase of mine could hope to capture. The core of this book consists of a series of lectures given by me at the American Museum of Natural History, where I work. The four lectures of that series (Chapters 2–5) were later revised and expanded, five additional chapters being added to form the present volume. Before concluding this preface, I would like to acknowledge my great debt of gratitude to Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan, who epitomizes the best in anthropological scholarship. Marcus read the individual chapters as they were finished and offered many incisive suggestions. Moreover, in addition to providing unflagging support, she played an active role in bringing about the publication of this book. Indeed, but for her, it might still be languishing in manuscript. I also want to acknowledge my indebtedness to Stephen K. Sanderson, a sociologist and friend, for his loyal support and wise counsel. His work along evolutionary lines, which is similar in objective to what I have attempted in this volume, stands among the very highest echelons of contemporary social science. Finally, my editor, Eliot Werner, allowed me every opportunity to show that my manuscript deserved to see the light of print. Not every editor would have been as patient, or—I like to think!—as perceptive. And in working with him on the manuscript as it made its way through the press, I have found him to be the kind of editor every author wishes he had.

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Contents

1. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: A BONE OF CONTENTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

First Attempts at a Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Philosophy of History Rejected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Philosophy of History Reembraced . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 5 9

2. THE CHANGING FACES OF HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Practice of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History as the Recounting of Objective Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . History as Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Universal History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Concept of Cultural History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15 16 18 30 35 43

3. THE THORNY THICKETS OF HISTORY ...............

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Free Will versus Determinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moral Judgments in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contingency in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Anthropologist Looks at Contingency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Relativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 57 66 72 74

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4. WHAT DRIVES THE ENGINE OF HISTORY? RACE AND THE DEITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Racial Determinants of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . God in History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86 93

5. THE GREAT MAN AND IDEAS AS PRIME MOVERS

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Anthropology and the Great Man Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Men Speak for Themselves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ideas as Prime Movers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6. How TO TURN HISTORY

109 113 121 130

SCIENCE . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Anthropological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From History to Social Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Comparative Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

156 158 162 165

INTO

7. THE CULTURE PROCESS AND ITS DETERMINANTS The Culture Process Exemplified . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rise of Chiefdoms and States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Theory Put to Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Economic Factors as Historical Determinants . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

8 . ARE THERE LAWS

177 179 182 186 190 194

OF HISTORY?....................

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Historica l Laws Op p o s ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laws of History C h am p i o n ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historica l Laws Den i ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . La ws of History P ro p o s ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P eople a nd C ult u re Di s t i n g u i s h ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

207 208 209 210 220

9. PROPOSED LAWS

OF

CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

The Law of Evolutionary Potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Statistical Laws of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Complexity as a Function of Size .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

235 237 241

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Predicting the Onset of Chiefdoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Law of Cultural Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

243 248 252

CAST OF CHARACTERS: SELECTED LIST OF HISTORIANS AND OTHER SCHOLARS AND WRITERS CITED IN THE TEXT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 REFERENCES INDEX

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Chapter

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The Philosophy of History A Bone of Contention

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in April 1775, in the presence of Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had not yet appeared, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell were discussing history. As Boswell tells it, “The common remark as to the utility of reading history being made,” Dr. Johnson observed, We must consider how very little history there is; I mean authentic history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.” “Then, Sir,” replied Boswell, “you would reduce all history to no better than an almanac, a mere chronological series of remarkable events” (Boswell 1968:315). Here, in a nutshell, is the issue I would like to explore in these pages. Is history more than “a mere chronological series of remarkable events”? Does it have a pattern? Is it fraught with “meaning ? Can we discern its trends? What determines its course? In short, we will be asking, Is there a substantial and coherent philosophy of history that offers an answer to these questions? This is a question that has intrigued—and bedeviled—historians for centuries. To this day, great skepticism exists among historians as to whether an acceptable philosophy of history can be devised. The metaphysicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century who attempted it so muddied the waters and so aroused the antagonism of professional historians that, according to John B. Bury, the very phrase “philosophy of history” became “a flag over debated ground” (1906:144). By the beginning of the twentieth century, opposition to the philosophy of history was both widespread and outspoken. Charles W. Colby, Kingsford Professor of History at McGill University, was led to NE DAY

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write, “If any individual member of our craft really believes that the philosophy of history is anything more than flatus vocis, he had better keep the opinion to himself” (1906:155). And in the face of the human tendency to try to generalize from history, Colby felt it “the duty of the historian to go through life with sling in hand and heart steeled to slay the false deduction which is tyrannizing over mankind” (1906:153). History, which had long been seen as the handmaiden of philosophy, had, by the end of the nineteenth century, renounced that role. It abjured all connection with philosophy, declaring itself autonomous and independent. Thus, today, according to Patrick Gardiner, most historians regard the philosophy of history as a “submarine monster, dredged from the deep waters of nineteenth-century metaphysics, its jaws occasionally opening to emit prophecies in a dead (or at any rate a foreign) tongue— the language of Hegelian dialectic” (1961:ix). If a distaste for the vacuities of Hegel was what first turned professional historians away from the philosophy of history, they were later to find another ogre to fear and despise. This second menace came from a new breed of scholars, the social scientists, men who shared with the Hegelians only one thing: the desire to erect an overarching theory of the past. Historians in goodly numbers were ready to rail against this new menace, insisting, with Alfred Cobban of University College, London, that “the desire for a general sociological theory, applicable to the whole course of human existence, must . . . be dismissed as incompatible with critical history” (1971:16). In a similar vein, another British historian, Harold Perkin, warned his colleagues that while steering clear of the hazard of “the whirlpool of exhaustiveness” on one side, they needed to remain alert, for “on the other side prowls the devouring monster of social science” (1972:437). And was there not some real danger on this score? After all, had J. Cottee Morrison in the article “History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica not proclaimed that “the philosophy of history was “a term now replaced by the far better one ‘sociology ,” adding that “history ... can never again dispense with the assistance of sociology (1881:24)? Pity the poor historian, then, beset by monsters on both sides. It is probably fair to say that most professional historians today remain hostile to the notion of a philosophy of history. To them, the course of history is more like a labyrinth than a line, and most despair of ever finding Ariadne’s thread to guide them through it. As Herbert Butterfield put it, “the truth of history is no simple matter, all packed and parcelled ready for handling.... [T]he understanding of the past is not so easy as it is sometimes made to appear” (1965:132). Butterfield himself wrote a famous little book—The Whig Interpretation of History— “

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in which he directed hammer blows at one particular philosophy of history but never attempted to propose one of his own. Indeed, he argued, “It is not for . . . [the historian] to give a philosophical explanation of what happens in time and space” (1965:71). More recently, Barbara Tuchman has spoken out against making historians feel they should seek any broad pattern or meaning in history: “The lilies of the field, as I remember, were not required to have a demonstrable purpose. Why cannot history be studied and written and read for its own sake, as the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all? Insistence on a purpose turns the historian into a prophet—and that is another profession” (1982:35). Later in this chapter, we will find reason to challenge this narrow view of the historian’s role. First, though, let us look briefly at early efforts to erect a philosophy of history.

FIRST ATTEMPTS AT A PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY Jean Bodin is often credited with being the earliest scholar to expound something approaching a philosophy of history, his Method for Easily Understanding History, published in 1566, being described as “the first extensive treatise on historical method, with the emphasis on interpretation rather than upon criticism of sources.” This work, according to Harry Elmer Barnes, “clearly recognized the nature of the philosophy of history” (1963:117). If seeing the past as the unfolding of a series of stages can be said to constitute a philosophy of history, then men like Vico, Turgot, and Condorcet should be credited with having such a philosophy. But if we require more, and insist on there being a distinct mechanism or a guiding principle to direct the course of history, then we must wait several more decades for the first real philosophies of history, for, as Peter Gay, the leading student of the Enlightenment has observed, “The philosophes had no overriding explanation of historical change that would have permitted them to show how causes interacted or how they could be arranged in a hierarchy of importance. Their theory of society was too primitive, and their idea of history as sheer battle too deeply ingrained, to permit them to discover a really convincing theory of development”(1969:388). It is a curious fact that even the giants among eighteenth-century historians failed to write their histones in such a way as to lay bare the underlying patterns and movements of the events they portrayed. Commenting on Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Scottish historian Archibald Alison remarked: “The ardent

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genius and pictorial eye of Gibbon rendered him an incomparable delineator of events.... But, notwithstanding this ... talent for general and characteristic description, he had not the mind necessary for a philosophical analysis of the series of causes which influence human events” (1846b:368). Alison’s judgment has been endorsed by later historians. Barnes, for example, found The Decline and Fall “less definitely philosophical in tone than most other major works of the Rationalist historians” (1963:159), adding that in Gibbon’s work “there was no systematic analysis of the fall of Rome.” While he “recognized and described most of the causes for it now listed by specialists,” said Barnes, “he did not weld them into a consistent theory of the decline of Rome” (1963:160). And what Gibbon failed to do for Roman history specifically, he certainly did not attempt for human history generally, Much the same assessment was made of David Hume’s History of England. To quote Alison again, Hume “has even less than Gibbon the power of unfolding the general causes which influence the progress of human events.... [He] is far from being gifted with the philosophy of history. He has collected or prepared many of the facts necessary for the science, but he has made little progress in.it himself. He was essentially a sceptic. He aimed rather at spreading doubts than shedding light” (1846b:368, 369). Shortly after the time of Hume and Gibbon, however, the picture began to change. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, “a considerable number of ‘philosophies of history appeared and enjoyed great popularity” (Robinson 1912:37). These philosophies, though, were mostly the product of German thinkers such as Herder and Hegel, and the view of the past they presented to the world was essentially metaphysical. In a way, this was only to be expected, for as Butterfield explained: “The need to know how mankind had come from primitive conditions to its existing state would appear to have been felt before the historians were in a condition to supply what was wanted” (1960:103). But if the facts were not yet fully known or properly aligned to provide the answers being sought, there was at least a body of theory, of sorts, ready to do so. What was the source of such a set of ideas? To quote Butterfield again, “The work of providing a rational account of man on earth would seem to have been taken over from the theologians” (1960:103). This was certainly true of the German philosophers of history who clustered around the end of the eighteenth century—Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel—of whom Barnes wrote: “From Herder to Hegel, historical philosophy was influenced by the theology and epistemology of the German Transcendental Idealists. So far as ‘

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their historical perspective is concerned, these ponderous dialecticians were, in reality, little more than Lutheran theologians ... who had merely changed their terminology. The Absolute is none other than God, and its unfolding in the world is the working of Providence” (1963:194). Schlegel, for example, wrote that his purpose in composing his Philosophy of History was “to point out the progressive restoration in humanity of the effaced image of God, according to the gradation of grace in the various periods of the world, from the revelation given at the beginning, down to the middle revelation of redemption and love [the coming of Jesus Christ], and from that to the final consummation” (quoted in Barnes 1963:195). Similarly, for Herder (as summarized by Robert Flint), “the end of human nature is humanity, and that they may realize that end, God had put into the hands of men their own fates” (quoted in Barnes 1963:193). For Fichte, mankind had progressed through a series of five stages, in the last of which, the age of art, “humanity becomes free and beautifies itself as befitting the image of Absolute Reason” (Barnes 1963: 194). Schelling, for his part, sought “to unite nature and intelligence and show that they cooperated in the unfolding of the Absolute” (Barnes 1963:195). “Nature is visible soul,” he said, “and soul is invisible nature, and both advance incessantly by an uninterrupted succession of stages” (quoted in Barnes 1963:195). Finally, for Hegel, “World history ... represents the development of the Spirit’s consequences of freedom and the consequent realization of that freedom” (1953:78). Alternatively, Hegel conceived of history as revealing “the dialectical unfolding of the absolute idea” (Leff 1971:7). A major shortcoming of such wordy and nebulous constructions, and one that pretty well vitiated them, was the fact that their authors, being philosophers rather than historians, lacked a command of the facts they attempted to interpret. And this superficial knowledge of history opened them up to severe criticisms regarding their detailed presentation of events. They shared, however, an even greater failing. As Bury later wrote, “The radical defect of all these philosophical reconstructions of history is that the framework is always made a priori .... The principles of development are superimposed upon the phenomena, instead of being given by the phenomena” (1906:145).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY REJECTED This mode of expression was no doubt congenial to the German audiences to which they were addressed. Thus, for example, Jacob Grimm was probably echoing the popular sentiment when he asserted

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that “history must be written by philosophers, whatever our pedants say” (quoted in Becker 1964:91). Outside of Germany, though, such vagaries of thought soon brought the philosophy of history into a disrepute from which it did not soon emerge. With figures of speech vying with each other for vividness, professional historians expressed their disdain for these philosophies. William Milligan Sloane of Columbia University, for example, spoke of the “shoreless ocean of speculation on which both Herder and Hegel were sailing (1906:28), and, making the metaphor more concrete, John B. Bury of Cambridge ridiculed Hegel’s effort to “screw history into his iron bed” (1906:145–146). Nor did German historiography easily purge itself of this element of metaphysics. As a young man studying history at the University of Berlin, Andrew D. White, first president of Cornell, was repelled by “the loose and vague talk that accompanied the discussion of the philosophy of history,” Germany still being in those days (1855–1856) firmly in the grip of Hegelian inscrutabilities (Ausubel 1950:191). Henry Adams, another American studying history in Germany and likewise exposed to Hegelian metaphysics, found his own way of expressing contempt for it. Describing the state of mind of Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, the heroine of his novel, Democracy, Adams wrote: “In her despair she resorted to desperate measures. She read philosophy in the original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened that so much culture should lead to nothing—nothing” (1983:13). Even Leopold von Ranke, generally regarded as the greatest historian of his age and hailed for his objective and “scientific” treatment of history, was nonetheless “philosophically ... inclined to Hegelianism.... It was the cosmic process with which he was mainly concerned, the working of a universal spirit as revealed by outward manifestations” (Sloane 1906:34–35). As late as 1913, we find the German historian Ernst Troeltsch, in discussing the philosophy of history, alluding to “the relation of the historical process in the world to the fundamental forces of the universe,” and speaking murkily of “the foundation of the psychical world in the Universal Spirit, the connexion between the physical and the psychical world, the Divine direction and sustaining of the cosmos, and the distinction between the purely natural life of the soul and the spiritual and civilized life that strives to transcend it” (1913:721). Small wonder, then, that almost a century after Hegel’s death, James Harvey Robinson still found reason to speak disdainfully of “the now nearly extinct tribe of philosophers of history, who flattered themselves that their penetrating intellects had been able to discover the wherefore of man’s past without the trouble of learning much about it” (1965:99). “

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Some years earlier, arguing along the same lines, Lord Acton had heaped scorn on the philosophers who had arrogantly taken possession of the field, so cocksure of the validity of their formulations that “even a moderate acquaintance with the events of the past has ceased to be deemed a necessary or even a useful ingredient in the preparation of a philosophy of history” (Acton 1907:328). Acton and Robinson were but two voices of a larger chorus. German metaphysical idealism had so poisoned the waters of historical interpretation that, according to Frederick J. Teggart, the modern historian had girded his loins “against philosophies of history because he is convinced that these begin by assuming conclusions and pursue their speculations in a sphere wholly removed from the world of fact” (1910:711). Going even further, Sir Charles Oman (1939:84) declared bluntly that “philosophers are the enemies of history.” Even philosophers themselves have at times expressed the same opinion. Bertrand Russell, for example, once asserted that the men who make up philosophies of history may be dismissed as inventors of mythologies” (1957:17). Those few historians who had made a goodwill effort to find a philosophy of history congenial to them had evidently failed in the attempt. Thus C. V. Wedgwood (1960:13) reported plaintively, “For twenty-five years I have been looking for a philosophy of history without finding one in which I could believe, either in the works of philosopher historians ancient and modern, or by my own meditations.” In his survey of American historiography, John Higham (1989:98) stated that “the special bête noire of American academic historians . . . was [the] philosophy of history,” and offered as a prime example the following incident. At a meeting of the American Historical Association, a paper read by a sociologist on a “Theory of Social Causation” so incensed the historian Ephraim Emerton that he exclaimed, “Under the seductive name of sociology we are here meeting once more the ghost of our ancient enemy, the philosophy of history” (1989:107). By and large, though, these harsh critiques were aimed at the writings of interlopers into the field of history. Would there not be less fear of a philosophy of history hammered out by historians themselves? With much greater control of the facts, and well schooled in the intricacies and pitfalls of historical inference, could historians not propose a more seasoned and sophisticated philosophical overview, one that would be more acceptable to their professional colleagues? Evidently not. At least the fear of the broad generalizations inherent in any philosophy of history was so ingrained in the minds of historians that it kept virtually all of them from making the attempt. After all, such a venture inevitably required one to transcend the precincts of hard fact ”

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and to enter the uncharted domains of theory. And historians, Henry C. Lea admonished his colleagues, “should beware of theories; for when a theory once takes possession of a writer it renders him an unsafe guide and inspires reasonable distrust” (1903:60). The general dread of the philosophy of history was based, however, on more than the simple apprehension that in his frailty a lone historian might succumb to the glittering enticements of theory. It was rooted in the profound belief that history itself was too convoluted and indeterminate to lend itself to any unified and coherent interpretation. Oman, for example, was convinced that “the human record is illogical, often cataclysmic ... a series of strange and perplexing happenings” (1939:98, 84). And if that were true, then surely history was not a promising field for an illuminating general synthesis. In the face of this alleged intractability of historical events, many historians found it easier—and certainly safer—to forego the attempt at finding a higher order in the course of history They turned instead in the opposite direction, dedicating themselves more and more to the search for historical particularities. Lending his support to this endeavor, George Burton Adams, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1908, announced: It is my firm belief that in our field of history, for a long time to come, the man who devotes himself to such labors [that is, the establishing of historical facts], who is content with this preliminary work, will make a more useful and a more permanent contribution to the final science, or philosophy of history, than will he who yields to the allurements of speculation and endeavors to discover in the present stage of our knowledge the forces that control society, or to formulate the laws of their action.(1909:236) More than thirty years later, summarizing the thinking of American historians on the proper course their profession should follow, W. Stull Holt concluded that “most of the scholarly history written in the United States from 1875 to the present has been conceived in terms of [presenting] objective facts” rather than in the pursuit of theory. To seal this verdict Holt added: “The value put on the facts as an end in themselves; the emphasis given to the establishment of facts; the fear of making any statements without a supporting document; the belief, sometimes avowed, that complete objectivity could be attained merely by honest effort; the denial of any philosophy and theory of history . . . all testify to the same conclusion” (1940:361).

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And in England as well, this zealous pursuit of the obscure historical detail, and the corresponding fear of broad generalizations that it engendered, led the Cambridge historian J. H. Plumb to lament: “Philosophic history has been buried by a plague of antiquarianism” (1988:154). It was the prevalence of this entrenched timidity among historians that led Harry Elmer Barnes to summon up his scorn and declare: “One of the most revered hypotheses of the respectable school [of history] is that historical scholarship is better exemplified by conclusions that fall seventy-five percent short of the truth than by those that stray one per cent beyond it” (1963:271). This narrowing of their endeavors, characteristic of American historians, also occurred in Great Britain. H. R. Trevor Roper was thus led to observe, “Today most professional historians ‘specialise.’ They choose a period, sometimes a very brief period, and within that period they strive, in desperate competition with ever-expanding evidence, to know all the facts .... But they have no philosophy. For a historical philosophy is incompatible with such narrow frontiers’’ (1957:vii, viii).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY REEMBRACED Notwithstanding the heavy artillery leveled against any attempt at a philosophic synthesis of its materials, history was never without an intrepid handful of practitioners for whom a constricted view of their role seemed needlessly barren and shallow. And these men openly rebelled against such restraints. Thus, “history,” observed Lord Acton, “unless considered in its philosophic aspect, is devoid of connection and instruction” (Acton 1907:326). Urging his colleagues to go beyond the gathering of facts and to look toward their interpretation, Edward P. Cheyney declared that “history is not merely an account of external events, but an explanation of them” (1927:157). And J. B. Black argued that the historian “must have a ‘philosophy of history,’ a reasoned conception of how things actually happen, before he is in a position to interpret any historical event” (1965:9). Perhaps the strongest call for a renewed and robust philosophy of history came from John B. Bury. Addressing the great Congress of Arts and Science held at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904, Bury spoke eloquently of the historian’s higher mission: “Facts must be collected, and connected, before they can be interpreted; but I cannot imagine the slightest theoretical importance in a collection of facts or sequences of

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facts, unless they mean something in terms of reason, unless we can hope to determine their vital connection in the whole system of reality” (1906:144–145). And, Bury continued “The interpretation of history that shall be more than a collection of plausible labels must grasp the vital process, perceive the breath and motion, detect the undercurrents, trace the windings, discern the foreshadowings, see the ideas traveling underground, discover how the spiritual forces are poised and aimed, determine how the motives conspire and interact” (1906:148). Bury’s own specialty was modern European history, and he was confident that, being better known than what had gone before, this was the field “in which we may hope to charm from human history the secret of its rational movement, detect its logic, and win a glimpse of a fragment of the pattern on a carpet, of which probably the greater part is still unwoven” (1906:152). It was, however, largely the newly arisen social sciences—hated and dreaded as they were by most historians—that spearheaded the renewed search for order and regularity in historical events. Strongly influenced by sociology and anthropology, a new breed of historians, intent on discovering such regularities, sought to oppose their colleagues’ faintheartedness and to erect what amounted to a sound philosophy of history. A pioneer among them was James Harvey Robinson, a founder of the “New History.” First of all, Robinson stated, it was necessary to disassociate any new philosophy of history that might be forthcoming from the familiar and despised Hegelian metaphysics: The historical student who classes the modern social sciences with the old and discredited philosophy of history is making a serious mistake. The philosophy of history [as it was pursued earlier] sought to justify man’s past in order to satisfy some sentimental craving, and their explanations were . . . usually begotten of some theological or national prejudice. The contemporaneous student of society, on the contrary, offers very real and valuable . . . explanations of the past. (1965:99) Robinson then went on to assure his readers that “the kind of thought suggested by the new allies of history [sociology, anthropology, and economics] should serve, if judiciously practiced, greatly to strengthen and deepen the whole range of historical study and render its results far more valuable than they have hitherto been” (1965:100). An even stronger statement of this view came from Harry Elmer Barnes, a scholar with a foot in both history and sociology.

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It would . . . betray clouded thinking to hold that this gathering of facts marked the final completion of the task of the historian no less than it would for the scientist to contend that his work was at an end when he had tabulated his observations. The careful and painstaking interpretation of historical material, far from being unscientific and wholly aside from the task of the historian, in reality constitutes the final rounding out to completion of the scientific method in history and gives some meaning and significance to the vast array of facts. (1927:394) To objections that the historian’s proper function was simply to dredge up new facts from the archives, Barnes replied: “The real historian is not the plodder or compiling clerk who gathers the facts from a diversity of sources. He is, rather, the one who takes his raw material, evaluates it, and organizes it in such a fashion as to illuminate our minds with respect to the nature of the past and the manner in which the past has produced the present” (1963:270). Somewhat more guardedly, certain other historians expressed the wish that a solid philosophy of history would once more be attempted. For Carl Becker, such an eventuality would be “a fortunate circumstance, an indication that historical studies are not destined to run into a barren scholasticism” (1913:107). In 1926, in The Art of History, J. B. Black spoke of “a need for the reintegration of history and philosophy, and the reintegration ought, this time, to come from the historian’s side rather than the philosopher’s’’ (1965:14). Years later, reacting to criticism of his own work as being too broad in its generalizations, Arnold Toynbee replied that “this job of making sense of history is one of the crying needs of our day” (Geyl, Toynbee, and Sorokin 1949:82). Purged of misty metaphysics and shorn of its flowery phrases, the philosophy of history is, in its essentials, simply “an attempt to give a rational explanation of historical events” (Nordau 1910:49). And a cleareyed recognition of this fact can be found in some more recent discussions of the subject. Writing in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, for example, Patrick Gardiner remarked that common to all philosophies of history is the “assumption that the historical process is more than an agglomeration of events ‘senselessly’ succeeding one another in time: there is an underlying structure or theme waiting to be discovered, in terms of which this apparently arbitrary sequence can be seen to be ultimately meaningful or intelligible” (1968:429). Over the years, as we have seen, a sprinkling of historians have been ready to defend the attempt to construct a philosophy of history

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even if they themselves were not prepared to do so. To quote one last example of this attitude, as early as 1905, Goldwin Smith, an English historian transplanted to America, insisted that “the philosophy of history which traces the interdependence of events, the connection of causes and effects, the operation of special influences general or personal, permanent or temporary, the distinction of epochs,. . . and above all the general progress of humanity, ... is a vast, fruitful ... field” (1905:513). Who could seriously quarrel with this statement? If the philosophy of history is taken to be the thoughtful examination and interpretation of the entire course of what has transpired in the past, aiming at the discovery of whatever patterns and trends might be revealed, why should it not be perfectly reasonable and proper to pursue it? Such a conclusion should force itself on anyone who thinks of history as something more than a mere temporal succession of particular events. Thus, the French historian Henri Berr (1972:255) urged his readers, “Let no one fear a return of the philosophy of history.” Historians, I might add, should couple Berr’s advice with Shakespeare’s, to “stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood!” The pages that follow deal with many issues and aspects of historiography. They examine what historians have thought of history and what they have written about it. The main focus, though, will be on the interpretations historians have made of history—on “the philosophy of history,” whether they embraced the concept or detested it. Two principal elements are involved in the philosophy of history. One is the attempt to discover order in historical events; the other is to search for the determinants of that order. And it is our main purpose to pursue these two elements of the story. From time to time, though, we will yield to the temptation of exploring certain byways of history that have special interest and appeal, such as whether history should be considered a branch of literature, as well as the fascination historians have shown with contingency in history. I should make it clear, however, that in looking at how historians have dealt with history, I am doing so from an anthropologist’s perspective. Fundamental differences exist in the way anthropologists and historians perceive the course of events. The two sets of scholars have different concepts, different approaches, and different objectives. They may deal with the selfsame body of evidence, but they grapple with it in distinct ways. It is my hope that the perspective offered by anthropology may provide new illumination—or at the very least, the tiny light of a flying spark—when the two points of view collide.

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w

E BEGIN with the fundamental question, What is history, anyway? Betraying an abiding cynicism toward the way history has been written, the answers to this question have often been ironic or disparaging. By all odds, the best known of such epigrams is Henry Ford’s contention, “History is bunk!” More elegant but in much the same vein was Matthew Arnold’s allusion to “that huge Mississippi of falsehood called history“ (quoted in Bartlett 1947:548). Napoleon is said to have called history “a fable agreed upon,” while Thomas Carlyle (1902:I, 312) described it as nothing better than “a distillation of Rumour.” And with the skepticism that marked his later years, Mark Twain declared that “the very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice” (1925:II,366). Turning to more serious efforts to answer the question, we find that the word history has been used in three different senses. In decreasing order of inclusiveness they are as follows:

1. History is everything that human beings have ever done. 2. History is the surviving record of everything that human beings have ever done. 3. History is the selection, arrangement, and presentation of certain aspects of this surviving record. I use the words certain aspects in describing this third sense, since historians usually limit themselves to the evidence provided by written records. From an anthropological perspective, though, the 5,000 years of recorded history are but a narrow slice of the pie of human existence— only ¼00 in fact, of the more than two million years that have elapsed since human beings attained culture. 13

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Let us look now at statements representing each of these three views of history. Illustrative of the first is George M. Trevelyan’s comment that “it is difficult to set bounds to the scope of history. It is concerned with every activity of man” (1968d:182). So is James T. Shotwell’s (1910527) remark that “history in the wider sense is all that has happened.” Similarly, for the Dutch-English historian G. J. Renier (1950:224), “History . . . refers to past collective human experience.” Emphasizing the fact that events themselves, and not merely their recounting or interpretation, are what constitute history, the German anthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel (1896:22) held that “the essence of history consists in the very fact of happening, not in the recollecting and recording [of] what has happened.” And finally, the British historian G. R. Elton (1970:8) declared that “the study of history comprehends everything that men have said, thought, done or suffered.” The second of the three views of history distinguished here, while acknowledging history’s very broad scope, restricts it to surviving vestiges of human activities. Thus, for Frederick Jackson Turner (1972: 201–202), ‘Wherever there remains a chipped flint, a spearhead, a piece of pottery, a pyramid, a picture, a poem, a coliseum, or a coin, there is history.” Likewise, James Harvey Robinson declared that “in its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.. . . We are within its bounds whether we decipher a mortgage on an Assyrian tile, ... or describe the over-short pastry to which Charles V was addicted to his undoing.” Also part of history, thought Robinson, “are the provisions of Magna Charta, the origin of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the fall of Santiago, the difference between a black friar and a white friar, and the certified circulation of the New York World upon February 1 of the current year” (1965:1). The third view of history sees it not so much as the objective record of past events as the selection from and recounting of this record, in which the historian plays almost as large a role as the events themselves. Appearing to contradict his earlier opinion as quoted above, G. R. Elton (1970:105–106) affirmed that “history does not exist until it has been reconstructed and written down by the historian.” And Jerome Frank (1945:20) insisted that “an event nowhere recorded, no matter how important it may have been, does not, of course, exist for the historian.” Along similar lines, the British historian Edward Hallett Carr held that “the belief in a hard core of facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fal-

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lacy” (1964:12). Similarly, for Sir Charles Oman (1939:7–8), “History is not a purely objective thing, it is the historian’s way of envisaging and correlating a certain series of events.” Finally, Carl Becker (1958a:49), an outspoken historical relativist whom we shall meet again in that connection, held that “the historical fact is in someone’s mind, or it is nowhere, because when it is in no one’s mind it lies in the records inert, incapable of making a difference in the world.” According to this third view, then, history is not what has happened, pure and simple, but rather what the historian does with what has happened.

THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY Whatever historians have had as their underlying conception of history, how have they actually pursued it? Or, more precisely, in what ways have they thought it should be practiced? A broad spectrum of opinion again confronts us. First of all, there is the contention that historians should narrate the events of history as factually as possible, with no embellishments. In the oft-quoted words of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, “the patron saint of nineteenth-century historians” according to Becker (1958:268), history was to be reconstructed wie es eigentlich gewesen, “as it actually happened” (Stern, 1972:16). The metaphor most often used during the nineteenth century to convey this feeling was that a historian should be like a mirror, faithfully reflecting everything that strikes its surface—nothing more, nothing less. With the invention of the camera, however, the metaphor changed, the historian then being likened to a photographic plate, which faithfully registers every ray of light that falls upon it (see Higham 1989:93). Exemplifying this belief was the remark of William Dunning (1914:219), a turn-of-the-century American historian, that “the absorbing and relentless pursuit of the objective fact—of the thing that actually happened in exactly the form and manner of its happening, is ... the typical function of the modern devotee of history.” This view represents the oldest, and still probably the most widely practiced way of writing history, namely, as a straightforward narrative of the past. “As history deals with concrete events fixed in time and space,” wrote Sir Lewis Namier (1972:378–379), “narrative is its basic medium.” And for George Trevelyan (1968c:149), “The art of history remains always the art of narrative. That is the bed rock.” Echoing this view, the American historian Thomas C. Cochran (1972:350–351) noted that “the traditional basis of history has been effective narrative.

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The ‘great’ histories of the past such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Macaulay’s England, or Morley’s Dutch Republic have been exciting ‘stories.’” Narrative history can be said to combine two major elements. First and foremost, it involves the recounting of events. But it is also concerned with the stylistic way in which these events are described. Let us consider these two aspects in turn.

HISTORY AS THE RECOUNTING OF OBJECTIVE FACTS As they actually took place in history, events are, of course, individual and particular. They consist of unique, concrete, and specific happenings. Narrative history, then, becomes the stringing together of particular facts in a chronological sequence, that is, in the order in which they occurred. The historians’ task was seen as embracing concrete events and maintaining their focus on them. Von Ranke (1972a: 57) insisted that “particulars . . . [are] an essential part of the writing of history,” adding that “the true historian ... must feel a participation and pleasure in the particular for itsel f.... Just as one takes delight in flowers without thinking to what genus . . . they belong; in short, without thinking how the whole manifests itself in the particular” (1972a:59). Years before Ranke, Thomas Carlyle had written, “Only the fact is important John Lackland passed through here, that is what is admirable, that is a reality for which I would give all theories” (quoted in Dalbiez 1954:45). And years later, Lewis Namier echoed the thought: “The subject matter of history is human affairs, men in action, things which have happened and how they happened” (1972:372). In his survey of American historiography, John Higham cites a poignant example of this love of the particular. William A. Dunning, who wrote what Higham (1989:103) describes as “a dull, magisterial” history of American political thought, “enjoyed one of the happiest days of his life when he discovered, by a comparison of handwritings, that Andrew Johnson’s first message to Congress was actually drafted by George Bancroft. ‘I don’t believe,’ he told his wife, ‘you can form an idea of the pleasure it gives me to have discovered this little historical fact.’ ” An intense devotion to the particular has by no means passed among professional historians. Johan Huizinga (1972:297–298), for example, maintained that “historical sense always inclines toward the particular, the graphic, the concrete, the unique, the individual.... Knowledge that has lost sight of actual men and actual events may be

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worthwhile, but it is no longer history.” And according to Richard Hofstadter (1972:367), “Most historians continue to feel that they deal with events which, though in some sense comparable, are essentially unique” (1972:367). The essence of narrative history, then, involved fixating on particular events, discrete nuggets of facts that could be serially arranged and nicely displayed, like pearls strung together on a silken thread. And it was Henry Steele Commager’s emphatic contention that “if history forgets or neglects to tell a story, it will inevitably forfeit much of its appeal and much of its authority” (1965:3). Almost from the start, however, there were those who leveled their guns at history written as pure narrative. As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon complained that “history is attended with numerous defects; the greater part of historians writing little more than empty and vulgar narratives,” which, Bacon said, were “a disgrace to history“ (1900:52). More than two centuries later, reviewing Jules Michelet’s major work, Histoire de France, the Scottish historian Archibald Alison found much in the manner of presentation to displease him: “The narrative in general is flooded by an ocean of details. Fatigued with the endless maze of intrigues, wars, tumult, tortures, crusades, and crimes, which succeed one another in rapid succession, the reader in despair shuts the volume, with hardly any recollection of the thread of events. He recollects only that almost all the kings appear to have been wicked, almost all the nobles ambitious, almost all the priests cruel, almost all the people ferocious” (1846a:192). More than a century later, Fernand Braudel, another French historian, expressed much the same annoyance with narrative history excessively burdened with facts. “[T]raditional history,” he wrote, “faithful to narrative and indeed a slave to it, overloads the memory, weighing it down needlessly with dates, with the names of heroes and with the lives and deeds of notabilities” (1995:xxxi). Inveighing against the historical particularlists of the late nineteenth century, William Milligan Sloane, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, called them “obscurantists” who denied any pattern to history and contented themselves with merely piecing together the minute fragments of the past. “For them,” wrote Sloane, “history is but a mosaic of details, without design or outline, like some cathedral windows in England; patched and assembled from the shreds to which iconoclasts reduced the glorious paintings which, by color and orderly arrangement, once conveyed noble and exalting thought” (1906:29). Just how to present the facts of history is, of course, one of the

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great issues among historians even today, and we will have frequent occasion to consider this problem in the pages that follow.

HISTORY AS LITERATURE The second major element of narrative history was the belief that it was rightfully a branch of literature and should be practiced as such. The desire to portray events not only truthfully, but also dramatically and vividly—even eloquently—seems to have motivated historians from as far back as Classical Antiquity. “The historians of ancient Rome,” wrote John B. Bury, “display what historiography can become when it is associated with rhetoric” (1972:212). History, in fact, can be said to have begun as literature, the poetic works of Homer providing us with our earliest information about the life and times of ancient Greece. Acknowledging the modern historian’s great debt to Homer, the distinguished classical scholar Gilbert Murray observed: If the Iliad and Odyssey were all fiction we should still learn from them a great deal about early Greek customs, about practices of war and government, about marriage, land tenure, worship, farming, commerce, and, above all, the methods of seafaring. Let anyone read thoroughly the story which Eumaeus the swineherd tells of his life, in Odyssey O. (xv.), and then consider how much history of the life of the Aegean, about the seventh century B.C., he has learnt from three pages of poetical fiction. (quoted in Trevelyan 1968a:94) Even in modern times, writers of fiction are occasionally able to capture and convey the flavor of a historical period better than professional historians. For example, according to Professor York Powell, “Balzac’s novels form the best history of 1830. He alone, among French historians, has grasped the essential features of the society that revolted from the ideas of the Restoration” (quoted in Trevelyan 1968a:96). Going back to the Middle Ages, Jean Froissart’s acclaimed history of the Hundred Years’ War, Chronicles of fiance, Flanders, England, Scotland and Spain, was called a “glowing, rich, and powerful feudal painting“ by Sir Walter Scott (1963:118). By contrast, said Scott, the work of such medieval chroniclers as the Monk of Croyden and Geoffrey de Vinsauff was such “a conglomeration of uninteresting and unintelligible matter, that we gladly fly for relief to the delightful pages of the gallant Froissart” (183O:xl–xli).

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Indeed, Froissart’s history is peppered with brief but vivid passages that helped evoke the events he was portraying, some of which he had actually witnessed himself Thus, in describing the opposing forces at the Battle of Nájera in 1366, Froissart wrote, “It was a beautiful sight to see them approach with their brilliant armour glittering with the sunbeams” (n.d. :107). Two centuries later, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614) was read not only for the information it contained but also for its vigorous style. According to A. L. Rowse, whatever its fate as a depiction of history, it will always remain, “a quarry for memorable English prose” (1963:62). Of the events leading to the demise of the Roman Empire, as described by Edward Gibbon, it was said by Archibald Alison (1846a:186) that “no historian ever portrayed them with so graphic and luminous a pen.” And regarding Gibbon’s description of the glory of the Empire under Augustus, the disasters that befell it during the reign of the Julian emperors, the fall of Constantinople, and the rise of Mahomet, Alison (1846a:186) wrote, “They stand out from the canvas with all the freshness and animation of real life; and seizing powerfully on the imagination of the reader, they make an indelible impression.” As an example of Gibbon’s style, note the majestic sweep with which, in forty-eight words, he summarizes the entire career of Mohammed: “He compares the nations and the religions of the earth; discovers the weakness of the Persian and Roman monarchies; beholds, with pity and indignation, the degeneracy of the times; and resolves to unite under one God and one king the invincible spirit and primitive virtues of the Arabs” (n.d.:339). It was writing like this that led Trevelyan to call Gibbon a model for historians for the way in which he “united accuracy with art” (1968c:164). The piquancy of Gibbon’s style reveals itself, not in clipped staccato phrases, but in skillfully embroidered convolutions. As the historian J. B. Black dissected it, “Gibbon will not say the plain truth in a plain way, exactly as he perceives it. He must perforce pass it through a series of mysterious and complex processes, which polish, refine, and enrich, until eventually it emerges bedecked and bejewelled and splendid beyond recognition” (1965:144). And if wry humor is one of the jewels Black has in mind, then Gibbon surely wore a glittering diadem. Again and again in The Decline and Fall we find him turning historical incidents into foils for his sardonic wit. One example will suffice: The Attacotti, a redoubtable Caledonian tribe of western Scotland, were reputed to have been anthropophagi who, when attacking shep-

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herds and their flocks, would forego the sheep and eat the shepherd. Taking note of this, Gibbon continues: “If in the neighborhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow a race of cannibals has really existed we may contemplate in the period of Scottish history the oppsite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas, and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand [the home of the cannibal Maori] may produce in some future age the Hume of the Southern hemisphere” (quoted in Clive 1989:82). The artistic skill, which Alison admired in Gibbon’s prose, he considered not just a desideratum but almost an essential in the best historical writing: “Though founded on fact, though based on reality, though dependent for its existence on truth, History is still one of the Fine Arts .... However the stones may be cut out of the quarry, however fashioned or carved by the skill of the workman, their united effect will be entirely lost if they are not put together by the conception of a Michael Angelo, a Palladio, or a Wren. Genius is still the soul of history; its highest inspiration must be derived from the Muses” (Alison 1846a: 188). Turning to the historians of the early nineteenth century, one cannot, for example, read the pages of Washington Irving‘s The Conquest of Granada (1819) without being stirred by the vivid prose with which Irving described the clashes of arms between Christians and Moors. And “to read Francis Parkman on the discovery of the Mississippi,” wrote the Harvard historian John Clive, “is to encounter literary artistry of a kind not inferior to that of the great novelists” (1989:16). By all odds, the figure who made historians most aware of the luster that a polished literary style could impart to the presentation of history was not a historian at all, but a novelist—Sir Walter Scott. It was Scott whose sharply chiseled and highly burnished characters in his enormously popular historical novels, especially Ivanhoe made history spring to life. Of this novel, George Trevelyan was to write, “In its day, Ivanhoe was the greatest single step towards opening out the Middle Ages to modern conception; for it was the first attempt to envisage our distant ancestors as human beings” (1968a:92). Nor was Trevelyan the first to make this observation. A century earlier, Thomas Carlyle declared that Scott’s historical novels had taught him “that the by-gone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men” (quoted in Halleck 1900:330). In Ivanhoe and other of his historical novels, Trevelyan noted, Scott “revealed to an astonished world the reality and variety of past ages” (1968c:166n.).

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This new and invigorated depiction of history was by no means merely a happenstance. Scott consciously set out to expose and ridicule the literary shortcomings of earlier historians and to urge a more spirited presentation of the past. At the beginning of Ivanhoe there is a “dedicatory epistle” to a fictitious Rev. Dr. Dryasdust, Fellow of the Antiquarian Society, who serves as an archetype of the dull, plodding, old-fashioned historian, whose head is crammed with learning, but whose works, completely devoid of literary art, are unreadable. In this epistle, Scott laments the fact that “our ideas of our ancestors are only to be gleaned from musty records and chronicles, the authors of which seemed perversely to have conspired to suppress in their narratives all interesting details, in order to find room for flowers of monkish eloquence, or trite reflections upon morals” (1830:xxvii). In his series of Waverly novels, Scott demonstrated how historical events could be rendered with great verve and dramatic flair. Summing up his general appraisal of Scott’s influence on history, Trevelyan wrote that “[he] did more for history, I venture to think, than any professed historian in modern times.... It was he who gave the realism and variety of actual life to the records of the past. It was he who first taught us to think of our ancestors as real human beings with passions and absurdities like our own. It was he who showed us the difference in mode of life between one epoch and another, and between one class and another in times gone by”(1968d:187). The effect of Scott’s writings proved not only pervasive but profound. Assessing this influence a century and a half later, Fritz Stern (1972:17) remarked that “every historian of the early nineteenth century was stirred and inspired by Scott’s bold reconstruction of the past, and admitted the deep effect of these fictions upon his own historical sense.” Scott’s own contemporaries were quick to express their admiration for the way he infused fresh life into the historical events in which his fictional characters took part. Thomas Babington Macaulay (n.d.:91), for one, portrayed Scott’s effect on the writing of history in this way: At Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window, which was made by an apprentice out of pieces of glass which had been rejected by his master. It is so far superior to every other in the church, that, according to the tradition, the vanquished artist killed himself from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same manner, has used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them, in a manner which may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings, works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than theirs.

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Scott (1813:xiii–xv) himself was quite aware of how a literary presentation could endow history with much greater vividness and appeal than was found in the works of conventional historians: Narrative,. . . if strictly confined to the great occurrences of History, would be deprived of the individual interest which it is so well calculated to excite.... Two or three figures, well grouped, suit the artist better, than a crowd, for whatever purposes assembled. For the same reason, a scene immediately presented to the imagination, and directly brought home to the feelings, though involving the fate of but one or two persons, is more favourable for [literature] ... than the political struggles and convulsions which influence the fate of kingdoms. The former are within the reach and comprehension of all, and, if depicted with vigour seldom fail to fix attention: The other, if more sublime, are more vague and distant, less capable of exciting those sentiments which it is the very purpose of [literature] ... to inspire. To generalize is always to destroy effect. We would, for example, be more interested in the fate of an individual soldier in combat, than in the grand events of a general action; with the happiness of two lovers raised from misery and anxiety to peace and union, than with the successful exertion of a whole nation. As Macaulay noted, Scott’s historical fiction showed what a master novelist’s touch could add to history in the way of vividness and interest. Indeed, only half in jest, Mark Twain blamed the American Civil War on Sir Walter Scott, arguing that Southerners had read Scott’s historical novels so avidly and had their heads so filled with notions of chivalry and the clash of arms, that they convinced themselves of their ability to defeat the more populous and industrialized North by sheer gallantry. Scott’s lesson of what lively writing could do for history was taken to heart most fully by Macaulay himself. In his essay “History,” Macaulay (1972:86) described his “perfect historian” as one who “gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction.” And his historical essays were magnificent examples of the implanting of historical events in a setting of great literary merit. Consider, for example, the following passage from one of those essays. Having just cited the names of the prominent men in attendance at a soirée given in the London home of Fanny Burney, Macaulay (1890:740) continued: But the great show of the night was the Russian ambassador, Count Orloff [Catherine the Great’s lover], whose gigantic figure was all in a blaze with jewels, and in whose demeanour the

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untamed ferocity of the Scythian might be discerned through a thin varnish of French politeness. As he stalked about the small parlour, brushing the ceiling with his toupee, the girls whispered to each other, with mingled admiration and horror, that he was the favoured lover of his august mistress; that he had borne the chief part in the revolution to which she owed her throne; and that his huge hands, now glittering with diamond rings, had given the last squeeze to the windpipe of her unfortunate husband. That, I submit, is writing! Clearly, Macaulay had absorbed Scott’s dictum, often choosing to present history through the actions of particular individuals rather than through faceless masses or vague generalizations. In a famous chapter in the first volume of his History of England, which we shall have occasion to refer to again, Macaulay set out to depict daily life in England in the year 1685. London was already the center of the best and the worst in English society, and to portray street life in that city, he avoided any abstract description, presenting it instead through the personal experiences of a single fictitious individual, freshly arrived from the country. For this purpose, Macaulay chose a wealthy, aristocratic landowner on a rare visit to London, someone so conspicuous on the city’s streets and so unaccustomed to its rough ways that he easily became the target of the hucksters and hustlers that infested London in those days: When the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman’s coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor’s show. Money-droppers [confidence men] ... introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked his way to St. James’s, his informants sent him to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of second-hand embroid-

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ery, copper rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. (Macaulay 1931:I,323–324) In the introduction to this great work, Macaulay declared, “I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.” However well he may have achieved this limited objective, Macaulay’s History of England secured much more lasting fame. As a leading historian of a later day, A. L. Rowse (1963:41) observed, “He succeeded in producing a book that has held the attention of the English-speaking world undiminished for the last century.” In Macaulay we find history and literature most felicitously combined. However, in Thomas Carlyle’s excursions into history, we have what surely must rank as a gross hypertrophy of the literary effort. Writing to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1834, Carlyle had informed his friend: “I am busy studying with my whole might for a book on the French Revolution. It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History, could we tell it right” (Fletcher 1902:xiii). And in The French Revolution, which appeared three years later, Carlyle fulfilled his ambition to turn history into what he deemed to be poetry. Indeed, he was more than ready to sacrifice historical precision on the altar of dramatic effect. For example, with fevered imagination and inflated rhetoric, Carlyle described in the following words the last days of Louis XV: Louis would not suffer Death to be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funeral monuments, and whatsoever could bring it to mind.... But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own heart-strings; unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at the very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking‘d, and await what is appointed Thee! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on thy bed of weariness, what a thought is thine! Purgatory and Hell-fire, now all too possible, in the prospect. (1902:26,27)

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While more tempered and muted in their diction, many a historian who followed Carlyle continued to advocate the melding of history and literature. Considered by Rowse (1928:14) to be Macaulay’s immediate successor in this regard was James Anthony Froude, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. In the opening chapter of his History of England, Froude (1900:61,62) gave evidence of the brush and palette he would use to depict a thousand years of English history: For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return.... And now it is all gone . . . and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of medieval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world. Best known among later English historians for his prose style was George M. Trevelyan, a grandnephew of Macaulay. So prominent an element in a nation’s culture did Trevelyan consider literature to be that he decried any treatment that failed to integrate it into the social fabric as a whole, but instead, left it “hanging at the end of history books like the tail from a cow” (1972:237). “The idea,” Trevelyan (1972: 240) argued, “that histories which are delightful to read must be the work of superficial temperaments, and that a crabbed style betokens a deep thinker or conscientious worker, is the reverse of the truth.” For Trevelyan as for Carlyle, history constituted a special form of poetry. “Truth is the criterion of historical study,” he wrote, “but its impelling motive is poetic” (1968a:103). Trevelyan’s historical poetry, though, was set, not in the sprung rhythms and free verse of Carlyle, but in more measured couplets. Trevelyan’s style impressed many contemporary historians, such as the American Edward P. Cheyney, who admiringly quoted the following passage in which Trevelyan described the early days of England under successive waves of invaders and settlers: “The era of Celt, Saxon

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and Dane is like Macbeth’s battle of the blasted heath. Prophecy hovers around. Horns are heard blowing in the mist, in a confused uproar of savage tumult and outrage. We catch glimpses of giant figures—mostly warriors at strife. But there are ploughmen too, it seems breaking the primeval clod, and we hear the sounds of forests crashing to the axe. Around all is the lap of waves and the cry of seamen beaching their ships.” Cheyney (1927:168) remarked, “No one hundred words could give a more just picture of those three misty centuries, and seldom have a hundred words of historical writing given more aesthetic pleasure to at least one reader.” Trevelyan was firm in his conviction that “the main works of our historical scholars should be written not merely for the perusal of brother historians but for the best portion of the general public—in other words, that they would be written as literature” (1968c:175). To men of letters, as opposed to professional historians, it was the literary imagination that counted for most in the writing of history. Factual exactness could at times be sacrificed to it. With characteristic wryness, Oscar Wilde expressed this view in his dialogue-essay, “The Decay of Lying”: In the works of Herodotus, who in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern sociologists to verify his history, may justly be called the “Father of Lies”; in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny’s Natural History; in Hanno’s Periplus; in all the early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycothenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe’s History of the Plague; in Boswell’s Life of Johnson; in Napoleon’s despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinating historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dullness. (1960:252) Far as Oscar Wilde went in this passage, Anatole France went even further: “I know as well as you,” he wrote, “that history is false, that all the historians ... are narrators of fables. But that does not disturb me. I am quite willing that an Herodotus should deceive me in an agreeable manner; ... I would even regret it if history were exact. I willingly say

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with Voltaire: reduce it to truth and you ruin it” (quoted in Frank 1945:25). While surely not as ready to dispense with historical accuracy, some historians openly longed for a defter literary touch on the part of their colleagues. “There are books of great research and erudition,” wrote W. E. H. Lecky, “which one would have wished to have been rewritten by some writers of real genius who could have given order, meaning and vividness to a mere chaos of accurate and labouriously sifted learning” (1970:3). As if to answer Lecky’s call, there appeared on the scene Lytton Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, the avant garde circle of writers and artists whose members included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. In a groundbreaking work, Eminent Victorians (1918), instantly acclaimed for its literary merit, Strachey made of the surface of history a rich intaglio instead of the flat and featureless plain of which Lecky had complained. Indeed, Strachey so revolutionized the craft of historical biography that with the book’s appearance, Virginia Woolf remarked, the biographer “has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist” (quoted in Himmelfarb 1995:35). Of the sparkle and luster with which Strachey portrayed the staid figures of Victorian England, I offer as a sample his evocation of Cardinal Newman: He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in the shade of an Athenian palestra, or his hand might have fashioned those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. (n.d.:16–17) Among contemporary historians, a sizable camp still insists that history be part of literature. H. Stuart Hughes (1960:35), for example, contends that “history would not be itself if it deserted the literary and discursive mold in which its original practitioners cast it,” and declared himself ready to “resist any notion that historians ... should cease to think of their subject as a branch of literature” (1964:4). Richard Hofstadter (1972:370) was convinced that the historian “realizes more fully than before how much history is indeed akin to literature,” while G. R. Elton (1970:97) believed that the historian “ought to be ... in

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addition an artist, a man wishing to create (in words) a thing of interest and beauty .” And Allan Nevins (1975:139) said simply, “History belongs to literature.” However, with the rise of “scientific history“ in the nineteenth century, a major change occurred among some historians in the way they saw this issue. An uneasy feeling developed among them that scholarly history could not be pursued as a branch of literature after all, and that in trying to serve the latter, the former would inevitably be compromised. John R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, was a leader in this movement, urging his students to “break the drowsy spell of narrative. Ask yourself questions, set yourself problems” (quoted in Trevelyan 1968c:149). And in his essay, “The Science of History,” John B. Bury, who succeeded Seeley at Cambridge, told his readers simply, “I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature” (1972:214). Indeed, according to Trevelyan, the “scientific” historians “denounced from the altar any of their profession, alive or dead, who had had dealings with literature” (1968c:152). As an example of this attitude we may cite Lord Acton’s criticism of the work of Leopold von Ranke. “His history,” wrote Acton, “is full of plums and no suet. It is all garnish, but no beef. He is a great historical decorator, and avoids whatever is dull and unpleasant, whatever cannot be told in a lively way . . . . He is an epicure and likes only tit-bits” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:87). And while Ranke’s manner of treating history allowed him his triumphs of depiction, it also prevented him from achieving a master synthesis. As Acton expressed it, “His miniature-painting preserves with a fidelity amounting to genius the features of royal and illustrious persons, but he has not the breadth of touch requisite to do justice to great popular and national movements” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:88). In the United States, James Harvey Robinson (1965:52) upheld the view that literature was inimical to the cause of history. “The historian is coming to see,” he wrote, “that his task is essentially different from that of the man of letters, and that his place is rather among the scientists. He is at liberty to use only his scientific imagination, which is quite different from a literary imagination.” Elaborating on his reasons for wishing to divorce history from literature, Robinson (1965: 51) noted: “Fiction and drama are perfectly free to conceive and adjust detail so as to meet the demands of art, but the historian should always be conscious of the rigid limitations placed upon him. If he confines himself to an honest and critical statement of a series of events as described in his sources, it is usually too deficient in vivid authentic detail to make a satisfactory story.” Some years earlier, Robinson had already concluded that “it would

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be difficult to find two companions more widely at variance in their essential spirit and purpose than history and literature” (1906:40). Writing in the decade after Robinson, and seemingly influenced by him, Homer C. Hockett felt that “the false assumption that history is a branch of literature, that an historical narrative must be a work of art, has seriously hampered the progress of scientific historical work” (quoted in Higham 1989:97). A decided prejudice against fine writing in history continued to exist among a certain segment of American historians. Thus, we find Walter Prescott Webb, a professor of history at the University of Texas and a past president of the American Historical Association, taking off his kid gloves and bluntly asserting: “There is something historically naughty about good writing.... A great gulf exists between truth and beauty and the scholar who attempts to bridge it deserves to fall in and drown.... The real scholar must choose truth and somehow it is better if it is made so ugly that nobody could doubt its virginity” (quoted in Tuchman 198258). (As if to answer Webb, Jacques Barzun [1974:14] wrote scornfully that the proposed injection of science into history at the expense of literary grace was an “attempt to rescue Clio from pitiable maidenhood by artificial insemination.”) Even G. R. Elton, whom I quoted earlier as believing that the historian “ought to be an artist,” nonetheless had grave misgivings about the work produced under this banner by George Trevelyan, the leading figure among this century‘s “literary“ historians. Trevelyan, Elton argued, “gave some substance” to the feeling that historians who strove for literary merit had sacrificed depth for readability, He and others like him, Elton (1970:107) thought, “too often achieved literary distinction by an easy saunter around any problem of intellectual gravity and by superficial methods of explanation which left the serious and involved student gasping.” When less inclined to be charitable, Elton wrote contemptuously of “the soothing pap lavishly doled out by G. M. Trevelyan and eagerly swallowed up by a large public” (Elton 1983:107). On the other hand, there were some historians who continued to believe that history lost something—its large audience, if nothing else-bybeing written without an eye toward elegance. And they roundly deplored the current state of historical writing, whose prosaic style Trevelyan called “a very serious weakness—spinal, in fact.” Trevelyan went on to complain that some historians “would seem never to have studied the art of telling a story. There is no ‘flow’ in their events, which stand like ponds instead of running like streams” (1968c:148– 149). Against this trend he urged a return to “the English tradition ... that history was a part of the national literature, and was meant for the education and delight of all who read books” (1968c:163). Instead, he

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continued, in the history that is being written, “art is sacrificed to science ten times for every time that science is sacrificed to art” (1968c:163). A. L. Rowse, a frank admirer of Trevelyan’s style, inveighed against “an increase in the number of history books turned out by people who do not know how to write. Never has there been such a quantity of raw chunks of historical research, malformed, undigested, indigestible, as has poured forth from the presses” (1963:64). To counteract this deplorable condition, he called for a “new movement” with “a greater breadth of conception, a nobler treatment of subject, which will restore the literary graces which have almost ceased to adorn recent work” (1928:27). Not all appeals for a more literary history, however, came wearing such a serious face. The British historian Philip Guedalla, said to have been the cleverest fellow to come out of Oxford since Oscar Wilde, held that the prevailing mode of writing history robbed it of all its verve and vigor. “Historians’ English is not a style,” he said, but “an industrial disease. The workers in this dangerous trade,” he continued, “are required to adopt (like Mahomet’s coffin) a detached standpoint—that is, to write as if they took no interest in the subject,” so that “the resulting narrations present the dreary impartiality of the Recording Angel” (Guedalla 1921:175). But Guedalla would not leave it at that. He went on to suggest that, in order to enliven it, history might be written somewhat as follows: “The imbecile king now ripened rapidly toward a crisis. Surrounded by a Court in which the inanity of the day was rivaled only by the debauchery of the night, he became incapable towards the year 1472 of distinguishing good from evil, a fact which contributed considerably to the effectiveness of his foreign policy” (1921177). More recently, H. Stuart Hughes (1964:3) has taken up the cudgels for writing history with a literary flair. “In the minds of historians wedded to the tradition of history as a branch of literature,” he wrote, “the new emphasis on methodological rigor suggests the abandonment of something infinitely precious.” And there we must leave the issue, for historians to resolve among themselves.

UNIVERSAL HISTORY Narrative history, which held the glass close to historical events, could surely magnify and vivify them. But it was open to the serious

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charge of being too narrow in its focus. Almost from the beginning of historical writing, voices were raised calling for a broader treatment of events. The first great historian to advocate Universal History, as this broad view came to be called, was Polybius, a Greek-born Roman historian of the second century B.C. (Shotwell 1910:529). Polybius was convinced that in the restricted conventional histories of the period, many of the important general trends in human affairs remained undescribed and unexplained. Thus, he wrote: “It is impossible to obtain from the monographs of historical specialists a comprehensive view of the morphology of Universal History. By reading bald and isolated narrative of the transactions in Sicily and Spain, it is obviously impossible to realize and understand either the magnitude or the unity of the events in question” (Polybius 1964:138). In his own historical writing, Polybius attempted to go beyond such narrow bounds, advancing the claim that: “I have undertaken to record, not some particular group of events, but those that have occurred throughout the world, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that I have projected my historical work upon a larger scale than any of my predecessors” (Polybius 1964:137). During the Middle Ages, this objective in the writing of history was all but forgotten, the sole exception being the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who in 1377 wrote a Prolegomena to Universal History. As the Renaissance began to unfold two centuries later, we find Jean Bodin entertaining a rudimentary notion of universal history. Thus, according to John B. Bury, Bodin “speaks repeatedly of the world as a universal state, and suggests that the various races, by their peculiar aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common good of the whole” (1960:44). But it was Giambattista Vico who, almost two hundred years after Bodin, took what is often regarded as the first step toward a broadgauged approach to the writing of history when in 1725 he composed his major work, The Principles of a New Science of the Nature of Nations (1970). In this novel way of treating history, as Vico envisioned it: “There will then be fully unfolded before us, not the particular history in time of the laws and deeds of the Romans or the Greeks, but (by virtue of the identity of the intelligible substance in the diversity of their modes of development) the ideal history of the eternal laws which are instanced by the deeds of all nations in their rise, progress, maturity, decadence, and dissolution” (1970:372–373; emphasis in the original). Immanuel Kant also felt drawn to a large treatment of the past, confident that such treatment would reap a rich harvest in depth of understanding. Although phrased in somewhat metaphysical terms,

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his intent was clear. He declared that “a philosophical attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind, must be regarded as possible and even as capable of furthering the purpose of nature itself” (1989:51). But while advocating such a history, he never seriously attempted to carry it out (Fukuyama 1995:13). The next distinguished name in the ranks of those calling for a Universal History was Voltaire. Voltaire’s conception of such a history “embraced all civilizations in the world without prejudice or parochial purpose” (Gay 1969:392). However, along with his fellow philosophes, he felt that in order to lay the groundwork for a Universal History it was first necessary to prune away what had hitherto passed for it. Thus, authentic universality in history, he held, “became possible only through unmasking the fraudulent universality of Christian historians—that myopic parochialism masquerading as world history” (Gay 1969:392). (What Voltaire had principally in mind here was Bishop Bossuet’s famous Discourse on Universal History, 1681, which is dealt with in a later chapter.) Despite his contributions to Universal History, since Voltaire is even more appropriately discussed in connection with Cultural History, I postpone a fuller treatment of him until later in this chapter. Even in an enlightened age, Universal History was not to everyone’s taste, however. Auguste Comte, who followed Voltaire in many respects, did not endorse his advocacy of a truly universal history. In dealing with history, Bury tells us, Comte “deprecated the introduction of China or India, for instance, as a confusing complication. He ignored the rôles of Brahmanism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism. His synthesis, therefore, cannot claim to be a synthesis of universal history; it is only a synthesis of the movement of European history“ (1960:294). Among mid-nineteenth century writers, Henry Thomas Buckle was by far the staunchest advocate of Universal History, at the same time that he lamented that it was not being done. The unfortunate peculiarity of the history of man is, that although its separate parts have been examined with considerable ability, hardly anyone has attempted to combine them into a whole, and ascertain the way in which they are connected with each other. In all other great fields of inquiry the necessity of generalization is universally admitted, and noble efforts are being made to rise from particular facts in order to discover the laws by which those facts are governed. So far, however, is this from being the usual course of historians, that among them a strange idea prevails that their business is merely to relate events.(1904:2)

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Leopold von Ranke is usually associated with a narrow, earthbound empiricism in the writing of history, focusing on concrete events and failing to lift his eyes to behold the broad panorama. And indeed, Ranke asserted that “the study of particulars, even of a single detail, has its value.... Concerned with human affairs, it will always reveal something of immediate interest; even when dealing with minutiae, it is instructive, since everything human is worth knowing” (1972b:61). But Ranke also pointed out that history should not restrict itself to the discrete and the minute. The specialized study of individual events, he held, was not the be-all and end-all of history, Such specialized studies will always be related to a larger context; even local history will be related to the history of the whole country, a biography to the history of a major event in church and state, to an epoch of national or universal history. But all these epochs themselves . . . belong in turn to the entire whole which we call universal history. The study of these epochs in a wider context is of a correspondingly greater value. The final goal—not yet attained— always remains the conception and composition of a history of mankind.(1972b:61) Ranke often spoke of the ideal of pursuing universal history, and “hoped to crown the labors of a lifetime with the famous Weltgeschichte, . . .” but in fact he never completed it (Butterfield 1960:44). In actuality, his historical writings embraced little more than Europe, and not all of that continent at that (Butterfield 1960:103–116). While precious little Universal History was in fact attempted during the nineteenth century, historians continued to extoll it as an ideal. In his letter to the Contributors to the Cambridge Modern History, a work of which he was the chief architect, Lord Acton wrote: By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind. (1972:249) As the nineteenth century drew to a close, historians continued to advocate the pursuit of Universal History. Some who had never attempted it, to say nothing of achieving it, nonetheless felt that writing such a history was a worthy objective. Thus, Henri Pirenne, who had

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written a history of Belgium and a history of Europe, maintained that “the final goal of history is to write the history of mankind” (1955:xv). James Bryce (19011, xxi) saw the writing of history on such a grand scale as embracing the peoples and cultures of the whole world: What do we mean by Universal History? Briefly: a History which shall (first) include all the races and tribes of man within its scope, and (secondly) shall bring all these races and tribes into a connection with one another such as to display their annals as an organic whole. Universal History has to deal not only with the great nations, but also with the small nations; not only with the civilized, but also with the barbarous or savage peoples; not only with the times of movement and progress, but also with the times of silence and apparent stagnation. One of the few universal histories actually attempted was H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, first published in 1920, a book enormously popular in its day but now all but forgotten. Universal History, said Wells (1921:v), does not “consist of the history of England, plus the history of France, plus the history of Germany, plus the history of Russia, and so on.... Universal history is at once something more and something less than the aggregate of the national histories to which we are accustomed.” What Wells had in mind was that Universal History should comprise not masses of repetitive accounts of the past events of each country, but rather a selection of the common elements occurring in the combined histories of the greater portion of mankind. Wells’s Universal History thus sought to extract recurring elements from the particularities of individual histories and to bring into bold relief whatever overarching trends and tendencies they manifested. Well into the twentieth century, Universal History continued to have its supporters. In 1913, Carl Becker (p. 89) wrote: “To exhibit the growth of civilization, to trace the evolution of society—most historians today would probably agree that the ultimate aim of history is to do something of that sort.” During the next decade, Harry Elmer Barnes, while lamenting “the episodical and anecdotal political, military and diplomatic history which still constitutes the dominant ideal of the respectable historian of our generation” (1927:330), which he regarded as “hopelessly anachronistic and futile in explaining the genesis of man and his works” (1927:341), nonetheless felt certain that “it is becoming more and more apparent that modern synthetic and dynamic history must be world-his tory“ (192 7: 3 93). In their article “History“ in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,

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the French historians Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre continued to call for “the replacement of the idea of particular histories by the broad and salutary idea of a universal history.” And they affirmed that “the final goal of the historian is not to make known certain groups of men at certain periods, but humanity in the totality of its representations” (1932:367). Arnold Toynbee’s twelve-volume work, A Study of History, if not a synthesis of the general flow of world events, is at least a close-order analysis of parallel developments in it, based on the principle that “in order to understand the parts we must first focus our attention upon the whole” (1947:5). Despite repeated calls for it, Universal History never really materialized. It was much envisioned but little achieved. By 1960, Herbert Butterfield frankly admitted that “Universal History has ceased to hold a prominent place in our interests, presumably because it spreads the mind over so wide an area that the knowledge can hardly avoid becoming too thin” (1960:44). Thus, historians had come to the conclusion that “instead of setting out to disperse their interest in equal proportion over all the quarters of the globe,” it was better to “intensify their focus and multiply their observations as the scene comes nearer home” (Butterfield 1960:115). Years earlier, Butterfield had already staked out what he thought the historian’s proper field should be, and made clear what a narrow precinct that was: “The historian is concerned with the concrete and as is at home in the world of facts and people and happenings.... Accidents and conjectures and curious juxtapositions of events are the very stuff of his story. All his art is to recapture a moment and seize upon particulars and fasten down a contingency” (Butterfield 1965:65–66). But what Butterfield held out almost as a virtue in the historian’s approach was, from an anthropologist’s perspective, more of a shortcoming. The fact of the matter was that, reared in the bosom of European history, most professional historians lacked the global knowledge and comparative perspective needed to undertake the writing of a truly Universal History. As we shall see in a later chapter, it was not until anthropology entered the scene that the tools and ideas for a work of this breadth became available.

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL HISTORY The type of history most commonly written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, by almost any yardstick, narrow. And it was

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narrow in two ways. First of all, it often included the events of only a single nation and, at that, usually restricted its coverage to a limited period of that country‘s past. Second, it was narrow in the kinds of events it depicted. Most of the histories written during this period focused on military and political affairs, reflecting Edward A. Freeman’s (1886:148) oft-quoted dictum that “history is past politics.” However, dissatisfaction with such a limited portrayal of history was already rising, even among men of letters outside of history. William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, put into the mouth of the protagonist of his novel Henry Esmond (1852) the following complaint: “The Muse of History has encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of the Theatre. She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks to measure. She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only of kings; waiting on them obsequiously ..., as if she were but a mistress of court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of the common people” (1950:21). The fictional Henry Esmond then goes on to propose a very different course for historical writing: Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for having her rise up off her knees, and take a natural posture: not to be forever performing cringes and congees like a courtchamberlain, and shuffling backwards out of doors in the presence of the sovereign. In a word, I would have history familiar rather than heroic: and think that Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the Court Gazette. (1950:22) Accounts of the past that centered on royal pageantry and heroic deeds also troubled the English historian, J. R. Green (quoted in Stern 1972:26), who derided them as “drum and trumpet histories.” Referring to the “political historian,” Thomas Carlyle (1972a:97), wrote, “From of old, it was too often to be reproachfully observed of him that he dwelt with disproportionate fondness in Senate-houses, in Battle-fields, nay, even in Kings’ Antechambers; forgetting, that far away from such scenes, the mighty tide of Thought and Action was still rolling on its wondrous course.” More than two centuries before Carlyle there were already occasional grumblings about the narrow compass of what passed for historical writing. Sir Francis Bacon was perhaps the first to give voice to this feeling. According to Preserved Smith, Bacon called for a history that “should tell the origins, progress, and migrations of the arts and sciences through diverse regions, and also their periods of decline, obliv-

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ion, and rebirth. Such a history should describe the chief controversies and schools of thought, name the principal authors, best books, universities, academies, circles, and orders of a flourishing and of a languishing learning; it should discover the accidents, times, and institutions propitious and those hostile to culture....” “Truly a noble and a comprehensive plan,” Smith remarked, “but one ... far ahead of the time in which it was written” (P. Smith 1962:231). Another early voice crying in the wilderness for a cultural history was Tomasso Campanella (1568–1639), an Italian philosopher and monk who, in his Rationalis Philosophiae, called for historians to go beyond the mere recounting of political changes, and to describe as well “the manners of the age . . . the food, medicine, and arms of the people, their money, edifices, and inventions in the arts” (quoted in P. Smith 1962:230). Almost a century later, the French theologian and writer, Francois de Fénelon, complained that the “dry and sad maker of annals knows no other order than that of chronology,” and held that it was more important by far to “observe the changes in the nation as a whole than to relate particular facts” (quoted in Becker 1964:91). But the one who, by all odds, exercised the greatest influence in changing the way of writing about the past was Voltaire. This new manner of history was proclaimed and exemplified especially in Voltaire’s The Age of LouisXIV (1757) and The Philosophy of History (1765). The second of these works, though criticized by Harry Elmer Barnes (1940a:548) as “an overly ambitious project for the times” and as “highly arbitrary in its selection of material,” was nonetheless hailed by him as “the first history of civilization worthy of the name ever penned.” And Jacques Barzun (1972:401) declared that “with his Essay on the Manners and Customs of Nations, plumb in the middle of the [eighteenth] century, Voltaire is the fountainhead of every successful movement to create a new and encyclopedic history.” (The story is told that in the Paris salon of Madame du Deffand, someone once accused Voltaire of lacking originality, to which the lady replied, What more would you have? He has invented history!” [Roberts 1927:367].) Voltaire had long been dissatisfied with history as it was then customarily written. As early as 1744, he complained: People are very careful to report what day a certain battle took place.... They print treaties, they describe the pomp of a coronation, the ceremony of receiving the Cardinal’s hat, and even the entrance of an ambassador, forgetting neither his Swiss soldiers

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nor his lackeys. It is a good thing to have archives on everything, that one might consult them when necessary....But after I have read three or four thousand descriptions of battles, and the terms of some hundreds of treaties, I have found that fundamentally I am scarcely better instructed than I was before. From these things I learn only events. (quoted in Gay 1969:393–394) (Voltaire would thus have concurred with the judgment of his fellow French historian, Fernand Braudel [1995:xxiii], two centuries later, that events were but “crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”) What Voltaire found most illuminating in the record of the past was not a dreary catalog of battles fought or treaties signed. Instead, he wrote: “A lock on the canal that joins . . . two seas, a painting by Poussin, a fine tragedy, are things a thousands times more precious than all the court annals and all the campaign reports put together” (quoted in Gay 1969:393). Assessing Voltaire’s accomplishments in the writing of history, Fritz Stern (1972:35) summed them up as follows: “Rebelling against the prevailing ideals and forms of historiography—against supernatural history, narrow political or biographical chronicles, and the uncritical acceptance of ancient historians—he proposed and produced a secular and naturalistic history which would depict the life and spirit of peoples, their art, science and politics.” In his introduction to The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire (1972c:43–44) prepared his audience for what was to follow: The reader must not expect to find here the exhaustive detail of wars, of towns besieged, taken and retaken by force of arms, given and regained by treaty. A thousand incidents of interest to contemporaries are lost in the eyes of posterity. They disappear, and disclose only the very great events that settle the destinies of empires. Not everything that is done deserves recording. In this history, only that which merits the attention of the ages will be dealt with—that which depicts the genius and manners of men. Voltaire had projected writing The Age of Louis XlV a full two decades before it actually appeared. And in a letter to the Abbé Jean Baptiste Dubos, written on October 30,1738, he told of the aims of this work: “For a long time now I have been collecting materials for writing the history of Louis XIV. It is not the life of the king I mean to write, nor is it the annals of his reign; it is rather the history of the human mind,

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examined in the century that sheds the most glory” (Voltaire 1972b:38). Voltaire then went on to describe his plans for the cultural sections of this work: “With regard to the arts and sciences, I think all that is needed is to trace the onward march of the human mind in philosophy, oratory, poetry and criticism; to show the progress of painting, sculpture, and music; of jewelry, tapestry making, glassblowing, gold-cloth weaving, and watchmaking” (quoted in Stern 1972:504n.). Clearly, Voltaire was ready to paint on a large canvas. And he did so with wonderful effect. As William Milligan Sloane put it, “By the sheer force of historic doubt he destroyed many a myth, by the seductions of a graceful style and the stings of a biting sarcasm he relegated the millinery of human life to the rummage chambers where it belongs” (1906:25). All well and good. But what we have in the writings of Voltaire— Madame du Deffand to the contrary notwithstanding—should not be considered the invention of a wholly new mode of writing history by a solitary genius. As Henry Thomas Buckle (1911:II, 243) was to say, “What proves this to be a movement arising as much from the spirit of the age [read: “the culture of the time”] as from the individual author, is, that we find precisely the same tendency in the works of Montesquieu and Turgot.” And James Harvey Robinson (1965:37) later noted that the numerous philosophies of history that appeared in the eighteenth century “were the outcome of a desire to seize and explain the general trend of man’s past.” Thus, we can say that Voltaire represented the convergence and culmination of an approach to history that had been quietly germinating before it finally burst on the scene. If he did not actually invent it, Voltaire certainly gave great impetus to what we now call social or cultural history. And in the spirit of Voltaire, Auguste Comte, coming after him, went so far as to assert that proper history could “only be a history without names of men, even without names of peoples,” a history of the development of customs and institutions, which were the product of anonymous cultural forces (quoted in Breisach 1994:274). In the decades immediately following, no one gave clearer expression to this new and invigorated way of recounting history than Thomas Babington Macaulay. In 1828, at the age of twenty-eight, the precocious Macaulay wrote an essay, “History,” which appeared in the Edinburgh Review. In this essay, he set forth the essence of cultural history, contrasting it with the prevailing way in which history had been portrayed, where politics and wars took center stage. Of the silent movements in history, which Macaulay felt were its most important yet least described components, he wrote:

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The circumstances which have most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides. (n.d.:90) In this pronouncement, written before he was thirty, Macaulay clearly foreshadowed how he himself would write history when, twenty years later, he began his magnum opus, The History of England From the Accession of James II. In his essay, “History,” Macaulay (n.d.:91) laid out with his customary clarity and vividness the groundplan for the writing ofhistory that he thought the ideal historian should follow. “The early part of our imaginary history,” he said, “would be rich with colouring from romance, ballad, and chronicle. We should find ourselves in the company of knights such as those of Froissart, and of pilgrims such as those who rode with Chaucer from the Tabard. Society would be shown from the highest to the lowest—from the royal cloth of state to the den of the outlaw.” It is not clear if, at the age of twenty-eight, Macaulay already aspired to be that “ideal historian” of which he wrote. However, in 1848, when he produced the first volume of his great History of England, he followed his own prescription, writing in the introduction: I should very imperfectly execute the task which I have undertaken if I were merely to treat of battles and sieges, of the rise and fall of administrations, of intrigues in the palace, and of debates in the parliament. It will be my endeavour to relate the history of the people as well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious sects and the changes of literary taste, to portray the manners of successive generations, and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements. (1931:I, 2–3) Despite his conviction that he was following the proper course, Macaulay evidently expected the censure of his colleagues, for to the passage just quoted, he appended the words, “I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history, if I can

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succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors” (n.d.:3). From our point of view, the most notable feature of the first volume of his History, was Chapter Three, in whose hundred-odd pages, as we have already seen, Macaulay described in detail the social life of England in the year 1685. It might not be going too far to say that this represents the first succinct ethnography of a European nation ever consigned to print. This justly famous third chapter continues to command the praises of historians to this very day. John Clive (1989:19) declared that Macaulay’s “marvelous description of English society ... remains a milestone in the writing of social history.” In much the same words, John Higham (1989:156) remarked that it “gave a model of how social history might be written.” And Peter Gay (1974:117) pronounced it “an immense leap beyond the occasional forays that David Hume made into social history, and an advance beyond the brilliant intuitions that Voltaire had offered.” “Chapter 3,” Gay concluded, “permitted social history to become a serious discipline.” It is probably no coincidence that one of the worthiest successors to Macaulay in writing social history—as he was in writing polished prose-washis grandnephew, George M. Trevelyan. In perhaps his best-known work, English Social History (1942), Trevelyan took Freeman’s famous dictum and stood it on its head, affirming that social history is “the history of a people with the politics left out” (quoted in Himmelfarb 1987:15; emphasis in the original). We noted earlier that H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History was an attempt at writing universal history. It was also an exercise in cultural history. Wells tells us in his introduction that the book deals with “many topics of quite primary interest to mankind, the first appearance and the growth of scientific knowledge for example, and its effects upon human life, the elaboration of the idea of money and credit, ... the story of the origin and spread and influence of Christianity” (1921:vi). Consciously choosing to emphasize broad trends rather than the achievements of particular individuals, Wells, when he came to speak of political leaders, often measured them according to whether they had furthered or retarded general social movements. With this as his criterion, Wells was especially severe in his judgment of Napoleon, who, having had an incomparable opportunity to advance the institutional development of France, had failed, Wells thought, to take proper advantage of it. Thus, he wrote: “so weary was France with her troubles and efforts [after the French Revolution], and so confident were men in the virtue and ability of this adventurer from Corsica, that when, at the birth of the nineteenth century, ... [a radically new] constitution was

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submitted to the country, it was carried by 3,011,007 votes to 1,562. France put herself absolutely in Bonaparte’s hands, and prepared to be peaceful, happy, and glorious” (1921:898). Unquestionably, then, here was a unique chance for statesman-like actions to produce extraordinary results: The old order of things was dead or dying; strange new forces drove through the world seeking form and direction; the promise of a world republic and an enduring world peace whispered in a multitude of startled minds. Had this man any profundity of vision, any power of creative imagination, had he been accessible to any disinterested ambition, he might have done work for mankind that would have made him the very sun of history, All Europe and America, stirred by the first promise of a new age, was waiting for him. Not France alone. France was in his hand, his instrument, to do with as he pleased, willing for peace, but tempered for war like an exquisite sword. There lacked nothing to this great occasion but a noble imagination. And failing that, Napoleon could do no more than strut upon the crest of this great mountain of opportunity like a cockerel on a dunghill. (1921:898) To be sure, it was not only in England that the writing of cultural history was acclaimed and undertaken. In Germany, for instance, it was actively practiced under the name of Kulturgeschichte. In France, the writing of cultural history was the stated objective of a group of historians who came to be known as the Annales school, after the title of the journal—Annales d’histoire économique et sociale— founded in 1929 by their leaders, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, professors at the University of Strasbourg. “The task of the two Strasbourg professors,” wrote Richard Mayne, ”was crystal clear: to go out among the other disciplines, return with the booty, and set forth again on the quest of discovery, demolishing obstructing walls at each occasion” (1995:xix). Of their achievement, Fernand Braudel, one of their disciples, was later to say: “They were conscious of labouring toward an absolutely new and even revolutionary history. Their means were relatively simple. History was for them one human science” (1995:xviii). Scholars who wrote for the Annales “tried to look at society with the eyes of ethnographers, while at the same time remaining historians” (Gurevich 1992:28). They tended to “concern themselves with what is recurrent, or at least comparable, in the history of past societies ... rather than with what is unique” (Day 1976:ix), their focus being “concentrated on the life of the widest strata of society” (Gurevich 1992:29).

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Searching for historical recurrences was, however, only one way members of the Annales school approached history. They aimed also to weave a rich, thick tapestry of the past, using threads of many colors drawn not only from traditional historical sources, but also from many other scholarly disciplines. Lucien Febvre had exhorted them: “Historians, you must become geographers. You must also be lawyers, sociologists and psychologists,” and on the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Annales, Fernand Braudel reiterated that the objective of the journal was “to maintain history‘s essential place as the obvious meeting point of all the social sciences” (quoted in Aymard 1972:504, 505). In England, the Cambridge historian John B. Bury proclaimed as an ideal a mode of writing history “in which every form of social life and every manifestation of intellectual development should be set forth in its relation to the rest, in its significance for growth or decline” (1972: 222). More recently, the American historian Morton G. White observed that during this century, “the tendency of historians ... has been to stress the fact that history is a study of social or cultural phenomena” (1943:226). So widely accepted, in fact, did the aims of cultural history become that in certain quarters it was fashionable to exalt the new history by lampooning the old. Thus, the Spanish writer Eduardo Gómez de Baquero remarked: “A pot, a poem, religious or erotic, a mildewed weapon, and, in more recent times, a novel, contain more historic substance, or at least historic substance of higher quality, than the papers zealously guarded in the archives by men whose spirits and whose bald pates have yellowed and stiffened like the parchments they watch over” (quoted in Birlán 1954:73).

THE NEW HISTORY In some respects, social or cultural history reached its flowering in the United States early in the twentieth century in a movement that called itself “The New History.” Most intimately associated with this movement were such distinguished names as James Harvey Robinson, James T. Shotwell, Charles A. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Carl L. Becker. For these historians, said Turner, “history is past literature, it is past politics, it is past religion, it is past economics.’’ In short, “history is the biography of society” (Turner 1972:200). In the hands of the New Historians, history radically changed its traditional emphasis from biographical events to cultural forms and general processes. By all odds, the most ardent and articulate spokesman of “The New

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History” was James Harvey Robinson. Robinson (1965:2) disdained the conventional way of writing books on the past in which “a dissipated courtier may be alloted a chapter and the destruction of a race left unrecorded.” As early as 1903, in his Introduction to the History of Western Europe, Robinson wrote: We gain practically nothing from the mere enumeration of events and dates. The student of history wishes to know how people lived; what were their institutions . . . , their occupations, interests and achievements” (1903:2). And in the blurb appearing at the back of that volume—no doubt written by Robinson himself—the book was described as “distinctive in omitting all isolated, uncorrelated facts and in placing the emphasis on movements, customs, institutions, and achievements that have genuine significance in the history of Western civilization and development. It gives due consideration to economic, social, and intellectual questions as well as to political changes.” The major treatise of this school, describing how it proposed to deal with history, was Robinson’s immensely popular The New History, first published in 1912. In its pages, Robinson (1912:15) left no doubt as to how the new history would differ from the old: Hitherto writers have been prone to deal with events for their own sake; a deeper insight will surely lead us, as time goes on, to reject the anomalous and seemingly accidental occurrences and dwell rather upon those which illustrate some profound historical truth. And there is a very simple principle by which the relevant and useful may be determined and the irrelevant rejected. Is the fact or occurrence one which will aid the reader to grasp the meaning of any great period of human development or the true nature of any momentous institution? The sense of history as comprising an enormous variety of cultural forms undergoing a process of transformation was vividly conveyed by Robinson in the following passage from The New History: “Every human institution, every generally accepted idea, every important invention is but the summation of long lines of progress, reaching back as far as we have the patience or means to follow them. The jury, the drama, the Gatling gun, the papacy, the letter S, the doctrine of stare decisis, each owes its present form to antecedents which can be scientifically traced” (1912:64). In much the same vein, Edward P. Cheyney, a later practitioner of “The New History,” wrote in the introduction to his book, A Short History of England (1919): “I have tried to select from the mass of historical detail what was significant rather than what was merely conspicuous,—what either gave shape and character to a considerable

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period of history, or was a clearly marked step in the general development of the nation. Detached episodes and merely striking occurrences, especially those in the field of military history, have been hastened over in order that more attention might be given to the really great movements” (p. iii). In the decade that followed, “The New History” caught on to such an extent that in a later essay Cheyney (1927:159–160) felt confident in proclaiming that “history is no longer a narrative of the doings of kings and statesmen and prelates and generals; it considers merchants and artisans, farmers and explorers, students and vagabonds.” Writing cultural history became as widely accepted in England as in the United States, being regarded as the hallmark of sound professional work. Thus, we find G. R. Elton (1970:132) remarking that “to write a narrative of emperors and popes is to do very little justice to the realities of history.” And, he continued, “The current preference for what is called social history demands a progressive analysis and account of societies at all their levels and in their multifarious appearances, not only as agents of political action but also as producers of wealth, harbourers of internal conflict, promoters of intellectual enterprises,” and so forth. Returning to the United States, we find Thomas C. Cochran, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, noting in 1957 that “American historians are moving rapidly toward recognition of culture as the best organizing principle for their syntheses. So far only a few books on United States history deal expressly with cultural analysis, but the large and growing interdisciplinary field of American Civilization is coming to have culture as its central focus” (p. 229). Scarcely more than a decade later, Gabriel Jackson (1969:24), Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, could say that “today the textbooks used all over Europe and the United States contain chapters on the scientific, cultural, and artistic accomplishments of the periods and nations with which they deal.” An offshoot of cultural history, or perhaps a development collateral to it, was a line of inquiry known as institutional history. As John Fiske, among others, had observed in the nineteenth century, “The study of sociology ... is primarily concerned with institutions rather than with individuals” (1881:82; emphasis in the original). Accordingly, those historians who were strongly influenced by sociology began to focus their attention on the growth of social institutions rather than on the achievements of celebrated soldiers or statesmen. This trend was particularly evident in the United States. As John Higham noted in his survey of American historiography, “To study institutions was to study the mor-

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phology of history, to trace through time the skeleton of a society as biologists were tracing the underlying structure of other organisms” (1989:159). Thus did historians acquire the feeling that they were dealing with what really mattered. Needless to say, this last “face” of history, which looks to the broad spectrum of culture as its most fruitful subject matter, is the one that cultural anthropologists find most congenial. Robinson, along with his colleagues and followers, aspired to move history into the ranks of the social sciences, and in certain respects, they came close to their goal. In Chapter 6, we examine the great debate that for more than a century has raged among historians as to whether history can be, or should be, a science. In the next chapter, though, we examine some of the obstacles lying in the path of historians as they sought to find a measure of order and a general progression in the large body of facts they were unearthing and recording.

Chapter

3

The Thorny Thickets of History

H

to find some intelligible order in past events must wrestle with many issues in their quest. In this chapter, I discuss four major issues that raise impediments, or at least provide complications, for the historian seeking regularities: ISTORIANS ANXIOUS

1. 2. 3. 4.

Free will versus determinism Moral judgments in history Contingency in history Historical relativism

FREE WILL VERSUS DETERMINISM The problem of free will is perhaps the thorniest of the lot—or at least the most basic. Its resolution is fundamental not only to history but also to anything aspiring to the rank of social science. Historians, moreover, have long been aware of this. More than a century ago, James Anthony Froude saw the issue clearly and faced it squarely when he wrote: “When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralized by what is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of him. If there is a science of him there is no free choice” (1867:ii). And in his System of Logic, the philosopher John Stuart Mill (1930:607–608) perceived the matter in much the same light: Among the impediments to the general acknowledgment, by thoughtful minds, of the subjection of historical facts to scientific laws, the most fundamental continues to be that which is grounded on the doctrine of Free Will, or, in other words, on the 47

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denial that the law of invariable Causation holds true of human volitions; for if it does not, the course of history, being the result of human volitions, cannot be a subject of scientific laws, since the volitions on which it depends can neither be foreseen nor reduced to any canon of regularity even after they have occurred. With few exceptions, when faced with the dichotomy between determinism and free will, historians have come down on the side of free will. Or at best, like Goldwin Smith, they have equivocated. Thus, Smith (1904:512) wrote that “human history may be the subject of philosophy; the subject of science it can hardly be if the human will is free.” And was it free? Well, said Smith, action must be preceded by volition, and volition in turn had to have antecedents. But the conclusion he reached was that it was “difficult, probably impossible, to designate the exact relation between them,” and hence he found the whole matter a “puzzle,” to which he could offer no satisfactory solution. Why have historians, who deal so intimately with the thread of cause and effect running through events, nevertheless tended to deny determinism in human affairs? They have done so, it seems to me, largely because they found quite unpalatable what determinism implies. Charles A. Beard (1935:14) put it bluntly when he said: “Should mankind discover the law of its total historical unfolding, then it would be imprisoned in its own fate, and powerless to change it; the past, present, and future would be revealed as fixed and beyond the reach of human choice and will. Men and women would be chained to their destinies as the stars and tides are to their routine.” And to many historians, just as it surely was to Beard, this was a disheartening prospect. As James Martineau had written, “In a world of mere ‘general laws,’ it would ever remain a melancholy thing to see living heroes and saints struck down at the altar of ‘historical tendency’ by some shadowy dagger of necessity” (quoted in Houghton 1957:337). By rejecting determinism, historians could rejoice in the open vista that free will seemed to afford them. This is what enticed Leopold von Ranke (1972b:60) when he declared that “human freedom makes its appearance everywhere, and the greatest attraction of history lies in the fact that it deals with the scenes of this freedom.” The opinion is widely held that a belief in determinism kills the joy of life. Listen, for instance, to the English professor and humanist, Joseph Wood Krutch (1952:218), who holds that “the experience of living is the thing which . . . has the greatest value, and . . . all the social sciences which tend to manipulate and regularize and unify human conduct result in a general lowering of the intensity of the experience . . .

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and ... therefore, from my standpoint, they are bad.” Thomas Carlyle (1972a:97) was of like mind, inveighing against “that class of cause-andeffect speculators, with whom no wonder would remain, but all things in Heaven and Earth must be computed and ‘accounted for.’” Some historians have contended that the tangled web of history itself bore evidence of the existence of free will. Friedrich Meinecke (1972:269), for one, felt that “the spontaneous acts of men . . . interrupt, divert, intensify, or weaken the morphology of events and so impart to history that complexity and singularity which makes a mockery of all attempts to explain it by invariable laws.” And, of course, not historians alone, but artists, writers, and humanists are generally dedicated believers in free will. William James (1880:442), for one, stated flatly, “I believe in free will myself,” and Samuel Johnson once told the faithful Boswell, with his usual selfassurance, “Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t” (Boswell 1934:II, 82; emphasis in the original). But is that the end of it? Let us take a close look at the issue and see what sort of case can be made against free will and for determinism. First of all, we should note that on another occasion, Dr. Johnson himself made a much more perceptive comment on the matter: “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it” (Boswell 1934:291). This statement can be taken to mean that regardless of the force of any arguments against it, one certainly has the feeling of enjoying free will. I can decide to raise my hand or not, just as I choose. But, compelling as this assertion may appear, it would not be the first time that a feeling, however “real,” turned out to be an illusion. Lack of awareness of the determinants of one’s actions is no guarantee that they do not exist. Before proceeding further in our discussion of determinism versus free will, let us first distinguish clearly between determinism and fatalism. The two, often confused and conflated, are nonetheless separate and distinct. Reduced to its bare essentials, determinism says that Event A will occur because of the presence of a certain set of antecedent conditions. That is to say, Event A will invariably occur if and only if those antecedent conditions are present. Fatalism, on the other hand, asserts something quite different. It holds that Event A will occur regardless of antecedent conditions! It is simply preordained or fated to happen. Clearly, determinism is a scientific concept, whereas fatalism is a metaphysical one. We can embrace the former and at the same time reject the latter. Few clear distinctions between the two are to be found in print, but here, in the words of Harry Elmer Barnes (1928:51) is one of them:

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“One should, of course, differentiate sharply between determinism and fatalism, which are often confused but are fundamentally different in nature. Determinism means that nothing happens arbitrarily but always as the result of a definite chain of causation in harmony with scientific laws.... Fatalism implies exactly the opposite, namely, that something is predestined to happen in some particular fashion at a given time wholly independent of antecedent or predisposing circumstances.’’ With that much settled, let us turn to the arguments in favor of the operation of determinism over free will in human history. Leo Tolstoy, one of the few men of letters to openly embrace determinism, in War and Peace stated in simple words one of the arguments in its favor: “If the will of every man were free, ... all history would be a series of disconnected accidents” (1978:1426). And so it would. But the fact is, much as we are impressed by the idiosyncratic and the unexpected, we are surrounded by vast amounts of order and regularity in human behavior that simply would not exist but for the systematic workings of cause and effect. Were the will really free, anyone could behave any way at any time. The very existence of words such as habit, custom, and tradition amount to a de facto recognition, imbedded in everyday speech, of a constraint on spontaneity and freedom in much of what we do. Thus, I find it difficult to disagree with Thomas Henry Huxley (1895:285) that “chance has no more place in the world of mind, than it has in that of matter. Sensations, emotions, intellections are subject to an order, as strict and inviolable as that which obtains among material things.” And I might add here Albert Einstein’s observation: “I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity” (quoted in Morris 1984:77). Consider what free will really signifies. It means that human behavior, or some part of it, is not the result of antecedent conditions but is independent of them. Now, if behavior is independent of antecedents, there is nothing left to constrain it. It can be anything at all. And this is most certainly not the case. The patterns of daily behavior we see around us are, without question, much more consistent with determinism than they are with free will. Let us for the moment engage in a little introspection. Whenever we have a decision to make, what do we do? We consider all the alternatives. We weigh the various possible courses of action, one against the other. And the outcome of this process—that is, what our actual behavior turns out to be—is best understood as the end product of a psychological tug-of-war among the various considerations present in our minds. John Fiske (1868:28) put the matter this way: “However nu-

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merous or complicated the forces at work, from whatever source the motives to action or inaction arise, whatever be the nature of the incentives to one kind of conduct or to some other kind, it is equally true that the result depends upon their comparative strength. Indeed, since forces can be measured only by their effects, to say that of two motives one is followed by volition [or better, action] is to call that motive the stronger one." Yet the overwhelming number of writers who have expressed their views on the subject seem to agree with Joseph Wood Krutch that a belief in determinism takes all the joy out of life, that it robs one of the feeling of spontaneity and creativity. And to be deprived of that feeling would be anathema to most people, especially to artists. One can predict, in fact, that a great majority of artists are firm believers in free will. Indeed, it is determined that artists, for the most part, should believe in it! A few years ago, I became acquainted with an artist who painted a mural for an exhibit in the museum in which I work. During one of our conversations, we began to discuss the subject of free will, and later, when the artist left New York, we continued this discussion by mail. In pursuing the argument as it bears on artistic creativity, I wrote to him as follows: I say that whenever the artist creates, he is not acting outside the stream of causality. What he engenders is in no real way random, not really totally unforeseen and unaccountable. It is the product of lots of things that are swimming around in his psyche, conscious and unconscious. And—here's the kicker—I would argue that this is better than free will! Real free will would mean that what you produce is entirely out of your hands, entirely at the mercy of chance, whim, and caprice. How could such a state of affairs possibly be satisfying to an artist? Isn't it more congenial to you that your art be a kind of summation and expression of everything that has gone into you, than for it to be something in every way removed from it? No, let's face it, free will—real free will—is depersonalizing, a purely mechanical coin tossing. The kernel of this argument was neatly epitomized years ago by Edward Beesly (1861:170) when he asked, “Who feels his dignity humiliated because he is unable to choose whether he will believe that two and two make four?" Beesly then went on to answer another argument raised by the proponents of free will: "What if the individual choose to act in opposition to all the motives that would naturally influence him, just to show that his will is free? The simple answer is, that the satisfac-

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tion arising from the gratification of such a desire is the antecedent which results inevitably in the course adopted” (1861170). Let me cite yet another argument against free will from the writings of Bertrand Russell (1935:171). “People imagine,” said Russell, “that, if the will has causes, they may be compelled to do things that they do not wish to do. This is, of course, a mistake; the wish is the cause of the action, even if the wish itself has causes.” That is probably all that needs to be said on the subject of free will, but I would like to consider one more argument sometimes raised in its favor. The grave question has been asked: What happens to moral responsibility and right conduct if the will is not free? Sir Isaiah Berlin, for example, worried that if “social determinism” is true, and “if we begin to take it seriously, then, indeed, the changes in ... our notions, our attitudes toward one another, our views of history, of society and of everything else will be too profound to be even adumbrated. The concepts of praise and blame, innocence and guilt, and individual responsibility,’’ which are the foundations of social morality, “would collapse or disappear” (1954:75). But Sir Isaiah had evidently failed to think the matter through. Had he done so he would have come to realize that anyone adopting this argument will find it boomeranging against him. Under careful examination, it becomes apparent that the entire weight of the argument that right conduct requires the will to be free really comes down on the side of determinism and against free will. The best refutation of Berlin’s argument that I have encountered comes not from a philosopher but from the historian George Grote, whose monumental History of Greece was one of the classics of nineteenthcentury historical writing. Grote’s cogent line of argument ran as follows: The very reason for giving notice that we intend to punish certain acts, and for inflicting punishment if the acts be committed, is that we trust in the efficacy of the threat and the punishment as deterring motives. If the volition of agents be not influenced by motives, the whole machinery of law becomes unavailing, and punishment a purposeless infliction of pain. In fact it is on that very ground that the madman is exempted from punishment; his volition being presumed to be not capable of being acted upon by the deterring motive of legal sanction. The free agent, thus understood, is one who can neither feel himself accountable, nor be rendered accountable to or by others. It is only the necessary agent (the person whose volitions are determined by motives,...) that can be held really accountable, or can feel himself to be so. (quoted in Fiske 1903:I, 97; emphasis in the original)

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Historians, like everyone else, are aware that constraints on our actions—often very severe ones—are part and parcel of everyday life. Thus, whatever their theoretical pronouncements on the subject, they must ultimately reach some accommodation with the hard, ineluctable fact of determinism in human affairs. Some have reached this accommodation only grudgingly, inventing awkward and unconvincing arguments in a vain effort to reconcile cause and effect with human freedom. A quite telling example of such an attempt, in which the historian wriggles like a worm on a hook, appeared in Charles Kingsley’s (1864b:xxxii) “The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History,” his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge: “Man can not only disobey the laws of his being, he can also choose between them.. . . If he falls into the water, he has his choice whether he will obey the laws of gravity and sink, or by other laws perform the (to him) artificial process of swimming, and get ashore. True, both would happen by law: but he has his choice which law shall conquer, sink or swim.” This argument is, of course, ludicrous, not to say pathetic. A much more reasonable way of framing the issue was presented by Edward P. Cheyney (1927:25–26) in a volume entitled Law in History and Other Essays: “We are controlled at every turn by the natural laws of the world in which we dwell. And yet we feel free to act much as we choose. If our action is not entirely free it simulates freedom. We are so used to our limitations that it is only exceptionally that we feel them. Individually we find a wide field of activity within the limits that condition and to a great degree control our action. We are free to act, subject to irresistible law in the background.” Perhaps a word should be added here about the relationship between volition and actions in human behavior, The determinist does not deny that a person can (usually) make his choices effective. I choose to raise my arm and I do so. One could say, I was “free” to do so, but what the determinist insists on is that the choice to engage in any action, be it raising one’s arm or leading a charge to the death in a bloody battle, is itself strictly determined, however much it may seem to the individual that he is exercising personal choice, unconstrained by antecedents. Of all nineteenth-century theorists who dealt with the course of human history, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are generally regarded as the staunchest advocates of determinism. Thus, for example, in a passage that can be duplicated many times over in Marxist writings, Engels remarked: “Historical events appear to be wholly controlled by chance. But even where on the surface accident plays its part, it is always governed by inner, hidden laws” (quoted in Frank 1945:47). Examining Marxism more broadly, we find its position on free will

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versus determinism to be somewhat equivocal. While Marx and Engels were basically determinists, they nonetheless felt the need to accommodate “freedom” in their system. But how could this be done? By a simple modification of the ordinary meaning of the term. “Freedom,” wrote Engels, “is the recognition of necessity” (1907:147). Combating the common notion of “blind necessity,” Engels insisted that “necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood. Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence of natural laws but in a knowledge of these laws” (1907:147), and he looked forward to “the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” (1954:393). Reconciling free will and determinism was a high wire act that Marx and Engels deemed important to accomplish. Why so? In Marxist dialectics, a great deal of stress is placed on the notion of “contradictions.” And one of the greatest apparent contradictions with which Marx and Engels had to wrestle was that of freedom versus necessity. As “scientific socialists,” they appreciated the force of determinism in human history. But as revolutionaries, urging their followers to action, they had to leave room for spontaneous individual initiative against the constraints that bound them. If workers were to accept the notion of “historical laws” playing themselves out automatically, laws that would inexorably bring about change without the need for human exertion, this would surely breed an “enervating quietism.” And as dedicated revolutionists, Marx and Engels felt compelled to dispel such an attitude. So long as Marxism remained only a theory, an interpretation of how history had unfolded, it could afford to wave the banner of determinism. But as soon as it became a blueprint for the overthrow of the existing institutions of society and their replacement with new ones, its emphasis had to change. It had to assign the individual a creative role in the process and thus seek to mobilize his efforts for the cause. Inexorable laws of history might exist, but they could bring about the desired results only when implemented through human effort. And to recruit this effort, individuals must be made to feel the freedom to act. (This feeling was succinctly captured in Marx’s [1941:84] oft-quoted remark, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world ...; the point is to change it”.) Necessity, therefore, when spoken of at all, must no longer be pictured as blind, but as a seeing eye, guiding human action toward the desired goal. (All of this may have convinced and inspired the exploited masses, but it failed to impress Thomas Henry Huxley. With his usual impatience toward what he deemed philosophic sleight-of-hand, Huxley [1895:285] remarked, “For necessity is necessity, and whether it is blind or sharp-eyed is nothing to the purpose.”)

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This dynamic tension between freedom and necessity in Marxist thought has undergone an interesting evolution—almost a transmutation—in recent years. Theoretical Marxism now appears to the world with a much softer countenance, and the “iron laws of history” of which Marx and Engels spoke are being attenuated and disguised. Determinism is being put in the closet, and the doors are being opened for a great deal more play of individual freedom. Repeating the old formula, the contemporary Russian historian Aaron Gurevich (1992:15) tells us that “history is a process in which freedom and necessity interrelate dialectically,” but then he adds: Historical change is the result of human choice. In any situation, however static it may appear, someone will start something unprecedented, following the promptings of freedom, however circumscribed. The cultivation of wild grass or the domestication of animals, the invention of working tools, sculpting of statues, devising of magic spells, composition of prayers or songs, calls to revolt, drawing up of guild statutes, scientific discovery, all are the products of free will, of the activity of an individual or a social group. (1992:15–16) Moreover, these words do not by any means represent an isolated instance. Indeed, what has occurred is that neo–Marxist scholars have done to Marx what Marx claimed to have done to Hegel, namely, to have turned him on his head. For example, within the last few years, a serious Marxist scholar, Joseph Ferraro, has written an entire book, quoting extensively from original sources, in which he downplays the determinism of Marx and Engels, and tries to show that they actually countenanced a large measure of human freedom in the working out of history. In this respect, Marxist historians are becoming almost indistinguishable from their non-Marxist colleagues. We may reiterate here that in order to be successful, the leader of any social movement must instill in his followers the notion that history does not move by its own impetus but must be carried forward by the actions of individuals who are ready to take initiative and to demonstrate in the streets. Thus, during the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King declared: Nor must anyone assume that the problem [of racial discrimination] is almost solved and that people can therefore sit complacently by the wayside and await the coming of the inevitable. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.... The most superficial look at history shows that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals. With-

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out this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of ... social stagnation. (quoted in Lewis 1965:84) Let me try now to put the whole matter of determinism in human affairs in anthropological perspective. History can be thought of as the collective behavior, over time, of large masses of people. But the behavior of the masses is an aggregate of the behavior of particular individuals. And the actions of individuals are, in turn, the outcome of a complex interaction of motives within them. So that in the broadest sense, the processes governing history are a summation of all the factors that have operated on the persons taking part in historical events, leading them to do what they did, and not something else. Here, a useful analogy exists in what physicists call a parallelogram of forces. It will be recalled that in drawing such a diagram, the direction in which each force acts on a body is represented by a line pointing in that direction, while the magnitude of each force is indicated by the length of the line representing it. In the simplest parallelogram of forces, where only two forces are involved, the actual geometric parallelogram is created by drawing lines coincident with, and equal to, each of the two lines of force. A diagonal is then drawn from one acute angle of the parallelogram to the other—called the resultant—that at the same time shows the direction and the distance the body would move if subjected to these forces. An individual’s actions can be similarly analyzed. Actual behavior can be thought of as the psychological resultant of all the motives acting upon him. Then, by extension, this model can be applied to the behavior of an entire society involved in some historical event. What actually happens in history, then, can be thought of as a supersummation, a grand resultant, of all the forces at work on all the individuals participating in the course of events. The process is, of course, infinitely more complex than when only a single individual’s motives are involved. As Engels (Marx and Engels 1942:476), who used the same analogy, expressed it, “There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant— the historical event.” As an example of this process of disparate and sometimes opposing forces operating in an actual situation, consider the process by which the U.S. Congress passes a piece of legislation. Rarely does the legislation that is finally enacted represent the desires of a single constituency, let alone of one man. Rather, it is an averaging out, a compromise among a great many points of view. Each view has its champions, each exerts its influence on the form taken by the bill in some rough propor-

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tion to the strength of its advocates. By the time a bill passes both Houses of Congress, it is usually weighted down with amendments. Thus, the bill that ultimately passes and is signed into law is, in a very real sense, the resultant of many pushes and pulls, both Congressional and Executive, exerting pressure in their own direction, their influence being in proportion to their respective strengths. More broadly, we can say that the vast and complex series of factors and forces operating in history rarely exert their effect unalloyed. They are often so numerous, so intricate, and so evenly balanced, that it may be impossible to predict the outcome of the issue until the event is on the very brink of occurring. But the intricacy of determinism should not be taken for the lack of it. The whole canvas of history may be a tableau of cause and effect, yet we may not be able to guess in advance who will win, say, the Battle of Marathon, or the presidential election of 1948, until they have actually occurred.

MORAL JUDGMENTS IN HISTORY Let us turn now to another thistle in the thorny thickets of history— moral judgments. Do historians actually make such judgments? And if they do, should they? In actual fact, the practice of bestowing praise or blame on historical figures and their actions is a very old one, going back to Greek and Roman historians. Tacitus, for one, issued an injunction to his fellow historians “to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil works and deeds” (quoted in Higham 1989:157). And he himself (1979:90–98) was unsparing in his censure of the Emperor Domitian, among others. Since Tacitus’s day, historians have not failed to reaffirm their right—almost their duty, as they see it—to pass such judgments. “History is good for nothing,” wrote Fontenelle, “if it be not united with morality” (quoted in Becker 1964:104). Jacques Amyot, in the introduction to his translation of Plutarch’s Lives in 1559, wrote that “history also hath his manner of punishing the wicked by the reproach of everlasting infamy, wherewith it defaceth their remembrance” (in North 1941:I, xxxii). The Swiss historian and economist Jean de Sismondi affirmed that “there is for the historian a holier mission than of working to extend the renown of a great people, and that is to judge every event by the great touchstone of the laws of morality” (quoted in Black 1965:10). Montesquieu filled so many pages of his Spirit of the Laws with statements such as “Religion and civil law ought to have a tendency

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to make men good citizens,” and the laws of chastity “ought to be respected in all nations” (emphasis in the original), that D’Alembert was led to remark, “He occupies himself less with laws that have been made than with those that ought to be made” (quoted in Becker 1964:114–115). D’Alembert’s fellow philosophe, Denis Diderot, saw some value in having historians heap reproach on those contemporary leaders who deserved it: “If from the beginning history had seized, and dragged by the hair, both political and religious tyrants, I don’t suppose they would have been better men, but they would have been more thoroughly detested, and their unhappy subjects would have perhaps become less patient with them” (quoted in Gay 1969:384–385). The distinguished historian Theodor Mommsen, who took part in the Sturm und Drang of German politics during his ten years as a deputy in the Prussian Parliament, wrote: “Those who have lived through historical events as I have, begin to see that history is neither made nor written without love or hate” (quoted in Abbott 1929:551). Asked the use of history, James Anthony Froude (1909:129) replied that “it is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.” The American medievalist Henry Osborn Taylor, listing in the preface to his The Medieval Mind the duties of a historian, declared that “at his peril ... must the historian judge. He cannot state the facts and sit aloof, impartial between good and ill, between success and failure, progress and retrogression, the soul’s health and loveliness, and spiritual foulness and disease. He must love and hate” (Taylor 1966:I, xiii). But not only have historians preached the validity of passing moral judgments, they have also practiced it. Take, for example, the way they have treated the person of King John of England. Writing in 1754, David Hume summed up his views of that monarch in the following words: “The character of this prince is nothing but a complication of vices equally mean and odious, ruinous to himself and destructive to his people. Cowardice, inactivity, folly, levity, licentiousness, ingratitude, treachery, tyranny, and cruelty—all these qualities appear too evidently in the several incidents of his life to give us room to suspect that the disagreeable picture has been anywise overcharged by the prejudices of the ancient historians” (n.d.:I,453). And the passing of more than a century did nothing to soften this assessment, for, writing in 1874, J. R. Green described King John thusly: “In his inner soul John was the worst outcome of the Angevins. He united into one mass of wickedness their insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their shamelessness,

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their superstition, their cynical indifference to honor or truth.. . . ‘Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John.’ [This] ... terrible verdict of his contemporaries has passed into the sober judgment of history” (n.d.:I,237). Such an unmitigated scourging well illustrates the readiness, even zeal, with which English historians once wielded their lash against those monarchs they despised. Much the same readiness to excoriate a hated ruler can be found in the American historian John L. Motley’s acclaimed work, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856). Motley’s firm conviction was that “it is more important for the great interests of humanity that before the judgment seat of History a crown should be no protection to its wearer” (quoted in Commager 1965:63). And, true to his word, Motley proceeded to inveigh with all the power of his pen against Philip II, King of Spain: “No greater mistake can be made than to ascribe talent to this plodding, and pedantic monarch. The man’s intellect was contemptible, but malignity and duplicity, almost superhuman, have effectively lifted his character out of the regions of the commonplace” (1856:II, 4–5). But Motley was not done with Philip. He leveled another hammer blow in his direction: “There have been few men known to history who have been able to accomplish by their own exertion so vast an amount of evil.... If Philip possessed a single virtue it has eluded the conscientious research of the writer of these pages. If there are vices ... from which he was exempt, it is because it is not permitted to human nature to attain perfection even in evil” (quoted in Commager 1965:62). Yet, John I and Philip II were only individuals. The historian’s propensity to pass moral judgments sometimes blankets and engulfs whole periods and entire complexes of events. No better example of this exists than the treatment accorded the French Revolution. Writing as late as 1902, the French historian T. Cerfbeer could still say that “the idea of treating the [French] Revolution as an event analogous to other events, without either curses or apologies, has as yet never occurred to anyone” (quoted in Robinson 1965:198). And as recently as 1963, A. L. Rowse could repeat the indictment: “In France the Revolution created a barrier, and still one is either on one side or on the other. It has impeded a unified conception of the past for the French, one making the history of France as a whole consistent and intelligible, doing justice to the work of both sides of that great divide. As it is, French history is written too much in partisan terms, either through royalist monocles or republican pince-nez” (1963:132). Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, a time by which scientific attitudes had begun to permeate the discipline of his-

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tory, we see a reaction against the unbridled expression of moral judgments. The issue was not whether King John, or any other monarch, merited better treatment. It was simply that, as evil as he might have been, it was not the historian’s proper role to pass judgment on him in the first place. Scientists did not assess the moral character of their subject matter—did not say that gravitation was good or mitosis was bad—and should not the historian emulate the scientist in this regard? To be sure, there had been a few anticipations of the view that history should refrain from being normative. As far back as the second century B.C., Polybius, expressing his credo as a historian, said, “Directly a man assumes the moral attitude of an historian he ought to forget all considerations, such as love of one’s friends, hatred of one’s enemies.... He must sometimes praise enemies and blame friends. For as a living creature is rendered useless if deprived of its eyes, so if you take truth from History, what is left but an unprofitable tale” (quoted in Shotwell 1910:528–529). In more recent times, Sir Francis Bacon stated, We are beholden to Machiavel, and writers of that kind, who openly and unmasked declare what men do in fact, and not what they ought to do” (1900:Book 7, Chapter 2). Tomasso Campanella (1991:376), Bacon’s contemporary, was of the same opinion, affirming that the historian “will neither praise nor blame anyone, being a reporter and not a judge.” And Voltaire (1972c:40) pictured himself as “a man who . . . is trying to write history neither as a flatterer, nor as [a] eulogist.” Still, not until late in the nineteenth century did the few isolated voices calling for ethical neutrality on the part of historians begin to swell into a chorus. Curiously enough, one of the most outspoken objections to voicing such moral judgments came from a literary figure—Oscar Wilde (n.d.: 88-89), who wrote, I know that there are many historians ... who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful school-master. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play.... They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

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The issue, however, was not an easy one for historians to resolve, and we find much ambivalence among them as to precisely what stance to assume when confronting actions in which a moral issue was involved. This ambivalence is perhaps best mirrored in the work of Lord Acton. “It is the great achievement of history,” wrote Acton, “to develop, perfect, and arm conscience” (quoted in Black 1965:10). Similarly, he argued that “it is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:96). And in his inaugural address as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, Acton counseled the young historians-tobe sitting in his audience “to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong“ (Acton 1972:24). But then, again, we also find in Acton’s writings passages such as the following: “Because it would be wrong today to torture a prisoner, to slaughter a garrison, to try a witch by water, to disembowel a Jesuit, or crop the ears of a Puritan, to hang a forger, to draw the teeth of a Jew, to set a price on a head, it by no means follows that the men who did these things did wrong according to the codes by which they must be severally tried, obeying the authorities above and the light that was in them” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:72n.). And Acton also declared, “We are no wiser when we know that . . . [a certain historical personage1 is good or bad,” but, on the other hand, we gain understanding when we learn “what are the causes and effects of his life. It is the business only of Him to judge who can carry his judgment into effect” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:73n.). The trend, though, was decidedly toward maintaining a standard of ethical neutrality when assessing historical events, and sociologists were among the most outspoken in urging this position. Ludwig Gumplowicz (quoted in Kochanowski 1909–1910:406; emphasis in the original), for example, argued that “no chemist would ask whether oxygen did well in uniting with hydrogen, or whether it is right in mixing with quicksilver. No astronomer would ask, whether the moon, in appearing between sun and earth [in an eclipse] is worthy of praise or blame—but no historian could be found who would consider it unjustified to judge about the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ action of King X or Minister Y.” In time, more and more historians began to question the propriety of passing moral judgments. For example, in his History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France, Fustel de Coulanges (1972b:188) declared, “In writing this book I have thought neither to praise nor to

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disparage the ancient institutions of France. I intend solely to describe them and to indicate their development.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American historian Henry C. Lea (1903:59,60) taking issue specifically with one of Lord Acton’s remarks urging the historian to pass moral judgments, admonished his colleagues that “history is not to be written as a Sunday-school tale for children of larger growth. It is, or should be a serious attempt to ascertain the severest truth as to the past and to set it forth without fear or favor.... Above all things, ... [the historian] should cultivate the detachment which enables him soberly and impartially to search for and to set forth the truth. He may often feel righteous indignation . . . but he should strenuously repress it as a luxury to be left to his reader.” However, pronouncements of this sort continued to provoke a strong reaction from those historians who rejected the dictum that history should be written dispassionately Thus, replying to Henry Lea’s admonition, Goldwin Smith declared, Mr. Lea appears to think that it is irrational and unjust to condemn Philip II [of Spain] and the inquisitors of the day for putting people to death on account of their religious belief, such having been the moral law of that epoch.... But such a conception would surely be fatal to morality itself, as it would destroy the identity of the moral law.... The conduct of Philip II and the inquisitors ... was influenced not solely by hatred of misbelief but by criminal propensities of a grosser kind: the despot’s lust of unlimited power, the hierarch’s lust of ascendancy and wealth. Philip II was not only a persecutor, he was a murderer and an adulterer. He hired assassins to take the life of his noble enemy William the Silent. (1905513–514) Rejecting such appeals to pass judgment on evildoers, the New History adopted a stance of moral neutrality. “The aim of the historian,” wrote James Harvey Robinson (1903:3), “is not to prove that a particular way of doing a thing is right or wrong, as, for instance, in trusting the whole government to a king or forbidding clergyman to marry. His object is to show as well as he can how a certain system came to be introduced, what was thought of it, how it worked, and how another plan gradually supplanted it.” Another practitioner of the New History, Edward P. Cheyney (1927:136), warned of the pitfalls that lay in store for those who read history as crafted by historians eager to dispense approbation or condemnation: “The facts of history when they are used to teach a moral lesson do not reach us in their entirety, [are] not grouped and gener-

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alized according to their internal relations, but selected and arranged according to the overmastering ideal in the mind of the historian. The reader is at the historian’s mercy.. . . Thus history sells its birthright of truth for a mess of the pottage of partisanship.” Years later, the French historian Marc Bloch (1953:139,140), one of the founders of the Annales school and a staunch upholder of the objective treatment of history, echoed the sentiment: “Now, for a long time, the historian has passed for a sort of judge ..., charged with meting out praise or blame to dead heroes.... How absurd it is . . . to inflict standards upon the way in which Sulla governed Rome, or Richelieu the States of the Most Christian King!... Hollow indictments are followed by vain rehabilitations. Robespierrists! Anti-Robespierrists! For pity’s sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was.” In his slender volume, The Whig Interpretation of History, first published in 1931, Herbert Butterfield likewise held that “above all it is not the role of the historian to come to what might be called judgments of value” (1965:73). And more recently, Michael Howard informs us that modern-day students of history are “trained to suppress” any tendency to make ethical evaluations and “are told that it is no business of historians qua historians to pronounce value-judgments on the societies they study, any more than it is the business of anthropologists” (1991:194). And yet, and yet . . . it is far easier for the historian to preach moral neutrality than to practice it. Earlier I cited the words of James Harvey Robinson, taken from the opening pages of his Introduction to the History of Western Europe, words directing the historian not to judge right or wrong conduct in his writings. Nevertheless, on page 351 of the same volume, while discussing the “Age of Exploration,” Robinson (1903:351) remarks that “it is hardly necessary to say that Europeans exhibited an utter disregard for the rights of the people with whom they came in contact, and treated them with contemptuous cruelty.” Is this not a moral judgment? In 1824, the French historian Francois Mignet published his Histoire de la Révuolution Francaise, a work in which he carefully refrained from expressing ethical judgments. In fact, Plekhanov (1940:31) tells us, Mignet perceived the Revolution as having occurred “in accordance with certain immutable laws.” This sober manner of writing history, unflinching even when contemplating the extremes and excesses of the Reign of Terror, was novel to French readers of the time. And it did not sit well with them, so accustomed were they to an unbridled or, at least, undisguised passion in their histories. Reviewing Mignet’s work, Chateaubriand labeled the budding young school of objective history

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(whose members included Guizot and Thierry as well) “fatalistic,” and had nothing but scorn to heap upon it. Said he, “This system demands that the historian shall describe without indignation the most brutal atrocities, speak without love about the highest virtues and with his glacial eye see in social life only the manifestations of irresistible laws due to which every phenomenon occurs exactly as it inevitably had to occur” (quoted in Plekhanov 1940:32). In reality, how can a historian, describing to his reader in all its specific details the life and reign of a monarch like King John, not resort to a succession of uncomplimentary adjectives? Henry Steele Commager’s way of dealing with the general problem of moral judgments in history exemplifies the intense inner struggle historians often feel when they come face to face with this issue. On the one hand, there is Commager’s professional opinion that “the historian’s task is not to judge, but to understand” (1965:68). But this resolve was put to the acid test when it came to the subject of slavery: “A problem which has confronted, and perplexed, American historians for a hundred years,” wrote Commager, “is slavery. Surely if anything is wrong, slavery is wrong. No social institution more deeply offends our moral sensibilities than this; no other collective experience induces in us a comparable sense of shame. Slavery, we are all agreed, corrupts alike the slave and the master, slavery corrupts the body politic, the poison still infects us” (p. 67). But Commager is well aware of the great tension that exists between the two polar attitudes. He has called for an objective, passionless treatment of history, but at the same time he admits frankly, referring to the words just spoken: “This is the vocabulary of morality, and it is this vocabulary which we invoke, almost instinctively, whenever we discuss what was long euphemistically called the ‘peculiar institution’” (p. 67). How, then, is he to extricate himself from the dilemma? By, in effect, cutting the Gordian knot. By maintaining that, when all is said and done, not all slave owners were bad, and not all abolitionists were good. There was good and bad on both sides. Thus, by spreading his moral judgment broadly enough to cover both parties, he has succeeded in diluting it. What he has not succeeded in doing is expunging it. It is still there. In the end, though, Commager seems uncomfortable with this solution. And once again he proclaims his professional credo, even though he cannot fully live up to it: “It is absurd to indict a whole people or to banish a whole people to some historical purgatory where they can expiate their sins” (p. 67). Bringing the issue of moral judgments down to the present, how can a historian write about Adolf Hitler and avoid any moral assess-

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ment of him? Can he really describe the events that occurred at Auschwitz or Belsen or Buchenwald and not let some trace of revulsion and censure creep into his work? It is for this reason that we still find many agreeing with Isaiah Berlin (1954:53), when he says that “the invocation to historians to suppress even that minimal degree of moral ... evaluation which is necessarily involved in viewing human beings as creatures with purpose and motives (and not merely as causal factors in the procession of events), seems to me to rest upon a confusion of the aims and methods of the humane studies with those of natural science.” From Berlin’s last remarks, we see that he appears ready to allow the natural scientist to turn a blind eye to malevolence and depravity, and to refrain from passing moral judgments when he encounters them. But perhaps he makes this allowance only because he believes that “malevolence” and “depravity” are simply not appropriate concepts when dealing with chemical compounds or geological strata. The real question is: Would he be willing to extend his dispensation from passing moral judgments to social scientists? Or would he regard the social sciences as belonging to what he calls the “humane studies,” not to science at all? And if so, would he insist on the social scientist’s duty to express approval or disapproval when it seemed warranted? Knowing something of Berlin’s general views, I suspect he would want such strictures expressed. Bringing the issue down to cases, can the social scientist, and more specifically, the cultural anthropologist, cling more steadfastly to the claim of moral neutrality than the historian? Anticipating the discussion of a later chapter, let me, as an anthropologist, try to show how we can escape the slippery slope of moral pronouncements. In the case of Hitler, we can do so by dissolving the individual, Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich, out of his particular historical matrix, setting aside his aberrations, excesses, and perversions, and generalizing him into a broader category—for example, that of conquest-driven political leaders. Now this does not wash away Hitler’s sins. It merely relegates them to another domain, irrelevant to the purpose at hand. And that purpose is to render him intelligible, to see him (at least in part) as the agent of a particular conjunction of historical, or better still, cultural forces. We admit that by universal estimation, Hitler was a diabolical monster, yet he cannot be fully understood by merely labeling him as such. He was also an expression of certain tendencies that were not unique to twentieth-century Germany but have recurred throughout European history—indeed, throughout world history. What Hitler tried to accomplish, Alexander, Augustus, Charlemagne, Philip II, Charles XII, and Napoleon had attempted before him. Whatever else he was (a

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pathological anti-Semite and all the rest), Hitler exemplified the inclination of militaristic states to push beyond their borders, defeat their enemies, engulf their neighbors, and create empires. Only by stepping back from the details of history in their full particularity and seeing them blur and blend into a general process— that is, by leaving aside individuals as such and examining how they represent a culture-historical process—can we surmount the dilemma of dealing with good and evil, without being caught up in the sticky business of taking sides. (A full discussion of how an anthropologist goes about identifying and reconstructing general historical processes is reserved for a later chapter.)

CONTINGENCY IN HISTORY One of the most intriguing aspects of historical analysis is the problem of contingency in history. “Contingency in history“—what a pretentious academic ring it has! But in fact, what does it mean? It is merely the notion that historical events, especially major ones, might well have turned out differently had some minor element been other than it was. The best known statement of this notion is the famous ditty that appeared originally in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Al manac : For want of a nail the shoe was lost, For want of a shoe the horse was lost, For want of a horse the rider was lost, For want of a rider the battle was lost, For want of a battle the kingdom was lost— And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. Even more famous, perhaps, is Pascal’s remark in his Pensées, that had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter—that is, had she not been so attractive as to beguile, in turn, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony—the whole course of history, or at least Roman history, would have been different. But the history of Rome might have been diverted from its actual course even earlier. Listen to the speculations of the French historian Jean Victor Duruy: “Suppose Rome destroyed by Pyrrhus or Hannibal, before Marius and Caesar had driven the German tribes back from Gaul: their invasion would have been effected five centuries sooner; and since they would have found opposed to them only other barbarians, what a long night would have settled down upon the world!” (1897:5073). And, of course, even minor differences on innumerable occasions in the roll of

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the dice of history would have been enough to cause the Roman Empire to deviate from the course it actually followed. What, for example, would have happened if the geese that saved Rome had failed to honk? A remark attributed to the former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer expresses the feelings of a statesman that the political mistakes he has witnessed in his career were by no means foreordained and inevitable. “History,” he said, “is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided” (Metcalf 1987:120). The “what ifs” of history have held a never-ending fascination for historians. For example, in 1931, an entire book appeared entitled If, Or History Rewritten, in which some dozen historians presented their fantasies of what might have occurred had certain important events in history turned out differently. Philip Guedalla wrote “If the Moors in Spain Had Won,” G. K. Chesterton, “If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary Queen of Scots,” and André Maurois, “If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness,” and so on (Squire 1964:2–23, 25–59, 107–142). Historians and statesmen are of course not the only ones fascinated by contingency in history. It intrigues us all. “What ifs?” and “might have beens” constantly play through our minds. And the more trivial or obscure the contingency, the more it seems to fascinate. In March 1961, the Tennessee Gas Transmission Company ran an advertisement in U.S. News and World Report that turned on the following little-known incident: “In 1587, Sir Francis Drake stopped a Spanish merchant fleet. Its cargo was strange—seasoned oak barrel staves. Drake reasoned they would be used to carry provisions in an attack on England. He burned them. A year later the Armada sailed. Its food, in green unseasoned barrels, spoiled. Spain’s crews sickened. Drake’s foresight . . . more than the battle itself ... sent a mighty empire into decline.” More familiar in the realm of “might have beens” are attempted assassinations of world leaders, especially if they were unsuccessful and the intended target escaped death by an eyelash. Of the failed attempt made on the life of President Roosevelt and its conceivable consequences had it succeeded, the jurist Jerome Frank (1945:42) wrote: “In 1932 an assassin’s bullet barely missed Franklin D. Roosevelt but struck and killed his companion, Mayor Zermak [of Chicago]. If the assassin’s aim had been better, John Nance Garner Roosevelt’s vicepresident [and a political conservative] would have been our president from at least 1933 to 1937, and the domestic policies of our Government— perhaps also our present foreign policy—would have been substantially different .” In the career of any great leader many occasions arise of which it can be said that, had things happened just a bit differently, the subse-

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quent course, not only of the man’s career but also of the entire nation he led, might have been radically altered. Napoleon Bonaparte has been a prime candidate for such speculations. Thus, in Felix Markham’s biography of Napoleon one finds a fair sprinkling of “contingencies” of this sort occurring at many points in his life. Consider, first of all, events that happened in Napoleon’s career before he assumed power, events that actually contributed to his success. There was, for instance, his triumph at the siege of Toulon in 1793, while he was still an obscure artillery man: “Napoleon had been helped by an incredible run of luck: the facts that Dommartin, the artillery officer, was wounded and out of action; that no artillery General was available; that Saliceti, the Deputy, was a Corsican and an old friend; that Dugommier and du Teil recognized his professional competence” (Markham 1963:26). Then, in addition to Napoleon’s positive accomplishments, there were also the pitfalls he avoided: “The sudden fall of Robespierre in the political crisis of Thermidor (July 1794) left Napoleon in a very dangerous position.... If he had been nearer to Paris, and in the hands of any Deputy less favourable to him than Saliceti, he might well have gone to the guillotine” (Markham 1963:27). After becoming Emperor, Napoleon experienced a number of close brushes with death, escaping only by sheer luck: On December 24, 1800, a considerable number of people were killed or wounded by an explosive machine hidden in a cart in the Rue Nicoise on the route from the Tuileries to the Opéra, where Napoleon was due to attend a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. Napoleon and Josephine escaped the explosion by seconds; it is said that they owed their lives to the fact that Napoleon insisted on employing a coachman, who was usually drunk and always drove too fast, because he had been with him at Marengo. (Markham 1963:100) Ironically, on the one occasion when Napoleon really wished to die, contingencies again intervened to save his life. Markham recounts the following incident that took place shortly after Bonaparte had been exiled to Elba: His chamberlain, Turenne, had taken the precaution of removing the powder from his pistols; but in the small hours Caulaincourt [his physician] was summoned to Napoleon’s bedside, where Napoleon confessed he had taken poison. But the poison came from the phial which Napoleon had carried in the retreat from Moscow, and had lost its potency. After severe vomiting and convulsions Napoleon survived, and was able to appear the following day. He never contemplated suicide again. (1963:218–219)

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Another historian, Goldwin Smith, reported several additional contingencies in Napoleon’s life. We learn, for example, that only by “the merest accident” did Napoleon, the Corsican, become a French citizen, and—what surely must be a supreme irony—“it seems that he had at one time thought of enlisting in the British navy” (1905:513). The mathematician Edna Kramer offers us yet another of the innumerable “what ifs” in Napoleon’s career: “In 1784 Laplace received a lucrative position as ‘examiner to the royal artillery.’ In this capacity he had occasion to test the sixteen-year-old Napoleon when the latter applied for admission to the École Militaire. What might the course of world history have been if Napoleon had been failed by Laplace? Or, if he had been admitted over a protest by Laplace, what might Laplace’s history have been?” (1947:312). Contingencies in Napoleon’s life appear to have attracted the eye— and the pen—of historians more than events in the life of any other world figure. Indeed, George M. Trevelyan wrote a delightful little fantasy on the theme, “If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo,” in which, among other imaginary happenings, Trevelyan has Lord Byron hanged by the British crown for inciting the downtrodden masses to insurrection (1968b:128). Finally, let me report one more alleged contingency involving Napoleon. At the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association held in Chicago in 1956 (which I attended), Leslie A. White presented a paper illustrating how religious beliefs and institutions strongly reflected the political structure of a society. It was a strongly deterministic paper, and during the question period that followed, a graduate student in the audience asked White, “But don’t you believe in contingency in history?” White thought for a moment and replied, “Yes, I believe in contingency in history. If a certain Corsican girl had not left her scarf on the beach one night and gone back to retrieve it, the whole course of European history would have been different.” I readily admit to my own fascination with historical contingencies, and offer now, with apologies, my favorite example, whose beginnings hark back to the Middle Ages. Eleanor of Aquitaine had several daughters, one of whom, Leonor, had married Alfonso VIII of Castile. Leonor herself had two daughters by Alfonso, named Urraca and Blanca, who were therefore Eleanor’s granddaughters. When the time came for the Dauphin, the future Louis VIII of France, to marry, Eleanor was determined to make one of her granddaughters Queen of France. By rights, the honor should have gone to Urraca, who was the older of the two, but Eleanor chose Blanca instead. “Urraca,” she reasoned, was too harsh and unmusical a name for French ears, whereas “Blanca” (which became “Blanche” when she

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joined the French court) was much more melodious and acceptable (Seward 1978:233–234). And so it was that Blanca and not Urraca became Queen of France. Now let us jump ahead more than 500 years to the reign of Louis XV, who, like all French kings bearing that name, was a direct descendant of Blanca of Castile. Though initially popular, winning for himself the sobriquet of le Bien Aimé (the Well-Beloved), things quickly took a turn for the worse, and Louis XV ultimately came to be regarded as one of the worst monarchs in French history. In 1725 Louis married Maria Leszczynska, daughter of the exiled King of Poland, and though she was described as “unattractive, grave and austere” (Williams 1907:31), Louis seems not to have deserted her bed, for she bore him seven children. Nonetheless, his insatiable and indiscriminate passion for the opposite sex soon began to assert itself, and he took on his first mistress, Madame de Mailly, later to be followed in this role by Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry. Besides being unfaithful to his wife, Louis also proved unfaithful to his mistresses. However, the shrewd Pompadour, who “was sufficiently acquainted with the king to recognise that mistresses were necessary to him ... lent herself willingly to the introduction into his presence of young girls from whom she believed she had nothing to fear” (Williams 1907:54). Not only was Louis consumed by his appetite for women of whatever age, but also in conducting foreign and domestic affairs he allowed himself to be powerfully swayed by the whims and fancies of his mistresses. Indeed, the disastrous policies they often urged on him led, among other things, to France’s loss of her colonies in Canada and India, In the Seven Years’ War, France’s military failures were due in part to the ineptitude of General Soubise, who retained his command only because he was a favorite of Madame de Pompadour. How tenacious she could be in his support is shown by the aftermath of the Battle of Rossbach (1757), in which the French army under Soubise was routed by Frederick the Great: After the battle . . . the French became fiercely indignant with Soubise’s protectress. Every day she received numbers of anonymous letters, full of threats and abuse. This very seriously disturbed Madame Pompadour; she began to suffer from insomnia. Nevertheless, she continued to protect Soubise. In 1762, she remarked in one of her letters to him that he was not justifying the hopes that had been placed in him but she added: “Have no fear, however, I will take care of your interests and try to reconcile you with the king.” (Plekhanov 1940:40)

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After the death of Pompadour, Louis took as his new mistress, Madame du Barry. This lady was “discovered” in a Paris bordello by a courtier who, through one of the king‘s chamberlains, brought her to his attention. Du Barry, described as “a common courtesan destitute of shame, but of surpassing beauty,” (Williams 1907:92), had little difficulty in capturing the king‘s affections. She thus became the third of his “official” mistresses, after Mailly and Pompadour. “But the mention of these three women,” wrote the historian Arthur James Grant (1911: 440), “gives no idea of the degradation of the king‘s life.... It would be difficult to mention the name of any European king whose private life shows such a record of vulgar vice unredeemed by higher aims of any kind.” In fact, according to another historian, during the reign of Louis XV, the French court was “converted into a brothel” (Williams 1907:92). The impact on France of the dissolute rule of Louis XV was assessed by Grant (1911:44) in the following words: There arose during the last years of Louis XV’s reign a strong reaction against the monarchy and its methods. Military success had given it its strength; and its prestige was ruined by military failure. In the parliaments, provincial and Parisian; in religion and in literature, a note of opposition is struck which was never to die until the monarchy was overthrown.... If the reign of his predecessor [Louis XIV] shows us almost the ideal of personal monarchy we may see in that of Louis XV all the vices and errors exemplified which lie in wait for absolute hereditary rule which has survived that period of its usefulness. Clearly, then, Louis XV had set the stage for the tremendous events of the French Revolution that followed a scant decade after his death. A major share of Louis’s failings as king can be attributed to his complete dedication to indescribable debaucheries. Now, it has been argued by Plekhanov (1940:41) that “Louis XV’s lasciviousness was an inevitable consequence of the state of his physical constitution.” In other words, his depravity is said to have stemmed from his genetic makeup. Thus, had the urgings of his hormones been less insistent, he might not have succumbed so readily to the wiles and blandishments of his mistresses, and his reign might have been a much happier one. So now we can jump back 500 years and assert: Had Eleanor of Aquitaine possessed a “tin ear”—had the difference between “Urraca” and “Blanca” meant nothing to her—and had Urraca, instead of her sister thus become Louis VIII’s queen, the course of French history would have been different! Contingency in history is more than a diverting speculation, how-

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ever. It has a direct and profound bearing on the way historians have seen and interpreted the course of history. First of all, they never seem to tire of calling attention to it. Thus, Gabriel Jackson (1969:24), professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, admitted that “whenever reading past history or current politics, I am struck by the role of contingency.” And Lacey Baldwin Smith (1966:ii), Professor of History at Northwestern University, declared that “the complexities, the uncertainties, the endless variations, and above all the accidents that bedevil the design of human events—these are the very stuff of which history is made.” Echoing the thought, Gordon Leff, a historian at the University of Manchester, maintained that “the cardinal feature of historical events is their contingency” (1971:72). This fascination with the chance elements of history, and the seductive belief that they outweigh its regularities, patterns, and trends, is characteristic of—one might almost say, congenial to—traditional historians. Many of them have seized upon it as being the sharpest sword in their arsenal with which to slay the hated dragon of historical determinism. Sir Charles Oman (1939:9), for example, wrote that “history is not a tale of logical processes or necessary evolutions, but a series of happenings—some of them so startling as to deserve to be called cataclysms. One has to study these happenings with a cautious conviction that they might have happened otherwise.” We can hardly imagine a warmer embrace of the role played by historical accident than that accorded to it by H. A. L. Fisher in the preface to his History of Europe: “Men wiser and more learned than I have discovered in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another, as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations ... the play of the contingent and the unforeseen” (1939:xv).

AN ANTHROPOLOGIST LOOKS AT CONTINGENCY From our perspective, what are we to say about contingency in history? Of course it exists. From a narrowly historical point of view, “accidents” happen all the time. That is to say, events occur that are neither derivable from any “law” of history, nor foreseeable from a general knowledge of existing conditions. No historical law required Frederick Barbarossa to drown in the Calycadnus River in 1190, on his way to the Crusades, and no one could have foreseen it. It did not have to happen. In a real sense, it was a pure accident. Not that it was uncaused, but rather, that it was entirely fortuitous in relation to what

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might be called the “fabric of history“ that served as its backdrop. It had nothing to do with the Crusades as such, nor with any aspect of Frederick’s reign as emperor of Germany, Such incidents may be conspicuous—even dramatic—but they have little to do with the mainstream of history. Let us not be misled by the striking nature of certain historical events. All of the innumerable contingencies in history, all of its incalculable accidents, do not in any way undermine the validity of causation. As John B. Bury observed, ”Contingency does not in the least affect the doctrine of determinism; it is compatible with the strictest interpretation of the principle of causation” (1960:303). And Bury then presented an example to illustrate the distinction between them he wished to make. It may be plausibly argued, he said, that a military dictatorship was an inevitable consequence of the chaos that followed the French Revolution. Furthermore, it was equally likely, given Napoleon’s character and ability and the fact that he was well positioned when the precise moment arrived, that it was he, and not someone else, who should become military dictator. This much seems strongly determined. However, that there should have been this man, Napoleon, with his peculiar constellation of attributes, present at the scene and ready to take advantage of the situation, that was contingency. Another British historian, A. L. Rowse, made a similar distinction between what he called “the surface pattern” of history and “the underlying story,” The former, he said, is capable of “infinite variation,” while the latter “is profoundly conditioned’’ (1963:88). To illustrate this contrast, Rowse offered the following example: We might say that if certain events had not taken place in our history—if Richard II had not been defeated and dethroned, if Edward IV had lived, or Edward VI, or Henry Prince of Wales; if Queen Anne had a son to succeed her—the whole surface pattern of our history would have been different; and yet it is probable that the underlying story of England would have been much the same” (1963:88). Finally, the American historian Edward P. Cheyney also made the important distinction between history writ small and history writ large: “There are two things to consider in history, one the vast slowly changing, inevitable movements; the other the play of much lesser, more incidental, more personal, more chance occurrences. These may affect the form in which the changes come, they may perhaps hasten or retard them, they affect the details, but they are dependent upon and conditioned by the more fundamental, more irresistible movements of their time” (1927:74). The contrast drawn by Bury and Rowse and Cheyney adumbrates

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the distinction between history and the culture process, which we will consider in detail in Chapter 6, and which is the essence of the difference between particularistic history and generalizing social science. When we begin to make this distinction, we will find historical accidents diminishing in importance, and determinate events asserting themselves more compellingly. Yet it takes a certain intellectual sangfroid to set aside the great human fascination with the fortuitous and the spontaneous and to accept—to say nothing of embrace—historical determinism. A thoroughgoing determinist perspective is something few people find congenial and many consider nothing short of anathema. Here we are back to the familiar issue of free will versus determinism. It is the artist, as we have seen, who clings most tenaciously to the notion of freedom and contingency in human affairs. But at times we find this view expressed even by scientists. Stephen J. Gould, for example, co-originator of the theory of punctuated equilibria, has, over the years, found determinism less and less to his liking. In one of his most recent pronouncements on the subject he remarked: Modern punctualism—especially in its application to the vagaries of human history—emphasizes the concept of contingency: the unpredictability of the nature of future stability, and the power of contemporary events and personalities to shape and direct the actual path taken among myriad possibilities. Contingency may provoke more anxiety in its failure to specify an outcome, but it surely embodies more hope in the power granted to people over their own futures. We are not pawns in a grand chess game played by inexorable natural (and social) laws, but effective rooks, knights, bishops, kings, and queens on a revolving board of alterable history with no set outcome. (1992:21) This is surely a more pleasing and palatable dish than anything determinism can set upon the table, but does it offer any prospect of a deeper understanding of the course of human history? We will see in a succeeding chapter that just the opposite is true.

HISTORICAL RELATIVISM We come now to the last thorn bush of history to be considered in this chapter, namely, historical relativism. Simply put, the question is this: “Can history be objective?” It is probably fair to say that in the nineteenth century most historians, regardless of how they might

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otherwise disagree, believed in the existence of an external, objective historical reality, and in the possibility of recovering and presenting it just as it was. Many historians adhered to the famous dictum of Leopold von Ranke that the proper and attainable goal of the profession was to display history wie es eigentlich gewesen (“as it actually happened”). And many of them expressed this view without qualification or reservation. James Anthony Froude (1863:41), for one, was convinced that “the eternal truths and rights of things exist, fortunately, independently of our thoughts or wishes, fixed as mathematics, inherent in the nature of man and the world. They are no more to be trifled with than gravitation.” And one day, when Fustel de Coulanges was giving what must have been a particularly luminous lecture, his students broke into applause. “Do not applaud me,” he said. “It is not I who address you; it is history which speaks through me” (quoted in Colby 1906:158). Still, minor challenges had always existed to this view of history as external, objective, and immutable. Historians like to recall, as typifying the predicament of those among them who claimed that complete objectivity could be achieved, an incident in the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower of London not long after completing his History of the World. Looking out of his cell window one day, Raleigh witnessed an altercation on the ground several floors below. Sometime later, he happened to discuss the incident with his jailer, and then with two other men, each of whom had witnessed the event. Although they all had seen it with their own eyes, each had a different recollection of just what had happened. Dismayed at this unexpected disagreement, Raleigh asked himself: If four men seeing the very same event have four different versions of it, how could anyone possibly rely on the word of a historian writing about events that had happened centuries before? And with that, he threw his History of the World into the fire. More than two centuries later, Voltaire (1972a:37) also pondered the historian’s difficulty in reconstructing the past objectively. “The soldier, the judge, the Jansenist, the Molinist,” he wrote, “do not see eye to eye about the same facts. A Carthaginian would not have written about the Punic Wars in the same tone as a Roman, and he would have charged Rome with the same bad faith that Rome imputed to Carthage.” So historians had always been aware of the impediments that stood in their way in getting their facts right. However, a major theoretical attack on the possibility of historical objectivity did not come until the beginning of the twentieth century. To be sure, there had been earlier anticipations of this movement just prior to the start of the century. Henry Adams, for example, writing in the American Historical Review in 1895 had observed:

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According to mathematicians, every man carries with him a personal error in his observation of facts, for which a certain allowance must be made before attaining perfect accuracy. In a subject like history, the personal error must be serious, since it tends to distort the whole subject, and to disturb the relations of every detail. Further, the same allowance must be made for every authority cited by the historian. Each has his personal error, varying in value, and often unknown to the writer quoting him. Finally, the facts themselves carry with them an error of their own; they may be correctly stated, and still lead to wrong conclusions. (quoted in Jordy 1952:130) On the basis of his assessment of the frequency of such distortions in published histories, Adams went on to estimate that Macaulay’s History of England contained no fewer than 30,000 errors (Jordy 1952:130)! The major assault against the presumption of historical objectivity may be said to have begun in 1910 with Carl Becker’s article, “Detachment in the Writing of History.” “The reality of history,” Becker (p. 528) declared, “has forever disappeared, and the ‘facts’ of history, whatever they once were, are only mental images or pictures which the historian makes in order to comprehend it.” Twenty years later, in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Becker (1964:88) returned to the theme, insisting that “history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, [and] the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.” Thus, he was ready to count as a “profound truth” Voltaire’s witticism that “history is only a pack of tricks we play on the dead” (p. 88). It was Becker’s contention that the historian could never be a perfectly neutral observer, that he was always subject to personal bias, and that this indelibly marked his writings. Moreover, not only were his interpretations thus colored by his background, but even his perception of the “facts” of history was tainted. An even more vigorous assertion of historical relativism was offered to his professional colleagues by Charles A. Beard in 1935, in an oft-cited article entitled “That Noble Dream.” Here, Beard wrote: The historian seeking to know the past, or about it, does not bring to the partial documentation with which he works a perfect and polished neutral mind in which the past, streaming through the medium of documentation, is mirrored as it actually was. Whatever acts of purification the historian may perform he

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yet remains human, a creature of time, place, circumstance, interests, predilections, culture. The events and personalities of history in their very nature involve ethical and aesthetic considerations. They are not mere events in physics and chemistry inviting neutrality on the part of the “observer.” . . . The past as it actually was cannot be known. (1972:325) Though they should have found it somewhat at odds with their outlook on history and their stated objectives in pursuing it, the apostles of the New History nevertheless generally subscribed to the doctrine of historical relativism. Thus, James Harvey Robinson (1965:135) held that “history . . . is . . . not fixed and immutable, but ever changing. Each age has a perfect right to select from the annals of mankind those facts that seem to have a particular bearing on the matters it has at heart.” Robinson might well have cited Jacob Burkhardt, who, half a century earlier, had said that history “is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another” (quoted in Boardman 1965:76). Succeeding generations of historians fell in step with this view. Sir Lewis Namier concluded that “history is necessarily subjective and individual, conditioned by the interest and vision of the historian” (1972:379). The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga believed that “historical knowledge is dead and worthless” if it does not have “as its sounding-board and its measuring-rod the historian’s personal intellectual and spiritual life” (1972:301). H. Stuart Hughes (1964:10) maintained that “few historians today would deny the neoidealists’ central contention that historical understanding is a subjective process.” And Allan Nevins (1975:183) assured his readers that “relativity reigns not in physics ... alone, but in writing upon the development of society.” And, why should we seek complete objectivity anyway when, according to Crane Brinton (1965:20), “absolute detachment is a polar region, unfit for human life”? Even more radical statements of historical relativism were put forth, however. For example, Michael Howard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, remarked that “the trouble is that there is no such thing as ‘history.’ History is what historians write.... Outside the minds and writings of historians the past has no independent reality” (1991:11, 12). And Michael Oakeshott, a political scientist and philosopher, seemed sympathetic to this view when he observed, “It has been said with plausible exaggeration that history is made only when the historian writes it” (quoted in Leff 1971:5). Finally, Carl Becker is quoted as saying: “Historical facts are not out there, in the world of the past, but in here, in the mind of the historian” (Gay 1974:197).

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I know of no word in the English language that means the exact opposite of reify, which is a pity, since here would be a perfect place to use it. Perhaps dematerialize comes the closest. At any rate, this is precisely what the historians just cited appear to be doing. Instead of artificially bringing to life something that in reality does not exist, as “reifiers” are said to do, they have taken something with a long, vigorous, objective life and denied its independent existence! Only when they—the historians—put pen to paper does history spring into being. Now, none of the aforementioned historians is likely to be an extreme solipsist. If pressed to the wall, even after the knife had been removed from their throats, every one of them would no doubt admit that, well, they were really exaggerating a bit to make their point. They would most likely agree that, in fact, historical events had happened in the past, before they were born, and that they were merely chroniclers, or at best, midwives, in giving life to these events, not their originators. Nevertheless, they have said what they said, and must be made to pay the price for overstatement. And now for a striking paradox. We have seen that Charles A. Beard in his famous article, “That Noble Dream,” gave expression to one of the strongest statements of historical relativism. Not so well known is an article he wrote the year before (as perhaps a trial run) entitled Written History as an Act of Faith.” In this article, Beard had already proclaimed the doctrine of historical relativism eloquently and with force, and indeed it is full of quotable passages to that effect (e.g., 1934:220, 221). But then, near the end of this article, in a remarkable about-face, which can be likened to a snake suddenly turning on itself and swallowing its own tail, Beard writes: Contemporary criticism shows that the apostle of [historical] relativity is destined to be destroyed by the child of his own brain. If all historical conceptions are merely relative to passing events, to transitory phases of ideas and interests, then the conception of relativity is itself relative. When absolutes in history are rejected the absolutism of relativity is also rejected. So we must inquire: To what spirit of the times, to the ideas and interests of what class, group, nation, race, or region does the conception of relativity correspond? As the actuality of history moves forward into the future, the conception of relativity will also pass, as previous conceptions and interpretations of events have passed. (1934:225) And Beard proved to be in some sense prophetic. More recently, there seems to be a discernible shift of position on this issue, at least on the part of some historians. Although it is perhaps too much to call it

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a countercurrent, it is at least a perceptible back eddy. “No one supposes,” writes G. R. Elton (1970:102) “that what the historian is in himself does not affect his writing,” but, he protests, “most people who express themselves on this point seem a little too ready to see the historian and forget the history.” The most vigorous expression of this altered view, however, comes from the pen of Peter Gay, a historian at Yale University. Gay believes that the debate over historical relativism has been allowed to cloud the issue of the objective reality of historical events themselves. Thus, he writes: “The objects of the historian’s inquiry are precisely that, objects, out there in a real and a single past. Historical controversy in no way compromises their ontological integrity. The tree in the woods of the past fell in only one way, no matter how fragmentary or contradictory the reports of its fall, no matter whether there are no historians, one historian, or several contentious historians in its future to record and debate it” (1974:210). Finally, among historians who have spoken out on this issue, I will give the last word to Barbara Tuchman. Having quoted Edward Hallett Carr’s (1964:12) dictum that “the belief in a hard core of historical facts existing independently of the interpretation of historians is a preposterous fallacy,” Tuchman proceeds to sweep aside the subjectivist arguments used by Carr to bolster his position and states categorically: “I ... declare myself a firm believer in the ‘preposterous fallacy’ of historical facts existing independently of the historian. I think that if Domesday Book and all other records of the time had been burned, the transfer of land ownership from the Saxons to the Normans would be no less a fact of British history” (Tuchman 1982:26). Then, admitting that Domesday Book and other such documents were historical records, whereas Carr was referring specifically to historical interpretation, Tuchman still refuses to change her stand, affirming that “evidence is more important than interpretation, and facts are history whether interpreted or not.... The influence of the receding frontier on American experience was a phenomenon independent of Frederick Jackson Turner, who noticed it” (1982:26). It seems to me that in most discussions of historical relativism, two separate questions have been confounded: (1) Is there an objective historical reality out there? and (2) if so, how close can the historian come to ascertaining and portraying it? An obsession with the difficulties surrounding the second question had led some historians to answer a resounding “no” to the first. But the events of history are not, inescapably, the creation or projection of the historian. History happened, and it happened just as it did, and in no other way. True, with only a thin and fragmentary record of the past, the historian is hard put to reconstruct historical reality fully and faith-

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fully. Nonetheless, it ought to remain the “Noble Dream” toward the attainment of which historians strive. They may not agree as to what “really” happened at the Battle of Hastings or the Congress of Vienna, but their separate attempts to establish these facts constitute a kind of triangulation of the past. And just as a surveyor, by taking successive bearings on a certain feature of the landscape from different stations is able to locate the feature more precisely, so the independent work of a corps of historians, investigating and writing about the same event, each from his or her own perspective, can help fix it more accurately on the landscape of history. To be sure, as G. R. Elton (1970:102) remarked, “No one supposes that what the historian is in himself does not affect his writing.” There is admittedly a significant kernel of truth in the doctrine of historical relativism. Elton (1983:103n.) may be right that historical truth “is only asymptotically attainable.” But carried too far, an allegiance to relativism threatens to undermine and vitiate history as a strict academic discipline. A thoroughgoing historical relativism introduces into the practice of history an enervating subjectivism. If the facts of history are, at bottom, only what individual historians make them out to be, and if every historian is free to cast them in his own mold, how then can one ever know reliably the nature of the past? Where would be the firm, squared-off building blocks with which to erect the solid edifice of history? With each historian his own architect, and each using a blueprint of his own design, who can confidently rely on any given historical structure? And if we are to choose, on what basis are we to select one among the various structures offered to us? Of course, the entrenched historical relativist will simply say, “Too bad, but that’s the way it is. The goals you aim for are inherently unattainable, History exists only in our conceptions of it, and these conceptions inevitably differ.” However, while this conclusion may be acceptable to the historian, it is by no means forced upon the anthropologist—certainly not on one who regards his discipline as a science. Such an anthropologist is in full agreement with Einstein (1934:60) that “the belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science” (emphasis mine). The anthropologist, we may say, is more of an optimist. He is convinced that the raw material of the past, if properly quarried and cut, can indeed furnish building blocks to erect a solid science of culture that is not a matter of personal taste but of common agreement. He is thus ready to endorse the view of Kenneth E. Bock (1952:493), a scholar with a foot in each camp, who urged the view on his colleagues that “the conviction, fostered by some historians ... and accepted by many

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social scientists, that the historical record of men’s experiences is something that can be comprehended only in a quivering ecstasy of subjective and intuitive interpretation, is something that we must get out of our system.” This advice, offered more than forty years ago, is even more appropriate today. Within the last decade or so, both history and anthropology have been infected by the virus of postmodernism. And compared to the historical relativism of Becker and Beard, this new affliction is as the Black Death to the chicken pox. (For an elegant and incisive critique of postmodernism in history, see Himmelfarb 1992, 1995131–161.) Curiously, the issue of historical relativism never arose in anthropology until quite recently. Cultural relativism, of course, dominated anthropology for close to half a century, but that was a very different concept. It did not question the anthropologist’s capacity to observe, record, and present ethnographic facts objectively. It maintained only that the customs and institutions of a society, as well as entire societies themselves, could not be validly assessed as more or less advanced, higher or lower, in terms of cultural development. The case, though, was different with sociology. During the height of the Vietnam War, sociology did become engulfed by the issue of historical relativism. In the maelstrom of passions that enveloped the social sciences during those turbulent years, and the subjectivism it engendered, some sociologists, notably Alvin Gouldner (197054, 60, 102–104, 439–440, 511), challenged the notion that an objective sociology was possible. Somehow, anthropology remained aloof from such doubts then, but in the 1980s, with the onset of postmodernism, anthropology, along with most other academic disciplines, was plunged into an orgy of subjectivism. And the effect was as baleful as it was profound. What had been avoided during the 1960s hit anthropology with full force in the 1980s. To characterize this effect, we can do no better than to return to our medical analogy. Just as the chicken pox, if gone through during childhood, is a relatively mild affliction, if missed at an early age and sustained during adulthood, it is likely to be much more virulent. But that is another story. Let me end this chapter by stating the anthropologist’s—or at least this anthropologist’s—opinion regarding historical relativism. Peter Gay was quite right. The events that constitute history are facts. They happened, and they happened in one way only. There was not a “different” Battle of Crécy for the English and for the French. It was one and the same engagement, however much each side might have regarded it differently. In reconstituting the whole of human history, we must struggle with many gaps in the historical record. And it is

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perfectly true that the interests and biases of anthropologists and historians alike can affect their perception, selection, and presentation of the facts of history. Still, there is something objective out there, something that exists or existed independently of whoever happened to observe and record it. And that “something” can be examined as a datum, can be dealt with as a scientific phenomenon. In this regard, our facts are no different from the elements of the chemist, the strata of the geologist, or the stars of the astronomer. True, just as a physicist is forced to introduce the concept of “standard error” in assessing the accuracy of his measurement, we may never be able to reconstruct this history with all the fullness, precision, and confidence we would like, but we can approach that ideal, as Elton put it, asymptomatically. That, at least, should be our objective.

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What Drives the Engine of History? Race and the Deity

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TREVELYAN stated the issue very simply. “The root ofthe question,” he said, “can be put in these terms:–‘Ought history be merely the Accumulation of facts about the past? Or ought it also be the Interpretation of [these] facts?’ ” (1972:230). As we have seen, a long tradition has prevailed among historians of “sticking to the facts” and avoiding broad interpretations. Trevelyan himself delighted in the pure historical fact, unsullied by any form of explanation. Thus, he wrote, “The deeds . . . are more interesting than their causes and effects.... The feelings . . . and actions of the soldiers of Cromwell’s army are interesting in themselves, not merely as part of a process of ‘cause and effect’ ” (1968c:147–148). Of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Archibald Alison (1846b:368) observed, We can turn over his fascinating pages without wearying; but without ever discovering the general progress or apparent tendency of human affairs.” In his presidential address to the American Historical Association, George Burton Adams “spoke as if history had no object except getting its facts straight” (Higham 1989:108). And typifying the view that assembling the facts is all that is required of a historian, James Anthony Froude declared, Wise men do not ask for theories of Hamlet, but are satisfied with Hamlet himself“ (quoted in Butterfield 1951:237). To many historians, though, this way of writing history—the piling up of fact upon fact—would not do. When it came to understanding why things had happened the way they had, and not in some other way, EORGE M.

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historical particularism yielded very unsatisfying results. Thus Geoffrey Barraclough (1984:28) stated categorically that “the accumulation of historical knowledge has not clarified, but has complicated and perplexed....” Other historians felt the same way, that the more they knew, the less they could be expected to understand. However, they held that this failure was more the fault of the way historians practiced their craft than it was of the ever-increasing corpus of historical evidence. The discipline of history, they felt, should aspire to something more than merely stringing together on the slender thread of chronology the facts that had been unearthed. Among those who held this view was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who, with his usual elegance, wrote: “In history . . . the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them, performs only one half of his office. Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value” (n.d.:76). Since Macaulay’s day, other historians have voiced similar views. “To me,” wrote Carl Becker, “nothing can be duller than historical facts, and nothing more interesting than the service they can be made to render in the effort to solve the everlasting riddle of human existence” (quoted in Higham 1989:120). The renowned Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was likewise convinced that “without hypothesis and synthesis history remains a pastime of antiquarians” (quoted in Renier 1950:259). The British historian Steven Runciman chastised his colleagues for their failure to concern themselves more fully with the trends and patterns of human events. Writing in the preface to his well-known History of the Crusades he said, “History-writing today has passed into an Alexandrian age, where criticism has overpowered creation. Faced by the mountainous heap of minutiae of knowledge, and awed by the watchful severity of his colleagues, the modern historian too often takes refuge in learned articles or narrowly specialized dissertations, small fortresses that are easy to defend from attack” (1964:I,xi). Instead of hating on details, Runciman (1964:I, xi) added, “The supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greatest events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.” Sir Lewis Namier sought to convince his colleagues that “the function of the historian is akin to that of the painter and not of the photographic camera: to discover and set forth, to single out and stress that which is of the nature of the thing, and not to reproduce indiscriminately all that meets the eye” (1972:739). More recently, William H. McNeill (1986:93) complained that “for half a century or more, Englishspeaking historians have emphasized micro at the expense of macro

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history. It is time to redress the balance, lest the profession sink toward triviality and preoccupation with merely antiquarian detail.” “The facts of history,” said A. L. Rowse, ”are not isolated, . . . like pebbles on a beach; they are connected by skeins of consequence in every direction. One state of affairs leads to another, arises out of an earlier one; they are connected causally, The fact that the cause is often not simple or unilateral does not mean that it is not there; it merely means that it is more difficult to disentangle and estimate” (1963:69). Finally, in his article on the philosophy of history in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Patrick Gardiner asserted unequivocally that “causality remains the fundamental category of historical understanding. The crucial problem, therefore, is one of elucidating the notion of causal connection in history“ (1968:431). Interpretation, then, must play a key role if we are to extract from history all that it has to offer. And at the heart of any such attempt is the notion of causation. Why did things happen the way they did? Or, as the title of this chapter asks, “What drives the engine of history?” Many historians have recognized causation as the “drive shaft” of this engine, delivering power, generated by the major forces of history, to the “wheels” on which it runs. “[T]he present condition of the human race,” declared John B. Bury (1930a:26), “is simply and strictly the result of a causal series (or set of causal series)—a continuous succession of changes, where each state arises causally out of the preceding; and ... the business of historians is to trace this genetic process, to explain each change, and ultimately to grasp the complete development of the life of humanity.” The American historian Edward John Payne (1892:4), struck the same note when he wrote: “The mind revolts from a mere recital of facts, however undeniable may be their truth. It requires the interpretation of their significance. It seeks the causes which generated them, the means by which they were produced, and the ends and effects to which they have conducted. History has become primarily an enquiry into causes.” A contemporary of Payne, Herbert Baxter Adams, heartily agreed. History, he said, “should not be content with describing effects when it can explain causes’’ (quoted in Saveth 1966:122). A more recent statement of this same view comes from the pen of the noted American historian Henry Steele Commager: “The search for the causes of things is, and has long been, the chief preoccupation of thoughtful historians. No self-respecting modern historian is content merely with recording what happened; he wants to explain why it happened. Of all problems of history, causation is the most urgent, the most fascinating, and the most baffling” (1965:79). Many historians, of course, have operated on this premise. In the

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preface to his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, W. E. H. Lecky, for example, tells us: “It has been my object to disengage from the great mass of facts those which relate to the permanent forces of the nation, or which indicate some of the more enduring forces of national life” (1892:vi). Still, identifying the true causal nexus of a historical event has been found a daunting task by many a historian. A typical lament is that of Herbert Butterfield: “It is as much as the historian can do to trace with some probability the sequence of events from one generation to another, without seeking to draw the incalculably complex diagram of causes and effects forever interlacing down to the third and fourth generations” (1965:20). Even those historians who readily and fearlessly embraced the central role of causation have generally shied away from singling out any particular set of factors as constituting the major determinants of history. Most of them seem to have agreed with Jacques Barzun (1972: 392) that “in history no single element is a prime mover.” Nonetheless, a few historians have been dissatisfied with what might be called a “democratic” view of historical causation in which no one factor is assigned a greater share than any other. Reacting to this view, A. L. Rowse objected that “it does not advance matters much to divide historical forces into economic and non-economic, and leave them in dead equilibrium. There is a natural hierarchy of such forces, which arrange themselves in order of importance” (1928:61). And indeed, through the centuries, a few historians and social theorists have ventured to select a particular set of factors as being the major driving force of history. Our survey of historical causation begins with those factors that today are regarded as the least convincing determinants of history and proceeds toward those deemed to be the more sustainable causes. Accordingly, let me turn first to attempts to invoke race as a major guiding element in history.

RACIAL DETERMINANTS OF HISTORY The recognition that culture is something separate and distinct from biology and that it constitutes the major determinant of human behavior is barely a century old. And before arriving at that recognition, historians frequently resorted to race in their efforts to account for the course of history. Each race, and even each supposed subdivision of a race, was thought to be endowed with its own peculiar and enduring traits. In matters of intellect especially, it was pretty well agreed that

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very significant differences existed between races. The various degrees of cultural advancement seen among different peoples of the globe were then readily attributed to their particular racial “temperament.” Not surprisingly, those writers most eager to make such assessments usually found their own “race” to be the one most favorably endowed. Germans were particularly impressed with the importance of “Teutonic blood” in shaping their place in history and in prescribing their mission in the world. This “racial” pride was already well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century, not only among solid German burghers, but even among the most transcendental of idealist philosophers. In his Addresses to the German Nation in 1807, for example, Fichte, held that “the hope of the future lay with the German people. They were the Urfolk or unmixed race, possessing ‘hidden and inexhaustible springs of spiritual life and power’ ” (Barnes 1963:194). Even a sober professional historian like Theodor Mommsen was so imbued with the dogma of Teutonic superiority that James Harvey Robinson (1965:88) was led to declare, “The Aryan theory set forth . . . by Mommsen in the opening chapter of his Roman History, to-day appears well-nigh as naive and grotesque as the earlier notion of the Tower of Babel.” Around the middle of the nineteenth century, along came Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequalities of the Human Races (1854). Gobineau, a French historian, was also an aristocrat and a Germanophile, and his thesis was much more warmly received in Germany than in his own country. “He considered the culture of the white races and especially that of the Teutons as superior to that of the other races and ascribed their culture to outward manifestations of superior innate tendencies. He attempted to disprove the idea that the lower races could ever reach a higher level of civilization.... He found justification for Aryan superiority in ancient Greece and claimed that European history began only with the Teutonic invasion” (Salomon 1931:683). Gobineau’s ideas were warmly greeted by the circle of men who surrounded Richard Wagner at Bayreuth and gave further impetus to the Germans’ belief in their own racial supremacy. Jacob Burckhardt, the famous German-trained Swiss historian of Italian Renaissance art, intermingled geographic and racial determinants when he wrote: “From time immemorial the Mediterranean Sea had given to the nations that dwelt on its shores mental impulses different from those which governed the peoples of the North; and never, from the very structure of their character, could the Italians be adventurers in the sense which the word bore among the Teutons” (1958:I, 279).

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By the close of the nineteenth century, so firmly was the notion of the inequality of races entrenched in Germany that we find an otherwise sound scholar like the anthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel (1896: 22) asserting that “the intellect of whole races shows a wide discrepancy in regard to differences of endowment.” The belief that because of their genetic superiority some races had played a more dominant role in history than others was by no means confined to Germany, however. A good many British historians believed it too. The Scotsman Archibald Alison (1846a:194), for instance, wrote: ”All nations were not framed in the same mould, because all were not destined for the same ends. To some was given, for the mysterious but beneficent designs of Providence, excellence in arms, and the ensanguined glory of ruthless conquest; to others supremacy in commerce, and the mission of planting their colonies in distant lands; to a few, excellence in literature and the arts, and the more durable dominion over the thoughts and minds of men.” Other British historians were not so evenhanded in parceling out positive attributes to the various races. Many were convinced that the Teutonic or Aryan traits of character that the English had allegedly derived from their Germanic heritage had played a key role in the establishment of England‘s supremacy in the world. This racial inheritance was a precious gift, moreover, and something to be looked after and preserved. Charles Kingsley (1864a:338), for one, did not hesitate to assert that “the welfare of the Teutonic race is the welfare of the world.” British historians who came after Kingsley continued to hold similar views. The concept of race, though, was sliced pretty fine. The white race was often subdivided into a Germanic race, a Celtic race, an Italian race, and so on, each being assigned its distinctive attributes. And specific historical interpretations were sometimes based on particular admixtures of differently endowed “races.” In his Handbook of English History, for example, M. J. Guest (1896:135) attributed the creation of the British empire to “the Norman fire and energy, which joined itself to the Teuton perseverance and industry.” It was, he said, “like putting the swift spirit of an eagle into the strong body of an ox.” Though generally known as a “social” historian, George M. Trevelyan was nonetheless convinced that “had it not been for the Scandinavian blood infused into our race by the catastrophes of the Ninth Century [the Danish invasions], less would have been heard in days to come of British maritime and commercial enterprise” (1942:53–54). Even an English writer like H. G. Wells, known for his enlightened views on social issues, nonetheless clung to a belief in the existence of innate psychological differences between ethnic groups, and argued

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that these differences were reflected in the history of nations. Thus, at the end of his widely read book, The Outlines of History, Wells wrote: “Our history has told us of a repeated overrunning and refreshment of the originally brunet civilizations by the hardier, bolder, free-spirited peoples of the steppes and desert. We have pointed out how these constantly recurring nomadic injections have steadily altered the primordial civilizations both in blood and in spirit” (Wells 1921:1097). And it is necessary to report that the British anthropologist, Sir James G. Frazer, seemed convinced that racial differences in intellect were real, and that their consequences were not to be ignored. For example, he spoke bluntly of “the natural, universal, and ineradicable inequality of men. Not only are different races differently endowed in respect to intelligence, courage, industry, and so forth...., [n]o abstract doctrine is more false and mischievous than that of the natural equality of men” (1913:166–167). Nor were American scholars of the period left behind in proclaiming that the races were not equal. Casting aside any pretense of modesty, that paragon of American letters, William James, informed the world that “layer after layer of human perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley with cries of ‘Meat, meat!”’ (1890–1891:2438). Somewhat more tempered in his assessment of the role of race in history was John L. Motley, whose best known work, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, appeared in 1856. Motley saw the triumphs of the Anglo-Saxon nations—Holland‘s liberation from Spain being his immediate concern—as stemming largely from a superior physical makeup, which justified, he thought, a flush of racial pride. “To all who speak the English language,” he wrote, “the history of the great agony through which the Republic of Holland was ushered into life has peculiar interest, for it is a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon race— essentially the same, whether in Friesland, England, or Massachusetts” (1856:I, iv–v). Citizens of the United States, “in whose Anglo-Saxon veins flows much of that ancient and kindred blood,” could trace their “own political existence to the same parent spring of temperate human liberty” that had galvanized the Dutch into rising up and otherthrowing the yoke of Spain (1856:I, v–vi). So firmly fixed was this belief in the genetic superiority of northern Europeans that according to Harry Elmer Barnes (1925:491), “The great majority of the philosophies of history and politics in the last half of the nineteenth century were based on the Aryan hypothesis.” Well into the twentieth century, historians continued to use race, however finely sliced, to help account for differences in historical devel-

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opment. We have already quoted a remark to this effect by George Trevelyan uttered as late as 1942. In more qualified and subdued form, William Atkinson offered the following assessment of the relative contribution of “racial” elements in his History of Spain and Portugal: “In the west—Galicia and Portugal—the Celts came to predominate, and the temptation remains strong to label as Celtic the most distinctive traits of the Galician-Portuguese temperament, its gentle melancholy, the yearning (saududes) for what has been and is not, its impracticality, its pre-eminently lyric genius” (1960:19). Later in the same volume, while seeking to account for the differences between Castile and Portugal, Atkinson again succumbed to the temptation of using race as a causal mechanism, and offered to explain their differences “in national temperament by divergences in the intensity and permanence of the various racial infusions, from Celtic down to Arab and Berber, in the west as compared with the rest of the Peninsula” (1960:73). As recently as 1963, in the writings of so sophisticated a historian as A. L. Rowse, we still find the following passage: Nothing is more remarkable to a discerning student of British history than the dualism of English and Celtic characteristics in the one people: the extremism, the vivacity and temperament of the one, the reliability, the dogged qualities, the imagination, the sense of moderation of the other. There is no doubt, fortunately, which is the dominant. Anyone with discernment can observe these strains coming out in the British people and in their history, and we can say that without involving ourselves in the crudities of racialism (1963:71) Well, then, perhaps in its “niceties”? As far back as the 1940s anthropologists were also working with the concept of “national character,” but they recognized that to the extent that it existed at all, it was a purely cultural phenomenon and not something springing from the genes of an ethnic group. It is probably fair to say that while today most British historians are familiar with the concept of culture, it still has not penetrated to the marrow of their bones. Viewing racial differences as a decisive element in history was by no means limited to German and Anglo-American historians, however. French historians were ready to play the game as well. In his History of France, Jules Michelet offered a prime example. According to Michelet, to properly understand such a mixed race as the French, one had to examine the component elements that went

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into it—the pure Bretons, the Welsh, the Scotch Highlanders, and the Irish. The old Celtic races, he wrote, perched on their native mountains, or sequestered in their far distant isles, have remained faithful to the poetic independence of their barbarous life, till surprised by the rude hand of foreign conquest.... But such is the tenacity of the Celtic race, such the principle of life in nations, that they have endured every outrage, and still preserved inviolate the manners and customs of their forefathers. Race of granite! Immovable, like the huge Druidical blocks which they still regard with superstitious veneration. (quoted in Alison 1846a:192) Not only on the Celts did Michelet bestow his admiration. He made no secret of his envy of the English temperament. After the turbulence and excesses of the French Revolution, “the French people,” he wrote, “sighed for the establishment of a government which should give them at once the energy of the British character, the glories of the British empire.” But, alas, said Michelet, it was a futile hope: “And what has been the result [of the manifestation of Celtic character]?—The desolation of Spain, the ruin of Portugal, the depopulation and blasting of South America. Vain have been all attempts to transplant to nations of Celtic or Moorish descent, the institutions which grew and flourished among those of Anglo-Saxon blood.” And he concluded that “a century of bloodshed, devastation, and wretchedness will be spent ere mankind generally learn that there is an essential and indelible distinction between the character of the different races of men” (quoted in Alison 1846a:194). As the nineteenth century drew to a close, this view still held sway in France, even among those who held themselves out as social scientists. We thus find the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon writing: History in its main lines may be regarded as the mere statement of the results engendered by the psychological constitution of races. It is determined by this constitution, just as the respiratory organs of fish are determined by their aquatic life. In the absence of a preliminary knowledge of the mental constitution of a people, its history appears a chaos of events governed by hazard. On the contrary, when we are acquainted with the soul of a people, its life is seen to be the regular and inevitable consequence of its psychological characteristics. In all the manifestations of the life of a people, we always find the unchangeable soul of the race weaving itself its own destiny. (quoted in Barnes 1925:166)

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Notions of the varying contributions ostensibly made by different peoples through their particular racial endowments continued to muddy the waters of understanding among historians throughout Europe. To cite one more example, the “Nordic myth,” that is to say, the notion that a Nordic people, arriving in Greece from the north, had, through their favored racial strains, invigorated Greek culture, has been, according to the historian Chester G. Starr (1963:12), “an enduring curse of Greek scholarship.” Looked at from a more southerly latitude, however, the supposed Nordic racial superiority was not only denied but turned on its head. A certain Arab judge named Said, assessing the situation from his seat of learning in medieval Toledo, presented a very different picture of the matter. With a strong dose of environmental determinism flavoring his argument, Said declared of Nordic peoples that “because the sun does not shed its rays directly over their heads, their climate is cold and atmosphere clouded. Consequently their temperaments have become cold and their humors rude, while their bodies have grown large, their complexion light and their hair long. They lack withal sharpness of wit and penetration of intellect, while stupidity and folly prevail among them” (quoted in Hitti 1967:169). Already in the mid-nineteenth century, however, a few thinkers began to reject the value of race or “national character” as an interpretive principle in history. John Stuart Mill declared that “of all the vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent national differences” (quoted in Bowler 1989:28). With anthropology leading the way, the scholarly world, including historians, slowly began to recognize and accept the fact that the physical differences between the races did not translate into intellectual ones, and that differences in “temperament” between ethnic groups were better explained culturally than genetically. Gradually, we can see historians beginning to learn the lesson. For example, in discussing the rise of the great fairs held in northern Europe during the Middle Ages, Henri Pirenne, in his well-known book, Medieval Cities (1925), did not point to terms such as “gild” and “hanse,” and use their German derivation to argue that these fairs stemmed directly from peculiarly Teutonic traits of industry, as an older generation of historians might have done. Rather, he held that “what determined the economic organization was not ‘national genius,’ but social necessity. The primitive institutions of trade were as cosmopolitan as those of the feudal system” (quoted in Rowse 1928:65).

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Within cultural anthropology, the notion that differences in culture can be attributed to differences in race has long been thoroughly discredited. And in more recent years, we find historians, too, learning the lesson. Arnold Toynbee, for example, sharply disputed the “racial alchemy” that historians had mistakenly practiced in the past: A false analogy from the phenomena that were being brought to light by physical science led our Western historians of the last generation to picture races as chemical “elements” and their miscegenation as a chemical “reaction” which released latent energies and produced effervescence and change where, before, there had been immobility and stagnation. Historians deluded themselves into supposing that the “infusion of new blood,” as they metaphorically described the racial effect of the Barbarian intrusion [into Europe], could account for those long-subsequent manifestations of life and growth which constitute the history of the Western Society. (1947:14) A fitting epitaph to racial determinism in history was penned by the philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood. We have seen that British historians talked of a “Celtic temperament,” and some even went so far as to use this notion in accounting for the distinctive features of Celtic art. But Collingwood would have none of it: Its dependence on an occult entity like the “Celtic temperament” forbade me to take it seriously. With entities of that kind we have left behind us the daylight, and even the twilight, of history, and have entered a darkness peopled by all the monsters of Rassentheories and Jungian psychology. In that darkness what we find is not history but the negation of history; not the solution of historical problems but only a heady drink which gives us the illusion of having solved them. (1978:139–140) Nothing more need be said on the issue.

GOD IN HISTORY We turn now to interpretations of history that see it as an expression of God‘s will on earth, as the unfolding of a divine plan for the human race. And we propose to trace how history, along with many other avenues of inquiry, gradually came to replace supernatural explanations with naturalistic ones. “To Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus,” wrote James Harvey Robinson (1965:29), ”history appeared to be purely human and secular....

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But with the establishment of the Christian church the past began to take on a religious and theological meaning.” In the Middle Ages, therefore, with Christianity deeply entrenched in Europe, historical events were seen by those who chronicled them (mostly priests and monks) as directed by the mind and hand of God. And in keeping with moral teachings of the Bible, rewards were bestowed on the virtuous and punishment heaped on the wicked. Let us cite a few examples of this. The anonymous writer of the Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña, the official fourteenth-century history of the Crown of Aragon, casting about for an explanation of the unexpected defeat of King Alfonso I in the Battle of Fraga after twentynine consecutive victories, concluded that it was “punishment for the sort of sacrilege he had committed in León and Castile” (Nelson 1991: 29). Among his sins was the fact that, unable to pay his troops from his own coffers, Alfonso “turned his hand against sanctuaries, churches, and monasteries. He robbed them of their treasure and sold and made levies against their properties and possessions” (Nelson 1991:29). And when in 1137, an almost certain war between Navarre and Aragon was avoided, it was, according to the chronicler, because “God, Who aids negotiations and averts evils, intervened so that the war did not occur” (Nelson 1991:38). Looking again at the history of Spain but jumping forward more than 300 years, when the Moors administered a crushing defeat to Castilian and Aragonese forces at the Battle of Axarquia in 1483, the Curate of Los Palacios, writing a history of the Christian campaign against the Kingdom of Granada, explained: The number of Moors was small, who inflicted this grievous defeat on the Christians. It was, indeed, clearly miraculous, and we may discern in it the special interposition of Providence, justly offended with the greater part of those that engaged in the expedition; who, instead of confessing, partaking the sacrament, and making their testaments, as becomes good Christians, and men that are to bear arms in defence of the Holy Catholic faith, acknowledged that they did not bring with them suitable dispositions, but, with little regard to Gad’s service, were influenced by covetousness and love of ungodly gain. (quoted in Prescott n.d.:I, 430–431) In the days of Classical Antiquity, as Robinson (1965:31–32) observed, “the danger had been that Clio [the Muse of History] would fall into the way of aping her sisters, Poetry and the Drama, and of borrowing their finery. Now she permitted herself to be led blindfolded by Theology.”

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St. Augustine formulated what came to be known as the “providential theory of history,” namely, “the assumption that God‘s plan had controlled the destinies of the pagan empires as well as the Jewish and Christian history” (Barnes 1963:49). His hand, then, was to be seen in all of history, sacred and profane. As to the general course of history, Augustine envisioned it as “moving along a line with a clear beginning, marked by the Creation, a middle, and an end. The birth and death of Christ denoted the central event, and the salvation of all believers at the termination signified the completion of the process” (Gilderhus 1996:22). Thus, in propounding his philosophy of history, Augustine instilled in Christians an outlook that “turned away from the world that now is and fixed on the world to come ...” (Haskins 1966:229). For the Christian faithful during the Middle Ages, then, “anticipation of the future held more significance than their perceptions of the past” (Gilderhus 1996:20). This was the overall trajectory of history seen from the Christian perspective. But here was also the more immediate, mundane, day-today history, the history of events in the lives of people here on earth, and that history was suffused with miraculous occurrences. The Bible, of course, was liberally sprinkled with miracles, and in medieval times, ”the working of a miracle was considered much more significant than the establishment of a dynasty” (Barnes 1963:44). Indeed, the most profound events of history were taken as instances of awesome divine intervention. So strongly was medieval Europe gripped by literalminded Christianity that in the writings of the period, according to Gibbon, “the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended” (quoted in Clive 1989:57). Even greater accomplishments were attributed to the saints, and Gibbon (no friend of medieval Christianity) took particular delight in exposing the credulity of those registering the miraculous deeds of pious heroes who “familiarly accosted, or imperiously commanded, the lions and serpents of the desert; infused vegetation into a sapless trunk; suspended iron on the surface of the water; passed the Nile on the back of a crocodile; and refreshed themselves in a fiery furnace” (quoted in Clive 1989:58). If profane history had a pattern at all, it was the successive, recurring, almost monotonous intrusion by God into human affairs. Considered from a strictly Biblical perspective, though, there was, as we have seen, a discernible direction to human history. “The perpetual turning of a wheel,” wrote Toynbee, “is not a vain repetition if, at each revolution, it is carrying a vehicle that much nearer to its goal” (quoted in

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Sorokin 1949:106). To any true believer, human history did have purpose and direction above and beyond the strivings of mere mortals: “It was a tale told by God, unfolding itself from the Creation through the Fall and the Redemption to the Last Judgment” (Toynbee 1949:79). With the approach of the year A.D. 1000, the Last Judgment foretold in the Bible seemed close at hand. And while the predicted millennium might, once established, usher in an eternity of peace and joy, its impending arrival caused trepidation and even panic throughout Europe. Many charters betrayed this sense of doom, beginning with the words, “As the world is now drawing to its close,” and portents of this menacing convulsion were especially dreaded. Thus, an army marching under the banner of the German Emperor Otto I “was so terrified by an eclipse of the sun, which it conceived to announce this consummation, as to disperse hastily on all sides” (Hallam 1897:6859). Well beyond the darkest days of the Middle Ages, historical events continued to be seen as instances of Gad’s involvement in human affairs. When Charles VIII of France, at the head of his armies, entered Florence in 1494, Savonarola, the city’s leading political figure, was convinced that Charles was the direct instrument of Gad, come to punish the Florentines for their lives of sin and pleasure (Robinson 1965361). And “Everything goes to show,” reported Plekhanov (1940: 12n.), “that Cromwell also regarded himself as such an instrument . . . ; he always called his actions the hits of the will of God.” The French Revolution, with its terrible excesses, presented a serious challenge to those who insisted that all that happened in the world was in accord with God‘s benevolent plan. But they were up to the challenge! The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, admonished the historian that, in his “just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence, and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of His goodness” (quoted in Acton 1985:527n.). The Scottish historian Archibald Alison, however, needed no such admonition, his thinking being quite in step with Coleridge’s. Of the events of the Terror that blighted the French Revolution he wrote: In the midst of these hideous crimes and atrocities, of this general anguish and suffering, fixed laws were operating, a silent progress was going forward, and Providence was patiently and in silence working out its ultimate designs by the free agency of an infinity of separate individuals. A great system of moral retribution was unceasingly at work; and out of the mingled

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virtues and vices, joys and sorrows, crimes and punishments, of previous centuries, were slowly forming the elements of the great and glorious French monarchy. (1846a:192) Some tried to turn the French Revolution to political advantage. Thus, the diplomat and dedicated royalist Joseph de Maistre considered the outrages of the Revolution to be “evidence of God’s wrath which could be appeased only by a return to the Old Régime” (Becker 1913:75). In earlier times, as we have seen, kings and political leaders had often seen themselves as carrying out on earth the dictates of a Celestial purpose. And what actors on the world stage, like Cromwell, stoutly maintained, scholars were ready to accept and elaborate. The most ambitious early effort to depict human history as an expression of God’s will was that of the seventeenth century French cleric, Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, as set forth in his majestic Discourse on Universal History (1681). In this work, according to Archibald Alison (1846b:369), Bossuet “professed to give nothing less than a development of the plan of Providence, in the government of human affairs, during the whole of Antiquity, and down to the reign of Charlemagne. The idea was magnificent, and the mental powers of the Bishop of Meaux promised the greatest results.... But the execution has by no means corresponded to the conception.” Buckle (1904:448) agreed with this assessment, calling Bossuet “a great genius cramped by a superstitious age.” As further testament to Bossuet’s power as a writer, we have the fact that after reading him during his first year at Oxford, Gibbon was temporarily converted to Catholicism. Of this conversion, soon afterwards reversed, Gibbon later wrote, “I surely fell by a noble hand” (quoted in Clive 1989:49). One feature of Bossuet’s Universal History, Alison (1846b:369) noted, was that “he supposes the divine agency to influence directly the affairs of men—not through the medium of general laws.” That this was the way he saw God working, Bossuet made crystal clear in a letter to the Dauphin, to whom he had addressed his Traité de Libre Arbitre: Remember, Monseigneur, that the long concatenation of particular causes which make and undo empires depends on the decrees of Divine Providence. High up in His heaven God holds the reins of all kingdoms. He has every heart in His hand. Sometimes He restrains passions, sometimes He leaves them free, and thus agitates all mankind. By this means God carries out His redoubtable judgments according to ever infallible rules. He it is who prepares results through the most distant causes, and who

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strikes vast blows whose repercussion is so widespread. Thus it is that God reigns over all nations. (quoted in Renier 1950:264) In preparing his own History of Civilization in England, Buckle had made a careful study of Bossuet’s Universal History, and while recognizing a powerful intellect at work behind it, he also perceived a great bias in many of his historical judgments. Particularly galling to Buckle was the fact that while Bossuet ignored major historical figures altogether, he heaped the most lavish praise on obscure drones of the Catholic Church. Unleashing the full might of his scorn, Buckle wrote: In . . . [Bossuet’s] scheme of universal history, Mohammed is not worthy to play a part. He is passed by; but the truly great man, the man to whom the human race is really indebted, is—Martin, Bishop of Tours. He it is, says Bossuet, whose unrivalled actions filled the universe with his fame, both during his lifetime and after his death. It is true that not one educated man in fifty has ever heard the name of Martin, Bishop of Tours. But Martin performed miracles, and the church had made him a saint; his claims, therefore, to the attention of historians must be far superior to the claims of one who, like Mohammed, was without these advantages. Thus it is that, in the opinion of the only eminent writer on history during the power of Louis XIV, the greatest man Asia has ever produced, and one of the greatest the world has ever seen, is considered in every way inferior to a mean and ignorant monk, whose most important achievement was the erection of a monastery, and who spent the best part of his life in useless solitude, trembling before the superstitious fancies of his weak and ignoble nature. (1904:451–451) Almost a century before Buckle, Voltaire had already objected vigorously to Bossuet’s presentation of universal history. Bossuet, Voltaire declared, “had mistaken a pious retelling of Hebrew tales for the history of the world” (Gay 1969:391). Well into the eighteenth century, the active and unrestricted play of God in human history continued to be affirmed. Consider, for example, Charles Rollin, rector of the University of Paris, and author of a four-volume work entitled The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians, published in 1731. In the preface to this work Rollin said of the ancients, from the descendants of Noah on down, that “God presided invisibly over all their councils and deliberations,” and that “nothing was transacted but by the Almighty’s appointment.” Moreover, as time passed and ancient days gave way to modern times, the same

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state of affairs continued to exist. “We must therefore consider as an indisputable principle,” Rollin went on to say, “and as the basis and foundation to the study of profane history, that the providence of the Almighty has, from all eternity, appointed the establishment, duration, and destruction of kingdoms and empires” (n.d.:I, 15). Rollin thus typified the view, lampooned by Preserved Smith, that history was “a puppet show in which God and the devil, by frequent direct interposition, pulled the strings” (P. Smith 1962:232). Summarizing the prevailing view of history during the eighteenth century, Carl Becker observed that “although history was regarded as a necessary and gradual process, it was not, in the main, regarded as a natural process; not conceived as the result of forces inherent in society, but rather as the expression of God‘s will” (1913:75). And well into the nineteenth century, this view continued to be held and expressed. Thus, the historian Thomas Arnold (the father of Matthew Arnold) was sure that “God‘s dealings with any particular generation of men are but the application of the eternal truths of His Providence to their particular circumstances” (quoted in Houghton 1957:146). Outside the field of theology, though, ideas were beginning to change. And these changes saw, if not a diminution in God‘s stature, at least his distancing himself from immediate intervention. An early anticipation of this notion can be found in the fourteenth-century French scholar Jean Buridan, who theorized that “God may have given each of the heavenly bodies the impetus He desired at the time He created them, and they have been running of their own impetus ever since” (Dales 1989:111). According to this view, then, it was no longer necessary to think of God as directly participating in the running of the universe, pushing the planets around in their orbits. He had wound the celestial clock at the beginning of time and now it was running on its own. While this idea of an initial divine impetus was still far removed from the laws of planetary motion, at least God‘s involvement in the workings of the universe was pushed back away from immediate control. And this new principle of divine governance through delegated authority, as it were, was to be seized upon and developed further during the ensuing centuries. The seventeenth century witnessed the beginning of vigorous scientific thinking in which received authority was openly challenged, and observation and experimentation were made the basis for verified knowledge. The earlier writings of Bacon and Descartes had helped set the stage for such a revolution in thought, but it was the actual scientified work of Galileo and Kepler and Newton that gave it real impetus.

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The radically new explanations of terrestrial and celestial motion set forth by these men revealed an undeniable orderliness and predictability in nature. Their findings thus pointed clearly to a universe ruled by fixed and immutable laws rather than one run by a God whose will was always inscrutable and sometimes perverse. The effect of these bold advances in physical science was to force on the thinking segment of society the realization that there were forces in the world that acted on their own, without the need for divine intervention. Nonetheless, it should be noted that God was merely relegated to a more distant place in the cosmos; he was not dispensed with altogether. Indeed, he remained the “prime mover” of the universe, the ultimate source of all matter and motion, even in the thinking of the leading scientists of the day Descartes, for example, was convinced that there were “certain fundamental ideas ‘given by intuition’ which provided the surest starting point for deductions of a mathematical character. Such ideas were those of motion, extension, and God. The idea of God was the main foundation of his system, for God had made extension, and had put motion into the Universe” (Mason 1962:166). Kepler, too, in his untiring calculations leading to the formulation of his three laws of planetary motion, was driven by the conviction that “God created the solar system according to a mathematical pattern” (Losee 1993:49). And Newton did not doubt for a moment that “this most beautiful cosmos could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being” (quoted in L. A. White 1987:284). But while the formulation of scientific laws could be seen, in some sense, as a demotion of God from the role of direct intercessor he had previously played, some scientists were ready to argue just the opposite. They maintained, in fact, that this way of proceeding was all the more to God‘s credit. The British astronomer John P. Nichol, for example, “hailed the advent of the comprehension of Nature through discoverable Laws and rejoiced at the disappearance of the capricious ways of Providence,” feeling that it “added greatly to the dignity of God to think that He governed the world through Laws and not through unpredictable wilfulness” (Peckham 1959:30). (It is interesting to note that the Reverend Charles Kingsley, initially disconcerted as the truth of Darwin’s theory of organic evolution bore in on him, grew reconciled to the change in God’s role that an acceptance of evolution entailed. Indeed, like Nichols, he decided that it added to God’s dignity, and accordingly, wrote to Darwin, “I have gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity to believe that He created animal forms capable of self-development into all forms

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needful . . . as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He himself had made. I question whether the former be not the loftier thought” [Kingsley 1927:3061 .) The influence of physical science, which was subjecting the behavior of matter to strict and elegant laws, began to affect thinking about the determinants of human events as well. Evidence of this can be found as far back as 1566, in Jean Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. In the early pages of this work, Bodin explicitly disavowed theological interpretations of history. “Such interpretations are not valid, in his view, because history.... is a discipline which has nothing in common with the study of God or of nature” (Huppert 1970:93). In line with this developing notion of how the study of history should be pursued, we can cite Giambattista Vico’s treatment of the problem in his The New Science (1725). While his avowed purpose in writing this book was to describe the workings of divine providence in history, the effect produced was otherwise. According to the sociologist Floyd House, Vico ”held that God directs the course of human affairs through natural causes rather than by miraculous intervention in particular cases. His inquiry into the operation of divine providence, therefore, assumes the form of an inquiry into the natural sequence of events; and thus Vico’s point of view makes possible a secular interpretation of history” (House 1936:108). The latter third of the eighteenth century, the period known as the Enlightenment, witnessed a further strengthening of the secular interpretation of history. Deism made its appearance, serving as an alternative and a challenge to theism in looking at the way in which God ran the world. As we have seen, earlier writers on history, especially theologians like Bishop Bossuet, had held that God could and did intervene directly in worldly affairs, temporarily setting aside his own laws, if need be, and causing wonderful or terrible things to happen if he wished. The Deists of the Enlightenment, however, were intent on setting strict limits to God’s powers, or at least to the way in which he exercised them. Conceding that God might have laid down the Laws of Nature at the beginning of the world, they held that he was now bound by them himself No longer was he allowed to capriciously intervene in human actions and suspend or transcend these laws. Miracles were thus banished from the realm of possibility. Deists believed, then, that God had no immediate involvement in human events, great or small. Thus, much as he might lament or decry an outcome displeasing to him, he could not, or at least would not, interfere to save a righteous monarch from being toppled from his throne, or a pious host from being slaughtered on the battlefield. Accordingly, for the Deists, human history was

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now free to follow an independent, lawful, and intelligible course. “The eighteenth-century Deists,” wrote James Harvey Robinson, “never tired of praising a God of immutable law” (1965:122). God, they affirmed, had created nature and was content to act through her. In the apt words of Auguste Comte, God was pictured “as a sovereign who reigns but does not govern” (Frank 1945:62). While these trends of thought were most apparent in France and England, a somewhat similar development was taking place in Germany. Here, though, as a manifestation of the German idealist tradition, God was attenuated and etherealized, rather than being confined to quarters, as the Deists would have it. Often the talk of German philosophers and historians was of “Nature” rather than of God, but more often than not, Nature proved to be merely a mask for God. Immanuel Kant, for example, thought that “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realisation of a hidden plan of nature” (1989:50). Hegel continually spoke of “Spirit” and of the “Absolute Idea” but made it clear that at bottom, they were both manifestations of God. In typically vague and mystical prose, he wrote that “the history of the world . . . is . . . the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world—viz., that what has happened and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially his work” (1969:I, 90). Herder clearly thought of God as master of the universe, but saw him acting through channels that he himself had laid down. And this applied to human affairs as well as to the physical world. “If there be a god in nature,” he wrote, “there is in history too; for man is himself a part of creation, and in his wildest extravagances and passions must obey laws not less excellent and beautiful than those by which all the celestial bodies move” (quoted in Robinson 1965:38). Schelling too saw history as “a continuous revelation of the Absolute gradually accomplishing itself,” and held that “History is an epic composed in the mind of God.” In fact, history was simply ”God’s march through the world” (quoted in Beard 1972:318). If the pronouncements of the German Idealists regarding the driving force of history all sounded pretty much alike, one would be tempted to say, with the French, that dans la nuit, tous les chats sont gris. Finally, in the writings of Leopold von Ranke, hailed by many as the dean of nineteenth-century historians and famous for his relentless pursuit of objectivity, we nonetheless find “the hand of God” clearly at work (Hughes 1964:8). As summarized by Carl Becker, it was Ranke’s belief that “God has made men and nations, through whose actions he indeed reveals himself. This is after all the ultimate truth, that history

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is God’s work, which we must submit to, but which we may seek to understand in order that we may submit to it intelligently” (1958b:271). In this regard, then, Ranke did not differ much from Hegel. “The philosophy of both men was in essentials the same: in the dim background God (or the Transcendental Idea), moving in mysterious ways, obliquely revealing the cosmic purpose in man ... and in his history” (Becker 1958b:272). In the middle of the nineteenth century, though, a profound change in human thinking began to occur, a change ushered in by the arrival of evolution. Darwin’s The Origin of Species stirred not only biologists but also scholars in virtually all fields of learning. To a mind unclouded by theological conviction, the implications of the theory of evolution were irresistible. If evolution could explain the origin and development of biological organisms without recourse to supernatural agents or forces, could it not do the same for the succession of human events? Once the full impact of this realization hit home, religious interpretations of history were not only put on the defensive but also found themselves in full retreat. Parallel to Darwin, and in fact even before him, Herbert Spencer had maintained that when looked at from a broad enough perspective, history could be seen as a gradual evolutionary development, to be explained by means of entirely natural factors and forces. In an article entitled “The Social Organism,” Spencer wrote: “You need but to look at the changes going on around, or observe social organization in its leading peculiarities, to see that these are ... [not] supernatural, ... as by implication historians commonly teach; but are consequent on general natural causes” (1860:52). By the latter half of the nineteenth century, while God had not been entirely driven from the temple of history, he was playing a distinctly muted role. He might be invoked in the preface to a historical work as constituting the ultimate source of human existence, but as an explanatory device in accounting for a given sequence of events, he was kept pretty much at arm’s length. To be sure, not all historians remained aloof from God in their writings. Charles Kingsley, a cleric as well as a historian, embraced God warmly and invited him in to direct the flow of events. For Kingsley, “History is ‘God educating man’ ” (1860:67). In all ages, “we shall find,... God ... protecting him till he can go alone, furnishing him with the primary necessaries, teaching him, guiding him, inspiring him, as we should do to our children.... This is my conception of history” (1864b:1). However, Kingsley warned, we should avoid looking closely into God’s motives, but rather should pursue our search for historical causa-

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tion “without impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds” (1964b:liii). Nor did Kingsley see God as simply a distant celestial overseer, but as actively engaged in directing the actual course of history. Listen, for instance, to Kingsley as he discusses the recurring and ultimately successful attacks of Germanic tribes on the Roman Empire: And now, gentlemen, was this vast campaign fought without a general?... Was there no one mind to lead those innumerable armies, on whose success depended the future of the whole human race? Did no one marshal them in that impregnable convex front, from the Euxine to the North Sea? No one guide them to the two great strategic centres, of the Black Forest and Trieste? No one cause them, blind barbarians without maps or science to follow those rules of war, without which victory in a protracted struggle is impossible . . .? Believe it who will: but I cannot. I may be told that they have gravitated into their places, as stones and mud do. Be it so.... But while I believe that not a stone or a handful of mud gravitates into its place without the will of God.... shall I not believe that though this great war had no general upon earth, it may have had a general in Heaven? and that in spite of all their sins, the hosts of our forefathers were the hosts of God? (1864a:339–340). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, we find God invoked only in a very tempered way by British historians. Thus, Lord Acton, although a lifelong Catholic, gave this counsel to his colleagues: “Historians have not to point out everywhere the hand of Providence, but to find out all the natural causes of things. Enough will always remain that cannot be so explained” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:138 n.). By the time of Herbert Butterfield, half a century later, the hand of God in history was spared even more. So much so, that as if to show that he did not regard naturalism as sovereign over all that happens in the world, Butterfield wrote: “We may still praise God, and not merely do honor to scientific laws, at the coming of spring; and we may thank Providence rather than Chance for those ‘conjunctures’ [as he called historical contingencies] which seem to matter so much both in life and in history” (1960:141). Turning to history as it was being written in the United States, we find similar allusions to God’s role. After the Thirteen Colonies had established their independence, one of the first important historical works to be published in America was George Bancroft’s History of the

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United States (1834). In it Bancroft wrote: “It is the object of the present work to explain how the change in the condition of our land has been brought about; and ... to follow the steps by which a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory” (1967I:3). Indeed, Bancroft’s History, according to Charles Beard, made every effort to show “how hard God had worked to establish democracy of a thoroughly reputable variety in America” (quoted in Ausubel 1950:191). Still, while God may have stood in the background, witnessing the scene and watching his general purpose unfold, his will was not necessarily behind the outcome of every battle. God might have laid down the blueprint, but its implementation was left to man. Over the last few decades of the nineteenth century, during which the influence of science on American history was steadily growing, we read very little of the unfolding of God’s plan in the work of professional historians. Indeed, Henry Adams went so far as to say, “If, finally, the science [of history] should prove that society must at a given time revert to the church and recover its foundations of absolute faith in a personal providence and a revealed religion, it commits suicide” (1959a: 351). Nonetheless, in the writings of a few American historians, God survived well into the twentieth century. Henry Osborn Taylor, for example, described by Harry Elmer Barnes as “one of the most learned and productive students of European intellectual history,” and at one time president of the American Historical Association, wrote that “the strength and comfort of belief in God, may still be the grandest verity of human life,” and he was convinced that “human progress still points onward through the action of the free intelligence, the righteously resolving will and the ever more enlightened love of God” (1923:293). Indeed, Taylor went even further, confessing in his Freedom of the Mind in History (1923): “I do not altogether understand history; I cannot explain much that has taken place. And I feel it safer to assume the constant or occasional participation of unfathomable elements—the animating and inspiring providence of God” (p. 38). Inquiring further into God’s actual role in human history, Taylor resorted to a metaphor: “As for the part this God of ours has taken in the world-drama, whether or not He built the stage and made the actors out of nothing, we believe that He is furthering the dénouement and climax of the play” (p. 34). Woodrow Wilson, a historian as well as a political scientist, was scarcely more guarded than Taylor in admitting God into the control room of history. Thus, he wrote: “The history of religion is not merely the history of social forces, not merely the history of institutions and of

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opinions. It is also the history of something which transcends our divination, escapes our analysis—the power of God in the life of men” (1906:10). But not only did Wilson believe that God‘s will was manifest in history generally, he was convinced that in his own case, God had done so in particular. Following his election as president in 1912, when he was approached by William F. McCombs, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, soliciting a post in the new administration and pointing to his valuable services during the campaign, Wilson rebuffed him saying: “God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented it” (Freud and Bullitt 1967:xi). Carlton J. H. Hayes, a historian at Columbia University, who also served as envoy to the Vatican and then as American ambassador to Spain, rejected the notion that human behavior could be explained entirely naturalistically, since such a view left “no room for God’s creation or man’s soul” (1941:124). So strongly was Hayes convinced of the power of God to mold history that he doubted “whether Europe or Western civilization can endure if cut off from its historic Christian roots”(1941:135). Down almost to the present, one can find vestiges of religious beliefs entering into the interpretations of a few professional historians. The best known and most conspicuous example of this is Arnold J. Toynbee, who in his later years affirmed, “As I have gone on, religion has come ... to take the central place in my picture of the universe” (1956:10). In his major work, A Study of History, Toynbee again and again looked to Biblical Christianity for inspiration and explanation. As one of Toynbee’s severest critics, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, noted, “Toynbee lives with the Bible, and its texts lie scattered thickly over his pages” (1949:4). Moreover, these Biblical passages “are more than a mere decoration of his argument, for in them he finds his profoundest truths foreshadowed and confirmed. God become man in Christ is to him the veritable sense of history” (1949:13). At a time when World War II threatened, Toynbee (1947:554) wrote, with a hope soon to be dashed: “Inasmuch as it cannot be supposed that God’s nature is less constant than Man’s, we may and must pray that a reprieve which God has granted to our society once will not be refused if we ask for it again in a humble spirit and with a contrite heart.” The route out of the human predicament, Toynbee thought, was by seeking “the way of Transfiguration,” which was “to give light to them that sit in darkness.... It is pursued by seeking the Kingdom of God in order to bring its life . . . into action.... The goal of Transfiguration is

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thus the Kingdom of God” (quoted in Nash 1969:I, 184). Sentiments like these, sprinkled here and there throughout Toynbee’s writings, led Harry Elmer Barnes to choose as a heading for his treatment of Toynbee’s A Study of History, “Arnold J. Toynbee Buries the Universe in an Anglican Churchyard” (1948:107). Conspicuous as they may be, these were but isolated instances. Secularism was taking firm command of the discipline of history. Most historians concurred with Edward P. Cheyney (1927:162) that “the belief that God has a plan for the progress of a nation or of the world, and that this plan can be discovered by any one historian and used for the explanation of events, belongs in the field of religion, not of history.” By 1912, James Harvey Robinson could say that “it is rare now to find a historian who possesses the old confidence in his ability to penetrate God‘s counsels and trace his dispensations in detail” (1965:34). As an active agency in history, A. L. Rowse concluded, “The idea of God has been rendered superfluous” (1963:81). More recently, the British historian G. R. Elton alluded to “the vacuum created when God was removed from history,” and added that “even historians who hold that God reveals himself in history would not today feel entitled to use him by way of explanation” (1970:40). But if God was removed from history, what was left to fill the void? What great rudder remained to hold the ship on course? Where did God‘s absence leave us in contemplating the past and peering into the future? Perhaps the most reasoned and fearless assessment of this dilemma was given by Carl Becker: As the time and space world is expanded ... the gods, withdrawing from the immediate affairs of men to the place where [the] absolute dwells, fade away into pale replicas of their former selves—into the Law of Nature, the Transcendent Idea, the dynamic principle of Dialectic, or whatever it may be. Philosophy in turn becomes Natural Philosophy, then Natural Science, then Science; and science, dispensing altogether with the assistance of the gods and their numerous philosophic progeny, presents for contemplation the bare record of how, as a matter of fact, the outer world behaves, of what, as a matter of fact, has occurred in past times, leaving man alone in an indifferent universe. (1938:28)

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HAT EFFECT did the removal of God from active participation in the affairs of the world have on historical interpretation? If the Great Being was no longer to give guidance and impetus to the course of history, the next best thing (some historians felt) was to find such a directing force in the Great Man. The idea of the Great Man as the prime mover of history goes back to the Heroic Age. During Classical Antiquity a strong tendency already existed to see heroes of superhuman proportions playing the leading role in molding events. If these heroes were not actually gods, they were at least of legendary stature. In the Greek epics, as Herbert Spencer pointed out, the “intention is to set forth the triumphs of Achilles, the prowess of Ajax, the wisdom of Ulysses, and the like” (1961:27). Moving from epic to actual history, we note that Plutarch’s Lives, by all odds the most popular history to survive from Classical times, consisted of biographies of the most illustrious Greeks and Romans of the age. Great Men and their exploits continued to be exalted throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Earlier we noted that in his Discourse on Universal History, Bishop Bossuet was only too ready to make a towering figure of a lowly monk. And well into the eighteenth century, the belief held sway that history was best understood as the product of supremely gifted individuals. The French historian Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, for example, attributed the form of social and political life found among the ancient Cretans to the legendary personage of King Minos, and saw a more fully historical figure like Lycurgus playing a similar role for Sparta. How was it, he asked, that the Spartans were so dedicated to the martial life and turned their backs on material

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prosperity? Because Lycurgus, said Mably, had entered “the hearts of his fellow-citizens and there crushed the germ of love for wealth” (Plekhanov 1940:30). In his History of the French Revolution (1826), Francois Mignet was one of the first French historians to play down the importance of individual actors in explaining the Revolution. Instead, he highlighted the working of social forces. This mode of interpretation, however, was alien to current thinking about history, and in reviewing Mignet’s, work the literary historian Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve found himself in vigorous opposition. He argued instead that “at any given moment a man may, by the sudden decision of his will, introduce into the course of events a new unexpected and changeable force, which may alter that course” (quoted in Plekhanov 1940:33). As an explanatory mechanism, then, social forces were to be subordinated to individual wills. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Great Man continued to hold center stage. And if he himself was not the prime mover of events, he was at least the chosen instrument of that Greater Being. Typical of this view was a remark attributed to Hegel, who, seeing Napoleon approaching the city of Jena, thought he was beholding “the world spirit on horseback” (Hook 1950:60). On another occasion, though, Hegel changed his metaphor, calling the Great Man “the business executive of the World Mind” (quoted in Renier 1950:240–241). Either way, divine surrogate or financial wizard, the Great Man, for Hegel, was the dominating figure in history. By all odds, the nineteenth-century historian best known for placing the Great Man on the throne previously occupied by God, was Thomas Carlyle. In his famous lectures on Heroes and Hero- Worship, published in 1841, Carlyle wrote: “In all epochs of the world’s history we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch;— the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The history of the world . . . was the Biography of Great Men” (1972b:103). A few pages earlier in the same work, he had asserted that “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world” (1894:5–6). Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend and follower of Carlyle, held similar views. In his essay on “History,” Emerson remarked that “there is

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properly no history; only biography” (1982a:153). And in his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson declared that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man” (1982b:185). Then, in a breathtaking simplification, he wrote: “A man Caesar is born, and for ages after, we have a Roman Empire” (1982b:185). Other voices joined the chorus. The historian Archibald Alison, a Scotsman like Carlyle, spoke of the tide “by which human affairs” were at times “wafted to and fro,” concluding that it was the great men “who determine the direction of this tide, who imprint their character on general thought, who are the real directors of human affairs; it is the giants of thought who, in the end, govern the world” (1846b:373). Even so clear a thinker as John Stuart Mill did not hesitate to assert that “if there had been no Themistocles there would have been no victory of Salamis; and had there not, where would have been all our civilization?” (1930:615). Charles Kingsley, another leading advocate of the Great Man theory, told the audience at one of his lectures that “instead of saying that the history of mankind is the history of the masses, it would be much more true to say that the history of mankind is the history of its great men” (Kingsley 1864b:xxxviii). But the weakness of employing the Great Man as the key to a rational understanding of history is betrayed by Kingsley’s additional remarks: “The appearance of great minds is as inexplicable to us as if they had dropped among us from another planet. Who will tell us why they have arisen when they did, and why they did what they did, and nothing else?” (1864b:xxxviii). Given “the disturbing force of genius,” whose appearance and effects were “unexpected, complex, subtle, all but miraculous,” Kingsley was convinced that the resulting effect on the course of human events would be the “throwing out alike the path of human history, and the calculations of the student” (1864b:xlii). Through the remaining years of the nineteenth century, historians continued to uphold the dominating role of the Great Man. The difficulties that the Great Man introduced into any effort to account for the patterns of history were merely shrugged off. Thus, “the social philosopher,” said John Fiske, “must simply accept geniuses as data. Just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations” (quoted in W. M. Payne 1900:142). John Addington Symonds was likewise convinced that ”we shall never comprehend, nous autres, the mysteries of genius. It is a God-sent clairvoyance, inexplicable, and different in kind from intellect” (quoted in Brown 1895I, 343–344). Around the turn of the century, the French sociologist Gustave Le

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Bon offered a modification of the usual Great Man theory. The really momentous and dramatic events of world history, he said, were not the product of ordinary geniuses, but instead, were the work of fanatics: At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Greco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history. (quoted in Barnes 1925:169) Before the century drew to a close, the Great Man theory found its most polished and eloquent spokesman in William James. In a wellknown essay, “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment” (1880), James stressed the importance of genius in invention and downplayed the role of the cultural milieu. Like Fiske, he found the appearance of the Great Man to be analogous to Darwin’s spontaneous variations in organic evolution. When a Great Man suddenly comes on the world stage, said James, his society “becomes modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of a new zoological species changes the faunal equilibrium of the region in which it appears” (1917:173). And of course the effect of Great Men could be profound: ”Nations . . . may be committed by kings and ministers to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science, or industry" (1917:174). While the twentieth century has seen a lessened advocacy of the Great Man theory, it has not brought about its complete cessation. The genius is still invoked to explain great achievements, and he is still portrayed as inexplicable as ever. Thus, in his biography of Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan observes in passing that “the genius works in a dazzling darkness of his own which normal modes of explanation hardly penetrate” (1983:250). Even scientists, more familiar with the notion of impersonal causation than are literary men, at times can also ally themselves to the cause of the Great Man. In an article designed to convince his readers of the need to improve the genetic stock of the human race “if we are to meet the challenge of the future,” Julian Huxley made clear his own position in the matter: “The great and striking advances in human affairs, as much in creative art and political and military leadership as

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in scientific discovery and invention, are primarily due to a few exceptionally gifted individuals” (1963:163). In off moments, anthropologists too have shown themselves prone to attribute certain cultural developments to “genius”—developments that might better have been explained otherwise. Robert H. Lowie, for instance, saw the main effect of the origin of agriculture in pre– Columbian Peru (an invention which, it would seem, he attributed to a stroke of genius), as providing “a chance for more geniuses to be born” (1940:25). Describing the political intricacies of the Creek Confederacy, John R. Swanton expressed his regret that “the names of the geniuses who contributed to its construction” had not been preserved for posterity (1930:368). And Franz Boas, speaking of the native states that had emerged in sub–Saharan Africa, praised those unknown rulers “whose genius for organization ... enabled them to establish flourishing empires” (1945:76). Anthropology can do better than that. Indeed, it has done better. And in the following section, we examine how an anthropological perspective has cut the Great Man’s role in transforming culture down to size.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE GREAT MAN THEORY Simply put, we can say that in explaining social changes, great or small, anthropology places much more emphasis on the generative power of culture than on the strivings of great individuals. Here again, as we shall soon see, we find Herbert Spencer to have been the first to express the anthropological side of the issue fully and forcefully. But even before Spencer, there were certain anticipations of this view, and before these anticipations, there were scattered glimmerings. In one of his famous letters to his son, Lord Chesterfield remarked that “a drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke, or Newton; but by culture, they are much more above him than he is above his horse” (1986:52; emphasis mine). Half a century later, discussing the role of the genius in history in his essay on Dryden, Thomas Babington Macaulay argued as follows: “Society indeed has its great men and its little men, as the earth has its mountains and its valleys. But the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected” (1900:72). Then pursuing the analogy further, Macaulay wrote: “The sun

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illuminates the hills while it is still below the horizon; and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a light which, without their assistance, must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them” (1900:72). John Stuart Mill, however, was not persuaded by Macaulay’s argument. This line of reasoning would be valid, Mill contended, only “if truths, like the sun, rose by their proper motion, without human effort, but not otherwise” (1930:612) and he proceeded to offer a counterargument: I believe that if Newton had not lived, the world must have waited for the Newtonian philosophy until there had been another Newton or his equivalent. No ordinary man, and no succession of ordinary men, could have achieved it. I will not go the length of saying that what Newton did in a single life might not have been done in successive steps by some of those who followed him each singly inferior to him in genius. But even the least of those steps required a man of great intellectual superiority, Up to this point, Mill’s argument sounds plausible, but then he overplays his hand: “Few will doubt,” he continues, “that had there been no Socrates, no Plato, and no Aristotle, there would have been no philosophy for the next two thousand years” (p. 612). When closely examined, Mill’s difference with Macaulay seems to be more with his analogy than with the substance of his argument. Both agreed that it took a superior intellect to achieve what Newton had achieved, and they both agreed that what Newton accomplished would have taken longer to attain had he never lived and had his achievements been left to lesser intellects to bring about. What remains at issue is how uniquely gifted—how far above his contemporaries— Newton stood, not in achievement, but in innate intelligence. Furthermore, how much talent or time would have been required for lesser men to have achieved what he did? These are both matters of degree, not of kind. Despite the soundness of part of Mill’s argument, he stumbles in not seeing that regardless of the greatness of Newton’s intellect, what he achieved depended in large measure on the culture in which he was reared. Coming into the world at a different time or place, Newton’s achievements would have been impossible. Either it would still have been too early for his inventions to be made, or else they would already have seen the light of day. Mill’s failure to recognize the importance of cultural conditions, as opposed to individual genius, is clearly revealed by his remark regard-

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ing the indispensable role of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the early history of philosophy. One could turn the argument around and say that, had they not lived, not only would there have been philosophy just the same, but indeed that being freer to follow the empiricism, materialism, and determinism of Leucippus and Democritus, rather than the idealism of Plato and the apriorism of Aristotle, philosophy would have made substantially greater strides! It was at about this time—after Mill had offered his critique of Macaulay in his System of Logic—that Herbert Spencer came on the scene. As early as 1851, in his first book, Social Statics, Spencer remarked in connection with cultural change that “men who seem the prime movers, are merely the tools with which it works” (1851433). And a decade later, in an article entitled “The Social Organism,” Spencer returned to the same theme: “Those who regard the histories of societies as the histories of their great men, and think that these great men shape the fates of their societies, overlook the truth that such great men are the products of their societies” (1891:II, 268). Then, in The Study of Sociology, written in 1872, Spencer proceeded to elaborate his argument, contending, as he had before, that where conditions in their societies allow “great men” to arise and to seem by their actions to transform those societies, the great men should be seen rather as the instruments of social forces: If it be a fact that the great man may modify his nation in its structure and actions, it is also a fact that there must have been those antecedent modifications constituting national progress before he could be evolved. Before he can re-make his society, his society must make him. So that all those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real explanation of these changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen. (1961:31) And to emphasize the importance of the surrounding culture in allowing a genius to emerge and to flourish, Spencer wrote: Given a Shakespeare, ... what dramas could he have written without the multitudinous traditions of civilized life—without the various experiences which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use? Suppose a Watt, with all his inventive power, living in a tribe ignorant of iron, or in a tribe that could get only as much iron as a fire

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blown by hand-bellows will smelt; or suppose him born among ourselves before lathes existed; what chance would there have been of the steam-engine? Imagine a Laplace unaided by that slowly-developed system of Mathematics which we trace back to its beginnings among the Egyptians; how far would he have got with the Mécanique Céleste? (1891:35) The attribution of major social changes to the initiative of Great Men, Spencer regarded as superficial. In The Principles of Sociology, his major work, he showed how unrealistic it was to think of Lycurgus as having originated the Spartan constitution, or that the democratic organization of Athens could be laid at the door of Cleisthenes (Spencer 1896:II, 376n., 424–425). Moreover, when the Great Man was working against the grain of history, his achievements, notable as they might have seemed at the time, were but transitory. After his initial triumphs, things generally returned to their previous state, to await the ripening of conditions before the new development could be achieved for good. In light of this, Spencer wrote: “The utter failure of Cromwell permanently to establish a new social condition, and the rapid revival of suppressed institutions and practices after his death, show how powerless is a monarch to change the type of the society he governs. He may disturb, he may retard, or he may aid the natural process of organization: but the general course of this process is beyond his control” (1891:268). (A parallel instance of premature and ephemeral social change may be found in the case of Ikhnaton, the pharaoh who ruled Egypt near the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. In opposition to the priesthood and the temples, Ikhnaton set aside the existing polytheism and established the worship of a single god, Aten, thereby—it is said—introducing monotheism into the world. Whether Ikhnaton was personally responsible for this innovation—and the notion has been seriously challenged [e.g., L. A. White 1949:260–2621, shortly after his death, the monotheistic religion he promoted was swept away and the traditional religion reestablished [pp. 233–2811 .) Spencer was not, however, the only one holding a diminished view of the Great Man at the time he was writing. For example, reviewing a volume by Charles Kingsley, in which Kingsley had reiterated his belief in the historical primacy of the Great Man, Edward S. Beesly observed that “men of genius, whether speculative or active, influence their age precisely in proportion as they comprehend and identify with its spirit” (1861:171). (In much the same words half a century later, the German historian Karl Lamprecht [1905:177] maintained that “the ge-

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nius is enveloped by the period of culture in which he belongs, and he reaches his full perfection just in proportion as he is active among the developing tendencies of his time.”) Years later, the English historian Goldwin Smith concurred in this opinion, stressing the role that the Great Man’s cultural matrix played in allowing him to achieve the exploits with which he was credited: Great men were not creators, but the consummate products of their generation, giving its tendencies the fullest expression, and reacting upon it by the force of their genius. But they were its offspring, not its creators.... What would Mahomet have been without Arabian tribalism, Judaism, and Christianity? What would Luther have been without the ferment of spiritual insurrection against Rome which had long before produced Wycliffe? What would Shakespeare have been without the Elizabethan era, Voltaire without his century, Napoleon without the Revolution and the outbreak of military adventure which ensued? (1905:516) As Edward P. Cheyney later expressed it, “Men have on the whole played the parts assigned to them; they have not written the play” (1927:9). We noted earlier that William James likened the appearance of a genius in society to Darwin’s spontaneous variations in organic evolution, which, being unexplained, simply had to be taken as given. But Grant Allen, a disciple of Spencer, took sharp issue with this analogy. “Dr. James’ ‘fortuitous’ and ‘spontaneous’ variations,” he wrote, “however carefully he may veil them, are merely long names for miracles.... The theory of spontaneous variations accidentally producing genius is . . . nothing more than a deification of Caprice, conceived as an entity capable of initiating changes outside of the order of physical causation” (1881:381). The issue of the Great Man in history has an aspect often overlooked, namely, that “genius” may exist where it has no chance to realize itself. Francis Galton’s dictum that “genius, like murder, will out,” is by no means true. As if to answer Galton, Sidney Hook wrote: “There is no good reason to believe that if a man with the biological endowment of Newton or Raphael or Napoleon had been born in early prehistory he would have rediscovered fire or created magnificent ornaments and paintings or achieved renown as a warrior” (1950:104). Perhaps the most telling—and certainly the wryest—account of unrecognized genius, living and dying in total obscurity, was given to us by Mark Twain in his little book, Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven:

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When Stormfield arrived in heaven he was eager to get a sight of those unrivaled and incomparable military geniuses, Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon, but was told by an old resident of heaven that they didn’t amount to much there as military geniuses, that they ranked as obscure corporals only, by comparison with a certain colossal genius, a shoemaker by trade, who had lived and died unknown in a New England village [during the time of the American Revolution] and never seen a battle in all his earthly life .... He tried heaps of times to enlist as a private, but he had lost both thumbs and a couple of front teeth, and the recruiting sergeant wouldn’t pass him.... He had not been discovered while he was in the earth but heaven knew him as soon as he arrived there and lavished upon him the honors which he would have received in the earth if the earth had known that he was the most prodigious military genius the planet had ever produced. (1961151–152; 1964:597) There have been many more instances than will ever be known of persons of great innate ability being born and dying in a culture that allowed them no possibility to express their “genius.” They were thus unable to produce any of the striking changes or discoveries by which alone society can recognize genius. Had Shakespeare been born in Patagonia, he might have worshiped Setebos, as Caliban did, but would never have written a line about him, or anyone else. And had Newton been born a swineherd ... “It seems probable,” wrote the sociologist Morris Ginsberg, “that the proportion of gifted men produced is fairly constant, while the expression or realization of their potentialities awaits and depends upon opportunities provided by the occasions of exceptional stir and exhilaration” (1932:74). Napoleon, wrote his biographer Felix Markham, “was not of the generation which made the [French] Revolution, but he was a product of the revolutionary age—a time when the mould of tradition and custom was broken and nothing seemed impossible in the face of reason, energy, and will” (1963:56). Leslie White offered another example of the effect of favoring circumstances: “A person becomes a Great Man in history,” he wrote, “when and because he is placed, by forces and agencies outside himself, in the midst of powerful cultural processes. Had not the Civil War come along and swept Ulysses S. Grant into its vortex, he would have remained an obscure and insignificant clerk in his father’s leather store in Galena, Illinois” (1963:121). A more poignant example of the importance of cultural circumstances in determining the fate of a potentially great historical figure is offered by Sidney Hook: “A Joan of Arc, in a

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scientifically enlightened age, wandering into General Headquarters with a tale about ’hearing voices’ would be sent to a psychopathological ward for observation” (1950:91). Who among us has failed to be impressed by the remarkable concentration of “geniuses” that appeared in Ancient Greece, especially in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. ? There were poets and playwrights, sculptors and architects, philosophers and statesmen, admirals and generals of the highest order. How is such a clustering of genius to be explained? This question has intrigued—and puzzled— historians and others for centuries. Edwin Grant Conklin, a biologist, saw the answer residing in the genes: “Those who have devoted much attention to this subject are of the opinion that no modern race is intellectually equal to the ancient Greek race. Not only did this race produce a larger number of illustrious men than has any other race during an equal period of time but the general intelligence of the citizens was probably higher than in any modern nation” (1922:162–163). Here we find the Great Man theory projected onto a wider screen. The recognized genius of a few dozen individuals has been extended to the whole Greek “race.” Bear in mind, however, that this assessment comes from the pen of a biologist, and biologists are much more at home with genetic determinants of behavior than with cultural ones. Conklin’s conclusion was thus predictable. However, A. L. Kroeber, a noted cultural anthropologist, cut the legs out from under this argument: “If Athens for a thousand years had no great men, began to have a few in the sixth century, produced an astonishing number of geniuses of absolutely first rank in the fifth and fourth centuries, tapered off in the third, then became sterile again and has remained so until now, there is no known mechanism of heredity which can explain this fluctuation of incidence of high ability” (1948:337). What, then, is the real explanation for the extraordinary florescence of talent manifested by ancient Greece, especially Athens? The answer has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with culture. Athens was a great commercial center at the time, a thriving emporium, a city made wealthy beyond any other of that period by the surplus products of its far-flung colonies, brought in by its merchant fleet. Moreover, the city was proud of its position, and much of the wealth that poured into Athens went into its beautification and glorification. Strong inducements and rich rewards were offered to artisans of every kind to devote their time and talents to their specialties. And of course, with specialization comes mastery, and with mastery, artistry. “Greece in that day, more than any other country at any later age,” wrote Lester Ward, “actually called out its talent and set it to work.” As

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with economic commodities, Ward noted, genius “is subject to the law of demand and supply. If it is demanded, it is forthcoming, and in any required amount” (1918:288). If this is not the total answer to “the Glory that was Greece,” it at least goes a significant way toward providing it. Ward proceeded to draw what strikes me as a very apt parallel, comparing ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance, whose artistic florescence, he points out, “was largely a product of a serious demand on the part of both Church and State for great works of art” (p. 288). As another example of his “demand and supply theory,” Ward cited the great castles and magnificent cathedrals of Medieval Europe. Kings and nobles, perpetually at war, provided the demand for the former, while the wealthy and powerful Catholic Church supplied it for the latter. The demand being there for castles and cathedrals, along with the wherewithal to pay for them, there was “no lack of architectural talent to build them,” even though the names of the master architects responsible for them, unlike the great figures of the Renaissance, are all but lost to the pages of history (p. 288). The other side of the coin is, of course, that when conditions for cultural development are absent or not sufficiently propitious, geniuses somehow fail to appear. We have no reason to suppose that genetics has thumbed its nose at the societies involved. It is simply a matter that, as with any delicate plant, genius needs the proper seedbed to germinate, develop, and floresce. Let me summarize the anthropologist’s view of the part played by genius in giving rise to the great innovations of history. An invention—which in fact is generally a synthesis of preexisting cultural elements—will be made first by the person best prepared to do so. By “best prepared” I mean the one endowed with the highest native ability and in the best position to absorb from his culture the elements that must be pieced together for the invention to occur. Needless to say, in accounting for any “work of genius,” it is difficult to assess the relative roles played by innate ability on the one hand and favorable circumstances on the other. Rarely are we in a position to gauge the inborn mental endowment of a “genius.” We simply infer that it must be exceptionally high from the achievements that resulted. But we really have no way of knowing with how much less ability someone else could have made the same invention given similarly favorable conditions. There may well be inventions that even persons of little more than average intelligence could have made had they found themselves in the appropriate setting. Some inventions, however, such as that of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz, no doubt required distinctly superior minds. Just how

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superior, we cannot tell. In all societies of at least moderate size, at any given time there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of persons with the requisite degree of intelligence for the invention of something as abstract and profound as the calculus. Exceedingly few of them, however, were sufficiently exposed to the cultural stream of higher mathematics that was a prerequisite for that invention. No society, then, is at the mercy of a single individual to achieve any given cultural advance. The fact that history records so many simultaneous and independent inventions—Newton and Leibniz’s coinvention of the calculus being but one—attests to this fact. And it must also be kept in mind that, setting aside cases of duplicate inventions such as the calculus, the fact that an invention has once been made automatically precludes anyone else from making it. And this fact tends to give the impression that no one else could have made it, and that, ipso facto, the inventor was a genius. To emphasize this point, we may add the fact that, as Plekhanov noted, “the personal qualities of celebrated people are ever so much more noticeable than deep-lying general causes” (1940:55).

THE GREAT MEN SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES Let us listen now to the words of a few “great men” and “geniuses” to see what light they can shed on their own greatness. Starting with the views of political leaders, we find their testimony pretty much in accord with Herbert Butterfield’s assessment that “we constantly imagine that the range of options open to a statesman at a given moment is greater than in reality turns out to be the case” (1951:73). Napoleon, one of the most energetic leaders in history, is quoted as saying, “The greater one is, the less free-will one has: one depends on events and circumstances. I declare my self the most enslaved man in the world. My master has no pity, and by my master I mean the Nature of Things” (quoted in Barrington 1927:324; see also pp. 227, 333). Abraham Lincoln, generally regarded as the greatest of American presidents, said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me” (Nicolay and Whinery 1911:709). Andrew Jackson, another American president of great stature, in words attributed to him by his longtime friend, A. H. Lewis, vividly described the “magnetic field” in which he, in exercising his office, was firmly held: A president is but the fly on the chariot wheel. Being vain, the insect might flatter himself with a theory that he is the reason of

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that dust and motion he observes.... [But in fact a president] is pressed upon by one force or another, and maybe a dozen at once, and must go with conditions like a man in a landslide. As I say, the office is so much bigger than the man that it transacts the man, and not the man the office. It is as though one were made president of the Potomac, or of a glacier. Could he take the one beyond its banks with a war or stay the other in its progress with a veto? He might run up a flag, order a bugle blown, fire a gun; but the river or the glacier would be the last impressed. No, sir; were one made chief magistrate of that snowstorm which now whitens the world outside, and set to rule its flakes, he would be in as much control as when given a White House and told that he is President. (1903:331–332) On April 16, 1869, Otto von Bismarck, “the Iron Chancellor,” addressing the North German Reichstag, told the assembled deputies: My influence on the events I took advantage of is usually exaggerated; but it would never occur to anyone to demand that I should make history. I could not do that even in conjunction with you, although together we could resist the whole world. We cannot make history: we must wait while it is being made. We will not make fruit ripen more quickly by subjecting it to the heat of a lamp; and if we pluck the fruit before it is ripe we will only prevent its growth and spoil it. (quoted in Plekhanov 1940:25; emphasis in the original) At about the same time, across the English Channel, Bismarck’s fellow prime minister, William Ewarts Gladstone, spoke to the British Parliament of “those great social forces which move on in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb” (quoted in Cheyney 1927:8–9). And it was the maxim of Edmund Burke, Gladstone’s predecessor as a member of Parliament, that “wisdom and religion dictate that we should follow events, and not attempt to lead, much less to force them” (Acton 1907:347). Turning from politicians to men of letters, the message of relative helplessness is again echoed. The renowned poet W. H. Auden, for one, was under no illusions about his influence on world affairs. “Nothing I wrote,” he admitted ruefully, “saved a single Jew from being gassed.... It’s perfectly all right to be an engagé writer as long as you don’t think you’re changing things.... The social and political history of Europe would be exactly the same if Dante and Shakespeare and Mozart had never lived” (quoted in Levy 1971:42). Looking next at eminent scientists—to “geniuses” rather than men

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of action—we recall how modestly Newton portrayed his own role in the development of physics and mathematics. In an oft-quoted remark, Newton observed, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” (quoted in Heisenberg 1971:207–208). Albert Einstein is generally regarded as the greatest genius of the twentieth century, so his case is particularly instructive. Werner Heisenberg, another distinguished physicist and a leading architect of quantum mechanics, who himself has a claim to being considered a genius, wrote thus of Einstein’s place in the history of science: It seems certain that in either field [science or history] the individual is replaceable. If Einstein had not discovered relativity theory, it would have been discovered sooner or later by someone else, perhaps by Poincaré or Lorentz. If Hahn had not discovered uranium fission, perhaps Fermi or Joliot would have hit upon it a few years later. I don’t think we detract from the great achievement of the individual if we express these views.. . . The pioneer has simply been placed in the right spot by history, and has done no more than perform the task he has been set. As a result, he may possibly be able to exert just a little extra influence on the subsequent progress of his discovery, but that is all. (1971:195) Einstein himself, with his accustomed candor and modesty, made some discerning remarks about society’s view of him as a genius. Looking back over his life at the age of seventy, Einstein concluded that his accomplishments had been “overvalued beyond all bounds.... Humanity needs a few romantic idols as spots of light in the drab field of earthly existence. I have been turned into such a spot of light” (quoted in Ferris 1983:38). But now, can nothing more positive be said about the role of the Great Man than that he is the virtual puppet of historical forces? Would “history” have been significantly modified had Mohammed or Napoleon or Lincoln never lived? Consider the following passage from the writings of Frederick Engels: That a certain particular man, and no other, emerges at a definite time in a given country is naturally a pure chance. But even if we eliminate him there is always a need for a substitute, and the substitute is found tant bien que mal; in the long run he is sure to be found. That Napoleon—this particular Corsican— should have been the military dictator made necessary by the

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exhausting wars of the French Republic—that was a matter of chance. But in default of a Napoleon, another would have filled his place, that is established by the fact that whenever a man was necessary, he has always been found: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell. (quoted in Hook 1950:78–79) Here we find the doctrine of sociocultural determinism carried to its extreme. Indeed, what Engels seems to propose is a near-fatalism: When the Great Man is needed, He will come. And if it is not A, it will be B, and if not B, then C, but someone will arrive to play essentially the same role. In a strange twist of logic, not only is Engels not denying the existence and importance of the Great Man, he is virtually proclaiming his necessity and inevitability! Engels’s position as expressed in this passage is, of course, open to criticism. Clearly, in the history of European nations (to limit the argument to just one continent), there are hundreds of instances of disasters and debacles in the affairs of nations in which (it might be argued) the Great Man, had he but come along, would have saved the day. But alas, he never appeared! The basic question is, then, how can anyone ever know when, and under what circumstances, the Great Man will decide to show himself? There may be some value here in distinguishing between Great Men who facilitated the course of history and those who deflected it. The former appear to emerge more readily, since the course that events were to follow was already more or less discernible, and all the leader had to do was ride at the head of the column and urge it onward. With regard to the deflectors of history, however, it is much harder to claim that their arrival was predictable, let alone inevitable. Listen, for example, to Sir Charles Oman’s argument on the subject: “Perhaps personalities like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Bonaparte, or even Lenin were not mere typical developments of their generation, but men who turned the course of history from its normal channel, because they were abnormal. Who can dare to say that if Alexander the Great or Mohammed had not existed, some other Macedonian king or Arabian prophet would have upset the world?” (1939:97–98). Here again, it is useful to distinguish between “facilitators” and “deflectors” of the course of history. Oman presents Alexander and Mohammed as “abnormal’’—in our terminology, as deflectors of history. But was this really the case? Looking first at Alexander, one can argue that in vigorously pursuing the course of empire building, Alexander was following a path previously trodden by many monarchs before him, including his own father, Philip of Macedon. In so doing,

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Alexander was thus acting in accord with, and not in opposition to, a powerful and long-standing historical trend toward the formation of larger and larger political units. He merely happened to be an especially successful agent of this trend. Far from being “abnormal,” then, Alexander was a true embodiment of a common and recurring historical movement. This of course does not in any way deny Alexander’s personal ability or his effectiveness as an instrument of the trend. Certainly, not every ruler could have fashioned so large an empire so quickly. Seeking to emphasize the uniqueness of Alexander’s accomplishments, Morris R. Cohen declared: “There is considerable evidence that if Alexander had been drowned crossing the Granicus none of his generals could have accomplished what he did. For in fact the events after his death showed that no one of them could sufficiently control the others” (1942:20–21). On the face of it, this appears to be true. As noted above, we are quite ready to acknowledge Alexander’s exceptional ability. But to use as evidence of his greatness the fact that after his death his generals had a falling out and were unable to keep his empire from fragmenting, is not a convincing argument. Nor is it necessarily fair to his generals. After all, Alexander had behind him the full authority of the Macedonian monarchy, something that his generals, in seeking to hold his empire together, totally lacked. In the ensuing disintegration of Alexander’s empire, this surely was an important factor. Let us turn next to the second of Oman’s two “abnormal” personalities, Mohammed, and see what the historian W. E. H. Lecky wrote about him: Individuals . . . have had a great modifying and deflecting influence in history, and sometimes the part they have played can scarcely be over-estimated. If . . . a stray dart had struck down Mohammed in one of the early skirmishes of his career, there is no reason to believe that the world would have seen a great military and monotheistic religion arise in Arabia, powerful enough to sweep over a large part of three continents, and to mould during many centuries the lives and characters of about a fifth part of the human race. (1970:100–101) One cannot easily deny Lecky’s contention. Still, the events of Mohammed’s life, and those that followed in his wake, do not establish his having been supremely gifted. In any event, to have accomplished what he did took more than native ability and determination. Circumstances had to be right. Sir Charles Oman, who enrolled Mohammed in

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the ranks of “abnormal” historical figures, nevertheless saw in his achievement a considerable element of happenstance. Mohammed, he noted, %ad an exceptionally lucky chance before him, at the moment when the Roman and Persian empires had just bled each other to a desperate pitch of exhaustion, after a war of twenty years” (1939:133). Certainly Mohammed was an unusual personality. Some historians in fact have tried to portray him as psychologically aberrant, perhaps even slightly deranged. In his biographical article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the German historian Julius Wellhausen wrote that in Mohammed, certain pre-Islamic religious ideas: “lodged themselves in a natural temperament which had a sickly tendency to excitement and vision, and so produced a fermentation that ended in an explosion” (1883:547). Then, in a footnote, Wellhausen ventured a little more deeply into the Islamic leader’s personality: “It is disputed whether Mohammed was epileptic, cataleptic, hysteric, or what not; Sprenger seems to think that the answer to this medical question is the key to the whole problem of Islam. It is certain that he had a tendency to see visions, and suffered from fits which threw him for a time into a swoon, without loss of inner consciousness” (1883:547n.) On the other hand, the Islamic Scholar D. S. Margoliouth, in his own biographical treatment of Mohammed in Hasting‘s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, painted a rather different picture of the man: Attempts have been made by Sprenger and others to specify the epileptic fits which in Muhammad’s case ostensibly accompanied the revelations; but it is doubtful how far these are to be regarded as real occurrences. It is clear that he was a man of great physical strength, since his life as tyrant of Medina was spent in constant military expeditions, added to the cares of a rapidly increasing community, of which he was at once priest, legislator, ruler, and judge. Yet we never hear of his health breaking down under the strain, the “fits” seem to have been experienced only when they were required for the delivery of the revelations, and in no case to have interfered with his activities. (1915:874–875) But whether Mohammed was a true epileptic or only an epileptic of convenience is a psychological issue. The historical issue is, how “aberrant” was the train of events that Mohammed set in motion? Were the results of his actions so unusual that, as Oman concluded, he “turned the course of history from its normal channel”? In the first place, we must cheerfully admit that no historical law

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dictated that in the seventh century A.D. a new religious movement should spring up in the Arabian desert and in less than a century sweep westward across North Africa and penetrate into western Europe. It might just as easily not have happened. However, given the fact that it did occur, and looking closely at the manner in which it happened, we would argue that it too represented a familiar historical pattern—rapid conquest by force of arms rallying around a cause. Islam was a militant religion, preaching jihad or holy war against unbelievers. It was this militancy that provided the impetus for the followers of Mohammed to drive out of Arabia in all directions, converting at the point of a sword those who failed to do so by reasoned persuasion. Had Islam been an irenic religion, and one loath to proselytize, it would, in all likelihood, have remained an insignificant sect restricted to a small corner of Arabia. In this rapid conquest and incorporation of vast areas, Mohammed’s legacy was part and parcel of the trend already exemplified by Alexander. And since military conquest is thus a familiar and recurring pattern in history, Mohammed‘s provoking of such a movement appears anything but aberrant. Viewed from a broad enough perspective, other “aberrant” personalities of history also appear to fall in line. Take, for example, the maid Joan of Arc, an enigmatic figure of such appeal that she was seized upon and made the subject of literature by writers as disparate as Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. Surely she was aberrant! Well, listen to how the medieval historian Edward P. Cheyney epitomized Joan’s achievements. Noting first that Joan of Arc came along just at the time when the English were about to be dislodged from French soil, Cheyney wrote: “All things were ready for a change. The peasant girl of Domrémy was the armed and inspired herald of this change. She did not turn aside the course of history, she but stood at the turning of the road and pointed out the way” (1927:73). Now, had Mohammed or Joan of Arc attempted some great enterprise that went categorically against the grain of history, all their ability would have been of little avail. Had they been acting fully in the teeth of history, the obstacles standing in their way would no doubt have been too great for them to overcome. Any success they might have had in pursuing their objectives would, at best, have been partial and transitory. Summing up the accomplishments of the Great Man in history, Cheyney wrote: “When he has worked along with the great forces of history he has influenced constructively the course of events; when his action has violated historic law the results have been destructive, momentary, subject to reversal” (1927:26).

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All of this goes to show that the Great Man never operates in a vacuum. The time, the place, and the circumstances must be right for his design to have any chance of success. Born among the Copper Eskimo or the Nama Hottentot, had Mohammed by some fluke devised the Islamic religion, he would scarcely have succeeded in attracting followers. More realistically, had he been born into such a setting, he would never have devised a new religion in the first place. There is, of course, nothing novel about this argument. It has been stated and restated countless times by social scientists as well as historians. “The big man,” declared the sociologist Albert G. Keller, “is the individual who correctly diagnoses the trend of events and rides in upon a wave of public opinion” (1922:148). An earlier sociologist, Ludwig Gumplowicz, saw that “the historical greatness of an individual lies exactly in this: in allowing himself to be carried by a social current” (quoted in Keller 193194). Speaking of notable rulers such as Charlemagne, Theodosius, and Alfred the Great, Edward s. Beesly remarked, “They were the organs, more or less efficient, by which the tendencies of their times were expressed” (1861:174). “A great man,” wrote George Plekhanov, “is great ... because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes” (194059). In support of this contention, Plekhanov turned to some major artists of the Italian Renaissance: “If.. . Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci had died in their infancy, Italian art would have been less perfect, but the general trend of its development in the period of the Renaissance would have remained the same. Raphael, Leonardo . . . and Michelangelo did not create this trend; they were merely its best representatives” (1940:53). Alluding to Elizabeth I of England, Edward Cheyney made the same point: Queen Elizabeth was one of the most individualized of sovereigns in the view of her contemporaries and of later ages, yet no historian will contend that she made Elizabethan England: she was merely the most conspicuous part of it. Individuals of great natural gifts or occupying high place often give force and unity to the desires and capacities of large groups of their contemporaries, but they have not given these desires or capacities to their contemporaries.... Their leadership has been interesting, and even important, their actual creative influence has been negligible. (1927:164) Cheyney then prescribed the course to be followed by a historian intent on looking beyond the surface coruscations of prominent person-

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alities to the underlying social trends. “It is the difficult but unescapable duty of the scientific historian,” he wrote, “to discriminate between the influence of individual men and the irresistible tendencies of their time” (1927:164). Perhaps the best assessment the role of the Great Man may play in history is that of the historian G. J. Renier: How does our outsize man appear if we take the longer view of the past? There are several possibilities. If he follows the direction of the march of mankind, of the society to which he belongs, he may hasten it, he may plane away obstacles that are impeding the march, he may guide his contemporaries along a short cut that will save them from a tedious trudge along the meandering road. He is the servant of progress, an “instrument of history”; he carries out a social task, and exercises a fruitful and lasting influence upon the course of events. Instead, however, he may try to arrest the march. He may be strong enough to press back for a while the front ranks of the marchers. If he does, he will soon be swept off his feet and carried away. (1950:242) Let me propose my own summary of the matter. The closer we look at history, that is, the more we focus on the specific details of past events, the greater the actions of particular individuals, great or small, are likely to seem. As we step back from these details, however, and contemplate instead the broader sweep of history, personalities diminish in importance and recede into the background. General trends now come to the fore. Were we writing a detailed history of the decline of feudalism, for example, its pages would be sprinkled with the names, dates, and deeds of any number of barons, earls, counts, dukes, and kings. And each of them could be seen as, in some small way, accelerating or retarding this decline. But were we to consider the transcending of feudalism from the full perspective of several thousand years of human history, the effects of particular individuals would first blur and then disappear altogether. We would find the emergence of feudalism to be a brief stage, and its passing an irresistible trend, a change depending on no particular set of individuals, no matter what their names or status. Indeed, if all the participants involved in the history of feudalism had been different-everybaron, every earl, every count, every duke, every king—the ultimate outcome would have been exactly the same. And now, a final word about historic “greatness” as seen from an even broader perspective, a perspective that anthropology alone can provide. Only when cultural evolution had given rise to the state, two million years after culture first began, was it possible for an individual

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to be regarded as “great.” No matter how able the headman of a Paleolithic band, he would never have gone down in “history“ as great. His very limited circumstances simply did not afford him the chance. Too few peoples would ever have known of his “greatness”; no summary of his exploits would have been recorded or preserved. After a generation or two of oral tradition, his achievements, whatever they might have been, would have been totally forgotten. And in what might his “greatness” have consisted, anyway? He would have had little or no opportunity to perform “great” deeds in our sense. A particular Paleolithic leader might have been skilled and courageous beyond all others in hunting the woolly mammoth, but there were no armies to lead, no great battles to fight, no cities to besiege, no masses to enslave, no laws to enact. And suppose he had been artistically gifted as well, and left behind a magnificent painting of a bison on some cave wall in the Dordogne. It might still be appreciated today, 20,000 years later, but alas, in total ignorance of his identity.

IDEAS AS PRIME MOVERS If great men were not to be counted the major causes of important historical changes, then those historians inclined to look to the prodigious to explain the course of history often shifted their focus to great ideas. And so we come now to examine the belief that ideas constitute the prime movers of history. The notion that Ideas rule the world can be traced back at least to the time of Plato. For Plato, Ideas existed prior to, and independently of, things in the world of experience. Material objects, in fact, were merely the embodiment of those preexisting ideas. Ideas were templates, and the structure of the material world simply the form impressed on matter by these templates. Since Ideas were primary in time and imparted structure to the animate world, they were clearly the prime movers of the world. To the extent that history was seen by Plato as having a direction at all, then, this direction had been given to it by Ideas. During the Middle Ages, the dynamics of world events were not seen far differently, for, as Lord Acton tells us, “In medieval philosophy Ideas . . . were regarded as the patterns in accordance with which God conceived of things and created them” (1907:111). We need not consider ideological interpretations of history until we arrive at the latter half of the eighteenth century. It was at this point, during the “Age of Enlightenment,” that history began to be regarded as a natural development rather than as the unfolding of a

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divine plan. And this development was generally represented as essentially a succession of ideas. Two parallel views of this emphasis on the determining nature of ideas may be distinguished, one centering in France and the other in Germany. Let us examine them in turn. The leading figures of the French Enlightenment, the so-called philosophes, were much concerned with identifying what it was that had led mankind to abandon the false notions of the past and replace them with truer ones. In tracing this development, they paid particular attention to what they called “the progress of the human mind,” a phrase that appears again and again in the writings of Turgot, Diderot, Condorcet, and Voltaire (e.g., Voltaire 1972c:44). Not only was the flow of ideas the distinctive feature of history for these men, but ideas were also what drove the process forward. In the decades immediately following the Enlightenment, the power of ideas to propel history was often reaffirmed. Auguste Comte, himself a son of the Enlightenment, wrote in his magnum opus, Cours de Philosophie Positive, “It cannot be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that ideas govern or overthrow the world” (1830– 1842:I, 48). Comte’s notions crossed the English Channel and began to influence British thinkers as well. John Stuart Mill, an early disciple of Comte, wrote in a somewhat more tempered vein, that “every considerable advance in material civilization has been preceded by an advance in knowledge; and when any great social change has come to pass, a great change in the opinions and modes of thinking of society has taken place shortly before” (1846:585–586). Henry Thomas Buckle, another follower of Comte, held similarly that “a discovery of the laws of European history is resolved, in the first instance, into a discovery of the laws of the human mind” (1904:90). In addition to his conviction in the directing power of Great Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson also assigned a major role in history to great ideas. “[Allways the thought is prior to the fact,” he wrote, “all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind” (n.d.a:1–2). And again: “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.... Every reform was once a private opinion” (1940:124). Nor was Emerson unusual in his emphasis on ideas. Statements of this sort can be found liberally sprinkled throughout the writings of nineteenth century historians and on into the twentieth century. Thus, John B. Bury, defending the domain of history from incursions by the social sciences, warned: “If human development can be entirely explained on the general lines of a system such as ... Spencer’s, then I think we must conclude that the place of history, within the frame of such a system, is subordinate to sociology

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and anthropology. There is no separate or independent precinct in which she can preside supreme” (1930b:46). Daunting as this prospect might at first appear to the historian, Bury thought he saw a way out of the dilemma. The solution, he said, was to view history, not as a concatenation of concrete events, but as a succession of ideas. On an “idealist interpretation of knowledge,” he insisted, another outcome was possible: “History then assumes a different meaning from that of a higher zoology, and is not merely a continuation of the process of evolution in nature. If thought is not the result but the presupposition of the process of nature, it follows that history, in which thought is the characteristic and guiding force, belongs to a different order of ideas from the kingdom of nature and demands a different interpretation” (1930b:46). Bury‘s predecessor at Cambridge, Lord Acton, wrote similarly of “ideas, which are not the effect but the cause of public events” (1985: 506). And many years later, Bury‘s successor at Cambridge, Herbert Butterfield, still echoed the familiar refrain. “[N]o interpretation of history,” he wrote, “can get away from the fact that it is men who make history, it is men’s brains that produce ideas” (1951:71). Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this view, however, came not from a historian at all, but from a classical scholar turned anthropologist, James G. Frazer: “The more we study the inward workings of society and the progress of civilization, the more clearly we perceive how both are governed by the influence of thoughts which, springing up at first we know not how or whence in a few superior minds, gradually spread till they have leavened the whole inert lump ... of mankind” (1913:168). Recrossing the English Channel, let us now examine historical Idealism in the form it had taken in Germany. In the works of such men as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the Absolute Idea, the World-Spirit, or whatever it was called, was put forward as the Ultimate Reality, and almost necessarily, therefore, the prime mover of human affairs. For the world of tangible actualities, the German Idealists had small regard. “The finite is not genuinely real,” wrote Schelling (quoted in Acton 1967:114). Hegel likewise believed that the palpable, the finite, the concrete, played a very subordinate role in existence. It was Mind that really counted, he thought; “things are always conditioned by other things, whereas mind is undetermined and absolute” (Acton 1967:114). In German Idealism, God might be hiding behind a number of aliases, but his true identity was not hard to discern. Thus, Karl Marx wrote with no little disdain that “while the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close to reality,

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the Germans move in the realm of ‘pure spirit,’ and make religious illusion the driving force of history” (Marx 1956:56). The Christian core of the German idealists was in fact only thinly disguised, leading Harry Elmer Barnes to remark, as we noted earlier, that “these ponderous dialecticians were, in reality, little more than Lutheran theologians.... The Absolute is none other than God, and its unfolding in the world is the working of Providence” (1963:194). Idealism became almost the official view of German historians. “For Germans in the idealist tradition,” noted John Higham, “history embraced and fulfilled the task of philosophy’’ (1989:99). Even Leopold von Ranke, a sound and sober scholar by contrast, came eventually to be recognized, outside of Germany at least, as “a romantic idealist, who always sought an intuitive apprehension of the universal within the particular” (Higham 1989:99). And following the analysis of Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert, Ernst Troeltsch, a German historian of the next generation, held that “historical causation is something entirely different [from causation in the natural sciences], being almost exclusively a matter of psychological motivation. In the historical sphere nearly everything passes through the medium of consciousness” (1913: 719). So pervasive and deep-seated was this Idealism that it showed itself even among German ethnologists of the day. Thus, of Adolf Bastian, Ludwig Gumplowicz wrote: “The fundamental characteristic of.. . [his] investigations is the endeavor to attribute all social phenomena to human thought.... With him thoughts are always primary and deeds are an emanation from them” (Gumplowicz 1899:38–39). Equally convinced of the causal primacy of ideas, Wilhelm Wundt maintained that whatever evolutionary regularities students of Kulturgeschichte might discover “belong to psychology, not to history” (Goldenweiser 1948:221). Beginning around the 1870s, German Idealism, as French Idealism had before it, moved beyond the continent and began to play an increasingly important role among British philosophers. The Idealist way of looking at the world soon became dominant at Oxford and Cambridge, being readily transmitted from teacher to student. And what was it that proved so attractive about this species of philosophy? As Morton White explained: “Instead of a bleak, evolutionary positivism of the kind that many Englishmen . . . found congenial in the work of Herbert Spencer, . . . young men . . . were provided [by Hegel’s works] with a rich, highly complex philosophical system that covered every corner of the universe in deep rich velvet, soft to the touch and warming“ (1955:15). Thomas Hill Green, the young Oxford apostle of German Idealism, “appealed to Englishmen under five-and-twenty to close their Mill and

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Spencer and open their Kant and Hegel and this appeal marks an epoch in English thought in the nineteenth century“ (Sorley 196143). This influence, moreover, was to last beyond the end of the century. Thus on April 25, 1902, we find Herbert Spencer writing to the psychologist Alexander Bain, founder of the journal Mind: “I do not infrequently think of the disgust you must feel at the fate which has overtaken Mind. That you, after establishing the thing and maintaining it for so many years at your own cost, should now find it turned into an organ for German idealism must be extremely exasperating.... Oxford and Cambridge have been captured by this old-world nonsense” (quoted in Duncan 1908:II, 201). The very next day, Spencer wrote to the historian and man of letters David Masson with the same complaint: “Hegelianism is rife . . . in Oxford and Cambridge.” Looking at the matter in perspective, though, Spencer noted: “Hegelianism, or German Idealism in England, is really the last refuge of the so-called orthodox. As I have somewhere said, what could be a better defence for incredible dogma than behind unthinkable propositions?” (quoted in Duncan 1908:II, 202). The depersonalization and etherealization of the concept of the deity that German Idealism fostered was not, however, to the liking of all Christian academics. Mark Pattison, a sometime historian and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, complained bitterly that in the new philosophy the idea of God had been “defecated to a pure transparency” (quoted in Harrison 1884:496–497). In somewhat chastened form and shorn of its more flamboyant metaphysical feathers, German Idealism, as applied to history, became transmuted around the turn of the century into a form of social psychology. Most notable in this endeavor was the German historian Karl Lamprecht. Regarding history as “primarily a socio-psychological science” (1906:111), Lamprecht called for a new approach to Kulturgeschichte which, “side by side with the individual psychological, admits the socio-psychological” (1906:117). Affirming that “history in itself is nothing but applied psychology“ (1906:121), Lamprecht summed up his view of its dynamics in these words: “If one penetrates into the depths of historic causation, it will be found that psychology has prepared the way and has become a safe guide to the historian who wishes to make known his discoveries in formulae in which they may be fitly expressed. In this way have psychology and historical science entered into partnership. The partition between them is giving way, and certainly one may say ... that psychology increasingly serves as a mechanical force to history (1905:31). Although in the writings of Lamprecht, German Idealism has been “

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transmuted into a quasi-scientific “social psychology” which he felt had been “delivered . . . from the deadly grasp of metaphysics” (1906:122), it still presents occasional flashes of its true self Psychology, after all, is the study of mind, and the content of mind is Ideas. And certain allusions to Ideas provide telltale evidence of what is going on behind the scenes. One cannot avoid the feeling that Metaphysics is pacing back and forth there. In one place, for example, Lamprecht speaks of the historian’s need of “going back to the most elementary experiences of the soul-life” (1905:118). And again, after examining various “periods of culture, with their general psychical character,” he tells us that “these episodes conform to certain laws which indicate the presence of a certain dominant which, supported by a constantly rising psychic force, tends toward an ever increasing soul-differentiation” (1905:183). Believing that he could see through the disguise Lamprecht had donned, the sociologist Arthur J. Todd remarked: “Lamprecht, in his attempt to make the reality with which history deals not the mere superficial comings and going of the political, industrial, institutional life of mankind, but that underlying something, the Volkspsyche, Weltgeist, etc., has really gone in quest of the Absolute. He has left the objective world of science as we usually accept the term, and has plunged into subjectivism” (1913:111). Todd went on to suggest that “if the historian insists on the subjectivist attitude he must reject historical methods and adopt poetry or the delphic incoherences of swoon and dream as his medium” (1913:112). Stripped of its metaphysical trappings, psychology began to play a greater role in the dynamics of history among historians working outside of Germany. “Most thinkers agree now that the chief clews to the growth of civilization,” wrote John B. Bury, “must be sought in the psychological sphere.... The governing factors which concern the student of social development are of the psychical order” (1930a:35, 36). And Sir Lewis Namier spoke of “mass psychology” as being “the most basic factor in history” (1972:384). Even James Harvey Robinson, so closely associated with the cultural aspect of history, nonetheless declared at one point that “the whole rationale of human civilization ... will never be understood without social psychology“ (1965:93). Given their long tradition of regarding history as “the progress of the human mind,” French historians were also ready to express their allegiance to psychology as providing the dynamics of history. Writing in 1900, in the founding volume of the Revue de synthèse historique, in which he laid out the program of the scientific school of French history, Henri Berr declared: “The comparative study of societies must lead to

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social psychology” (1972:253). And thirty years later, in the article on “History“ which he wrote jointly with Lucien Febvre for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Berr recited the same verse, speaking of “collective psychology, whose progress alone will be able to determine any decisive progress of history” (1932:365). With the emergence of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new impetus was given to psychological interpretations of history. One of the early milestones of this genre of writing was Lytton Strachey’s biographical study, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918. In this work, Strachey tore the mask off the public persona of four celebrated figures of Victorian England, revealing their private selves, with all their idiosyncracies and aberrations. So much had been written about the Victorian period, Strachey said in his Preface, that “the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it.” How, then, did he propose to proceed in portraying it? It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. (Strachey n.d.:vii) Of Florence Nightingale, for example, Strachey’s little bucket came up with the tidings that “her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt toward him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains” (p. 193). There were times, though, when her attitude toward God was much less professional and more highly personal: Her mind . . . had its singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt. At times, lying sleepless in the early hours, she fell into long strange agonised meditations, and then, seizing a pencil, she would commit to paper the confessions of her soul. The morbid longings of her pre-Crimean days came over her once more; she filled page after page with self-examination, self-criticism, self-surrender. “O Father,” she wrote, “I submit, I resign myself, I accept with all my heart this stretching out of Thy hand to save me. (p. 195).

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Eminent Victorians became a literary sensation, setting a style which others were quick to copy. So much so that, years later, Barbara Tuchman could write: “Strachey’s influence on psychological interpretation . . . has been followed to excess. In pre-Strachey biographies the inner life, like the two-thirds of an iceberg that is underwater, went largely unseen and uninvestigated. Since Strachey, and of course since Freud, the hidden secrets, especially if they are shady, are the biographer’s goal and the reader’s delight” (1982:89–90). Freud himself, of course, made several incursions into the psychological interpretation of history and of some of its leading figures. Chief among these efforts was Moses and Monotheism (1939), but there were also psychoanalytical studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoyevsky, and Woodrow Wilson. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud presented the Jewish prophet not as a Jew at all, but as an Egyptian, perhaps even a priest, who had been won over to the radical new monotheism introduced by the pharaoh Ikhnaton. Following Ikhnaton’s death, when the old priesthood, after its suppression, rose up and swept away the new religion, Moses left Egypt at the head of a body of Jews. Acting toward them as an authoritarian father figure, Moses converted them to his form of monotheism and led them out of Egypt and toward the promised land. But somewhat later, says Freud, in a reenactment of the primal Oedipal struggle in which the sons rose up and murdered their father, the Jews killed Moses, rejected his teachings, and adopted a new god, Jahve, who, while powerful and greatly feared, was but one among many gods, and not a universal deity like the Mosaic one. Time passed, and the memory of Moses and his monotheism was, to all intents and purposes, forgotten. But not quite. Centuries later, after a long “latency,” analogous to an individual’s “latency period” following a childhood trauma during which the trauma is repressed, the memory of Moses and his religion came back, just as an adult individual’s does under psychoanalysis. Then, guilt-ridden at having killed their “father,” the Jews reinstated Moses as their major prophet and reestablished his religion of a unique and omnipotent god. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has made some interesting observations about Freud’s scheme. “[T] here is in classical psychoanalysis,” says Lifton, “an implicit assumption that the larger historical universe is nothing but a manifestation of the projections or emanations of the individual psyche” (1974:23; emphasis mine). Indeed, for Freud, “history represents the intra-psychic struggles of the individual writ large” (1974:26). However, “within Freud‘s prehistoric paradigm,” that is, the primal rebellion of the sons against the father and their subsequent murder of him, “there is bequeathed to us an iron mold of psycho-

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logical repetition . . . enveloping indiscriminately the individual and the undifferentiated collectivity.” And so, concludes Lifton, “when this principle of repetition is seen as the essence of historical experience, there can be nothing new in history; indeed, if . . . history is ‘predestination,’ then there is no history” (1974:25). It might be of interest here also to give a taste of Freud’s psychoanalysis of a famous historical figure, one for which he had a good deal more biographical detail than he did for Moses, but one which a contemporary historian has described as “much lamented and unfortunate” (Gilderhus 1996:129). Accordingly, let us look briefly at his psychoanalytical study of Woodrow Wilson, written jointly with William C. Bullitt. While president of Princeton University, and following a protracted struggle with the faculty, Wilson succeeded in adding fifty new “preceptors” to the teaching staff. But Wilson’s victory was, according to Freud and his coauthor, a hollow one: The establishment of the preceptorial system neither satisfied the insatiable demands of his Super-Ego nor, when the struggle was ended, did it longer afford outlet for his reaction-formation against his passivity to his father [a stern Presbyterian minister], His passivity demanded outlet, his Super-Ego demanded that he should become God. His Ego became a battlefield: on one side stood his repressed passivity to his father demanding that he should be all femininity; on the other side stood his activity toward his father, his reaction-formation against his passivity, and his Super-Ego, demanding that he should be all action and masculinity. (Freud and Bullitt 1967:117) Assuming this analysis to be correct, one can readily imagine the complications that were bound to arise when such a personality was thrust onto the world stage. And one can only wonder how the world managed to survive! The retroactive psychoanalysis of historical figures became a strong temptation for some historians. G. J. Renier, for example, delved into the personalities of famous revolutionaries and found that “every revolutionary who has played a part in history and about whose early career sufficient data are available, can be reduced to type—invariably to a morbid type. The Gracchi suffered from a mother-fixation, Spartacus from an inferiority complex, Cromwell was a depressive maniac, Robespierre an obsessional narcissist, Danton an exhibitionist with an anal complex, Marat a schizophrene, Fouché an algolagniac” (1950:238–239, 239n.)

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At such a listing of profound aberrations, one hardly knows whether to shudder or to smile. Yet psychoanalytic interpretations have been embraced by a determined coterie of historians. H. Stuart Hughes, for example, tells us, “I see no other approach ... that remotely matches psychoanalysis in cultivating that feel which has always been the particular mark of the born historian” (1964:65). Speaking more generally, Isaiah Berlin held that “in the twentieth century psychology has begun to assume the role that biology had played in the previous century, and its methods and discoveries with regard to both individuals and to groups in their turn transformed our approach to history” (1979:106). Not all historians have been so receptive to this trend, however. With barely muted criticism, G. R. Elton wrote, “I cannot tell that the much-praised Freudian effort of E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, contributes anything of value to an understanding of either Luther or his age” (1970:25n.). Sir Lewis Namier was much less restrained in his critique of this approach. “The unqualified practitioner [of psychoanalysis],” he wrote, “must not be let loose, not even on the dead, and a mere smattering of psychology is likely to result in superficial, hasty judgments framed in a nauseating jargon” (1972:382–383). Namier died in 1960, and was thus spared the rise of a special field called “psychohistory,” with its own publication, the Journal of Psychohistory. In this journal, Namier might have read, from the pen of its founder, Lloyd De Mause, the following interpretation of the cause of the great and universal historical phenomenon of war: ”Groups go to war in order to overcome the helplessness of being trapped in a birth canal, through means of a sadomasochistic orgy in order to ‘hack one’s way out’ of the mother’s body” (1977:266). Another critique sometimes leveled by historians against psychological interpretations of history is that they appear to acquit historical figures of responsibility for whatever misdeeds they may have committed. To explain seems often to explain away. In a previous chapter, we noted the dark stains that King John had left on the pages of English history. In The Feudal Monarchy in France and England (1936), the French historian C. Petit-Dutaillis wrote, by way of explaining John’s character, “It is our opinion that John Lackland was subject to a mental disease well known to-day and described by modern psychiatrists as the periodical psychosis.... Among his Angevin ancestors were fools and madmen” (quoted in Hollister 1966:143). This interpretation struck a raw nerve in the historian Warren Hollister. To him it seemed that explanations of this sort led too readily to extenuation, and extenuation to exoneration. Thus, after quoting this

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passage, Hollister observed: “Modern psychology shares with medieval penance the happy quality of forgiving all sins, and by portraying John as a psychotic it is possible to absolve him of his wickedness” (1966:143–144). Setting aside extreme and uncertain pronouncements, what can we say about psychological interpretations of history? Putting one’s faith in psychology, individual or collective, as a means of understanding the course of history is, I believe, a faith misplaced. It fails to appreciate the fact that the same feelings and emotions that spurred the actions of a feudal baron or a Persian prince might also lie inside the bosom of a Cro-Magnon hunter. And constants cannot explain variables. But no, this is too hasty a judgment. It is partially true, but it overlooks something. The feelings of pecuniary greed and unbridled ambition evinced by many a Roman emperor, for example, were probably unmatched in anyone living in the Upper Paleolithic. Venality and ambition, though certainly latent capacities in the psyches of CroMagnon man, had to await the emergence of the state, or at least the chiefdom, before they could be fully aroused and openly expressed. The point is, though, that human psychology per se could scarcely begin to account for the perversities of a Caligula or a Nero. It was the times in which they lived that brought out these traits. Or, more precisely, it was the culture in which they were raised and by which they were surrounded, as well as the peculiar circumstances of their office, that led Caligula and Nero to express feelings and carry out actions not to be found in the Upper Paleolithic. Social psychology is merely the study of how human thoughts and feelings work themselves out. It does not account for the thoughts and feelings themselves. Caesar’s lust for power was not self-generated. It did not spring directly from the neural tissue of his forebrain. It arose instead from the ambient culture in which he lived, especially from those particular circumstances that a rapidly growing empire engendered in a military leader. Thus, it is to culture, not to social psychology, that we must look for an explanation of why Rome was changed from a republic to a dictatorship. To repeat, it is futile to try to reduce history to psychology, individual or social. Psychology may tell us something about the interplay of motives in people but not why they held these motives and not some widely differing ones; why one age fought for the divine right of kings and another for constitutional government. The things people think and feel about what they do—the legitimate subject matter of psychology— are but the mental correlates of the external cultural milieu into which they were thrust at birth and which never ceases to impinge upon them.

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And it is this cultural milieu, in flux, that constitutes history in its larger sense. But now let us put psychology aside and return to ideas, in and of themselves, as we continue our survey of the “prime movers’’ of history. Two writers on philosophy and history have been the leading twentiethcentury advocates of the idealist position: the Italian philosopher– historian Benedetto Croce and the British philosopher–historian R. G. Collingwood. “In its eternal essence,” wrote Croce, “history is the story of the human mind and its ideals in so far as they express themselves in theories and in works of art, in practical and moral actions” (1934:230). In this pronouncement we detect nothing new; it is simply the old, familiar Idealism we have dealt with before, transported south of the Alps and east of the Vosges. In his Autobiography, Collingwood attempted to enlighten his readers about his notion of history. To begin with, he made it clear that “history did not mean knowing what events followed what” (1978:58). He proposed instead what he took to be a new conception: “I expressed this new conception of history in the phrase: ‘all history is the history of thought.’ You are thinking historically . . . when you say about anything, I see what the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed this, & c.) was thinking.’ Until you can say that, you may be trying to think historically but you are not succeeding. And there is nothing else except thought that can be the object of historical knowledge” (1978:110). Here idealism has been coupled with an ingrained subjectivism. The simple succession of hard, objective, concrete events, generally regarded as the stuff of history, is set aside and left in the dust. Even historians known for their materialist approach to historical causation at times feel the need to pay lip service to the alleged primacy of ideas. Charles A. Beard, for example, renowned for his groundbreaking Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), remarked in America in Midpassage, a work written jointly with his wife Mary, that “as in physical nature the flash of lightning always precedes the roll of thunder, so in human affairs the flame of thought has always gone before a transformation in the social arrangements” (1939:II, 860). And similar asides can be found in the writings of a good many recent historians. Now, what are we to say about something so obvious and indisputable as that ideas precede actions? Only that if it is actually meant to pass for analysis, it is analysis of the most rudimentary and superficial kind. In fact, it is hardly analysis at all, but more like an immediate perception. Of course ideas precede actions! Nothing could be simpler or

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clearer. Even Marxists, generally regarded as allowing only material conditions into the pantheon of behavioral determinants, readily admit this. Engels, for instance, cheerfully conceded that “all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action” (1970:52). The real question is, what gives rise to the ideas that enter people’s minds and cause them to behave as they do? Where do these ideas come from? And unless one is a dedicated Platonist, ideas are not uncaused causes. They emerge out of antecedent conditions. If the appropriate conditions are present, certain ideas will arise almost inevitably. Had Newton never lived, who doubts that someone else would have formulated the Law of Universal Gravitation? Had Darwin never lived, we would still be “Darwinists.” On the other hand, as we have argued before, had Newton or Darwin been born before the right conditions were present, they would never have achieved the intellectual syntheses they did. All their innate talent would have gone for naught. Or, at best, it might have resulted in some minor triumph that might not even have been recorded in the pages of history, instead of the great intellectual revolutions they helped engender. Far more profitable than to proclaim the primacy of ideas, therefore, is the pursuit of those conditions forming the seedbed out which ideas arise. A homey analogy may be helpful here. The mix that emerges from the use of a kitchen blender can be understood far better by considering the ingredients that went into the blender than by the most intimate knowledge of the electromechanical workings of the blender itself To be sure, some device is needed to dice and comingle the ingredients that go into the blender. Ingredients do not blend themselves any more than ideas do. But ideas have a way of emerging into the consciousness of people almost automatically once a certain constellation of conditions has come into being. Disembodied ideas, of course, do not make good causal forces. Or, as the historian William Willcox (1966:22) put it, “The disembodied cause is unreal.” Thus, ideas must be brought down to earth and incorporated into flesh-and-blood individuals before they can have causal efficacy. But here, we are beginning to sound like the chorus of historians we have been accusing of verging on platitude and tautology. It is time, then, to move on. As far back as the days of Francis Bacon, there had already appeared a clear understanding on the part of a few thinkers that the importance of “mind” in interpreting the course of history was often overblown. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon himself

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wrote: “Another error hath proceeded from too great a reverence and a kind of adoration of the mind and understanding of man; by means whereof, men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reason and conceits” (quoted in Robinson 1965:245). With the flowering of science in the nineteenth century, historical explanations tended to replace personal causes, which expressed themselves in ideas and individual wills, with impersonal causes, manifested as factors and forces. Of this trend Carl Becker remarked that “scientific history, banishing ideas as a motive force, and concerning itself with the fact, sought for the continuity of history in external action” (1913:93). Though breaking sharply with tradition, this view nevertheless took a certain hold among historians, leading the braver ones, like A. L. Rowse, to declare that “all through history mind limps after reality” (1928:77). As a measured summary of the realistic appraisal by professional historians of the role of ideas in history, I would offer into evidence the following passage from Herbert Butterfield: We tend to attribute too much to ideas as though ideas were independent powers in history, existing outside men. People have pretended to account for the decline of tribal society by simply saying that there was a decline of the tribal idea or there was a diminution of the sense of kinship. I have seen the decay of the feudal system attributed in a similar way to the decline of what is called the feudal idea. Some historians have believed in the policy of using ideas to explain history, as though ideas were not in some sense the result of history before they could start being the cause of anything. (1951:73) But where does all this leave the problem of the major determinants of history? Before we can answer this question, we must first try to distinguish “history” from “science,” and then, using the kind of causal analysis of historical data that anthropology, as a social science, brings to bear, we will be in a better position to ascertain what in fact does drive the engine of history.

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Chapter

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chapter, I propose to show what the cultural anthropologist, working as a scientist, can do with the data collected by historians, beyond what they themselves customarily have done with it. At the outset, three questions need to be asked and answered. First, Is history a science? Second, If not, can it be made a science? And third, If it can, how is this to be done? For more than a century, these questions have been hotly debated. Some historians have insisted that history is already a science, while others have argued just as vehemently that it is not, and never can be. It may be instructive to begin by citing a few examples of the two opposing views. First, let us listen to those historians who consider history to be a science as it stands. The French historians of the nineteenth century, heirs and custodians of the positivist tradition of Auguste Comte, were almost unanimous in viewing history as a science. The famed medievalist Fustel de Coulanges declared, “History is and should be a science” (1972a:179). “History: he further remarked, “is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies” (quoted in Bloch 1953:25n.). Considering history to be a true science, and regarding objectivity and detachment as its hallmarks, Hippolyte Taine insisted that “the historian may be permitted the privilege of the naturalist: I have observed my subject as one might observe the metamorphosis of an insect” (quoted in Becker 1913:92). And, as if to outdo Taine in his dispassionate handling of historical events, Ernest Renan contended that “histories should be prepared with supreme indifference as if they were written in another planet” (1880:44). Finally, in their Introduction to the Study of History, Charles Langlois and N THIS

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Charles Seignobos declared: “That history can be regarded as a social science needs little argument” (1898:211). Turning to Germany, we may cite the words of Ernst Bernheim, who in his influential Lehrbuch der Historischen, affirmed that history is “the science of men in their activities as social beings” (1984:6). Many English-speaking historians concurred in this belief, George Burton Adams, a past president of the American Historical Association, raised the question: “Are the objective facts with which the historian deals, the past actions of the race, determined in their occurrence by forces acting according to fixed laws, and similar in character and method of operation to the forces which are at work in the sphere of the natural and physical sciences?” And he answered affirmatively: “May I venture to say that I am convinced that in this sense history is a science” (1909:233). John B. Bury, in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, a lecture entitled “The Science of History,” declared emphatically, “History is a science, no less and no more” (1972:210). And years later, A. L. Rowse, who held the corresponding professorship at Oxford, concluded that “history is then a social science” (1963:118). Many scholars, however, have voiced just the opposite opinion. The philosopher Stanley Jevons, for example, maintained that “a science of history in the true sense of the term is an absurd notion” (1900:761), and historians themselves have frequently repeated the same view. Thus, replying directly to Bury‘s pronouncement that history was a science, George M. Trevelyan wrote that “this alleged ‘science’ does not exist, and cannot ever exist in any degree of accuracy remotely deserving to be described by the word ‘science’ ” (1972:230). And in his own inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, half a century before Bury, Charles Kingsley was just as pessimistic, stating plaintively, “I only ask that . . . the hope [be] given up, at least for the present, of forming any exact science of history“ (1860:53). Many others have since doubted the possibility as well. Arnold J. Toynbee (1978:7) asserted, “I dissent . . . emphatically from Bury’s dictum that history is a science.“ To think otherwise, he added, “is one of the greatest and most destructive fallacies of the last hundred years” (1954:53). And what was wrong with regarding history as a science? Something precious, apparently, might be lost in doing so. As H. Stuart Hughes expressed it, “A great many historians seem to feel that if their subject should become too scientific it would forfeit its soul—it would lose the quality of color and adventure that first inspired them to embark on historical studies at all” (1964:4). As recently as 1963, without the fluff and feathers, Chester G. Starr stated bluntly, “History is

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not a science” (1963:15). And even more recently, Barbara Tuchman, author of the widely acclaimed The Guns of August, declared, “Science applied to history makes me wince” (1982:22). Well, who is right? Is history a science or isn’t it? In order to resolve this question we need first of all to examine the broader issue of what historians consider a science to be. One of the first historians to regard history as a science and to attempt (as he thought) to practice it as such, was Leopold von Ranke. However, Ranke’s conception of a science of history consisted of this: that it should diligently seek out all available sources and scrutinize them critically before weaving them into a tight narrative fabric. Furthermore, Ranke argued, the historian should not be subjective, moralizing, or speculative. The course of history, said he in his famous maxim, should be portrayed wie es eigentlich gewesen—as it actually happened. What Ranke meant by a science of history, then, boiled down to its essentials, was a scholarly pursuit in which historical data should be collected carefully, examined objectively, and put together with critical rigor. George M. Trevelyan followed Ranke in his conception of science. “It is not in guessing at historical ‘cause and effect’ that science comes in,” he wrote, “but in collecting and weighing evidence as to facts” (1968c:159). The scientific part of history, he reiterated, consists of “the accumulation of facts and the sifting of evidence” (1968c:160). The views of historians like Ranke and Trevelyan was summed up by Carl Becker: “To be scientific was to assume, in respect to historical events, the objective and detached attitude of mind with which the scientist regarded natural phenomena” (1913:92). This is all well and good, as far as it goes. But the procedures cited are merely the prerequisites and preliminaries of science. The heart of science is searching out order and regularity in the data being examined, and in formulating generalizations or laws about them. Ranke was content to present facts and not interpret them, but what is science without interpretation? As a later German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, clearly saw, “The scientific approach to history which stems from Ranke eschewed any unequivocal and general causal explanation. It therefore left itself open to the charge that it lacked the essential attributes of science” (1972:269–270). Many historians, though, continued to cling to the notion that a “science of history“ (in Ranke’s sense) was not only possible but also valid and fruitful, agreeing with Trevelyan that it was, essentially, merely a way of collecting and assessing the evidence. Under such an interpretation, though, any discipline pursued with a certain degree of rigor could be deemed a science.

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Another conception of history as a science that likewise fails to accord with science’s own conception of itself is associated with a group of thinkers who came to be known as the Southwest German School of philosophy, and whose leading figures were Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband. Dilthey argued that there were two kinds of science, Naturwissenschaft, natural science, the kind of science typified by physics, and Geisteswissenschaft, the science of the mind, which was, however, not the same things as psychology. According to the historian Ernst Breisach, “Although Dilthey respected the achievements of the [natural] sciences, he rejected the attempt to see the world of human phenomena as an analogue to the world of atoms and mechanical forces and to separate strictly the subject and object in all research. He found in the human realm elements which were absent in nature: intentions, purpose, and ends, as well as actions guided by them” (1994:281). Such a view had, of course, important implications for the way in which history was to be studied. Dilthey believed that a historian who looked at the past only from the “outside,” as a natural scientist, would fail to grasp its essence. We explain nature, we understand the human world, which is the world of the mind,” he said (quoted in Breisach 1994:282; emphasis in the original). To achieve such an understanding, historical phenomena had to be grasped “from the inside,” intuitively rather than empirically, They must be “lived through” and apprehended sympathetically (Walsh 1969:II, 62; Hodges 1968:185). The events of history, moreover, were to be seen as individual, concrete, and unique, and not to be a source of generalization. Dilthey’s “science” of history was thus not the description and interpretation of objective, external events, but, rather, an exploration of “the nature of the human mind.” Wearing only the thinnest veil, then, we discern here again the face of German metaphysical idealism. On the one hand, Dilthey and his followers felt a need to clothe the study of history in the prestigious garments of science, but on the other, they were unwilling to embrace science fully and wholeheartedly. Science is empirical and rational, not intuitive. Nor does it cling tenaciously to the specific identity of things and events, dissolving them instead into general categories. Moreover, science is strongly deterministic. It looks for causes, and it looks to impersonal, objective, external forces as constituting the most effective determinants, not to emanations from the human mind, which had a tendency to vaporize into such notions as Spirit and the Absolute Idea. Windelband’s analysis differed somewhat from that of Dilthey. He distinguished Naturwissenschaft, natural science, from Kulturwissen-

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schaft, the study of culture or history. In his famous Rectorial Address, delivered at the University of Strassburg in 1894, he coined two useful terms, nomothetic and idiographic, which he used to contrast two distinct approaches (Collingwood 1956:166). “Nomothetic” meant seeking to formulate general laws, while “idiographic” labeled a view of events that regarded them as unique and specific, and therefore ungeneralizable. The nomothetic approach was the method of Naturwissenschaft, natural science, while the idiographic approach was the one proper to Kulturwissenschaft, historical study. In claiming the latter as the one appropriate to history, Windelband spoke of “the inalienable metaphysical right of the historian to preserve for the memory of mankind, in all their uniqueness and individuality the actual events of life” (quoted in Park 1921:410). And the aim of the historian, he continued, was “to do for an actual event precisely what the artist seeks to do for the object of his imagination. It is just here that we discern the kinship between history and art, between the historian and the writer of literature” (quoted in Park 1921:409). Distinguishing further the two ways in which one could deal with events, Windelband wrote: “The natural scientist considers the single case only so far as he can see in it the features which serve to throw light upon a general law.” For the historian, on the other hand, “the problem is to revive and call up into the present, in all its particularity, an event in the past” (quoted in Park 1921:409). So far, this merely repeated a distinction already commonly made. But then Windelaband went on to elaborate his view of science a bit further: Treating the individual, sensuous, changing objects as mere unsubstantial appearances . . . , scientific investigation becomes a search for the universal laws which rule the timeless changes of events. Out of this colorful world of the senses, science creates a system of abstract concepts, in which the true nature of things is conceived to exist—a world of colorless and soundless atoms, despoiled of all their earthly sensuous qualities. Such is the triumph of thought over perception. Indifferent to change, science casts her anchor in the eternal and the unchangeable. Not the change as such but the unchanging form of change is what she seeks. (quoted in Park 1921:409) This is a most revealing statement! It shows clearly Windelband’s strictly limited notion of Kulturwissenschaft. It allows no valid existence to a science of social change, for the very core of such a science, of a true science of culture, is its attempt to study and account for the

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sweeping changes, the profound transformations, that have occurred in human societies from the Paleolithic to the present. And if it is true that social science, like Windelband‘s natural science, “casts her anchor in the eternal and the unchanging,” and deals not with “change as such” but with “unchanging form,” then such a science, so rudely stripped of its proper raiments, is left shivering naked in the cold. Clearly, Windelband’s model of science is drawn from classical physics, where indeed the same processes recur endlessly, according to the laws of mechanics, and where there is no fundamental change, no development, no evolution. Therefore, if Windelband would countenance a social science at all within his Kulturwissenschaft, it would be a narrow, straitened functionalism, studying the recurring permutations of societies as they seek to remain in equilibrium with their surroundings. Cultural evolution would be summarily dismissed from the room, and whatever study of change was permitted, would be left in the hands of the conventional historian, who would be instructed to pursue it idiographically, and who, dealing only with particular and unique events, would fail to discern the great trends of history, let alone formulate their laws. This is the impoverished fate awaiting a science of culture at Windelband’s hands. Putting all this behind us, we turn again to the question: Is history a science? The answer is simple. As historians like Ranke and many who followed him have pursued it, no, history is not a science. Thus, if historians tell us that, given the manner in which he practices his craft, it cannot be considered a science, we must take him at his word. If he is not doing science, then, whatever else he is doing, he is not doing science. The traditional historian thus is no scientist, and history, as conventionally practiced, is not a science. The question then must be rephrased to read: “Can history be turned into a science?” Or, more precisely, “Can the subject matter of history be transformed into the kind of phenomena with which science can operate?” That is the nub of the issue. And to this question I would answer, unequivocally, yes. The very same facts that historians deal with idiographically, anthropologists can deal with nomothetically. The same body of events that historians encounter as singular and unique, and which they prefer to keep that way, may be treated quite differently. These same events can be dealt with in such a way as to allow for the discovery of regularities, the recognition of broad generalizations, and even the formulations of laws. We can put the matter this way. There is, of course, but a single reality, the same for one and all, historians and anthropologists alike. But that reality can be looked at in different ways and put to different

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uses. The question then becomes, How are we to proceed in formulating scientific generalizations from the raw material provided to us by history? The answer is, just as the natural scientist does. In his role as a scientist, the anthropologist can take concrete events, identify and extract their common elements, and place them into general classes or categories. The particular events of history are thus turned into the general types of science. Caesar dies just once, but autocratic rulers are assassinated again and again. Bertrand Russell made the point very neatly when he said, “a fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance” (1931:58; emphasis mine). In order to generate a body of “instances” on which to practice science, two things must be done. First, one must dissolve an event out of its specific space-and-time matrix and place it into a broader context, where it becomes a member of a general class of phenomena. (“Phenomena” are simply things and events looked at from the point of view of science.) Second, one must cast the net wide enough to gather as many comparable instances of the phenomenon as possible. What this second step implies is clear enough. If history is to be a science at all, it must be broadly comparative. And this comparison must be carried out not just on a regional basis, but on a global one, since, as Buckle noted, the empirical generalizations that go to make up a “universal history“ increase in value “in proportion as we increase the extent of the surface from which they are collected” (quoted in Kenyon 1984:110). A few historians will be found who welcome the broad, crosscultural, comparative approach that the anthropologist would have them adopt. William H. McNeill, for example, who readily admits, “I borrowed most of my conceptual baggage” from anthropologists, declares that “the circumstances of our age demand a global account of how things got to be the way they are. Only so can the world in which we live make sense. To construct the best possible portrait of the whole human adventure on earth therefore constitutes a great and solemn duty historians should try to fulfill” (1986:94, 90-91). Geoffrey Barraclough likewise looked forward to a widening of the horizons of historians with “the prospect it opens up of establishing for the first time a solid foundation for a truly universal comparative history, which may eventually provide a valid basis for the understanding of the recurrent patterns of social processes and of the great continuities and discontinuities of history” (1991:171). In order to carry out such a comparative study, however, the assemblage of events that the traditional historian can marshal, while undoubtedly great, is insufficient. The reservoir of cultural facts amassed by anthropology from a much wider range of human societies needs to be brought to bear as well.

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However, it is not only the vast corpus of comparative data that the anthropologist brings to this endeavor. It is also (as William McNeill observed) the intellectual armamentarium of his profession. Philip Bagby, a British historian much influenced by the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, likewise observed, “The systematic interpretation of culture as developed in anthropology is most likely to provide the concepts and methods necessary to illuminate the dark jungle of historical events” (1963:71). Anthropologists, of course, do not claim exclusive rights when it comes to providing the comparative material needed to construct broad historical syntheses. Nor do they ignore or belittle the vast body of recorded evidence—different as it may be from their own—that the historian has to offer to this joint venture. On the contrary, they recognize its magnitude and importance, and welcome it with open arms. For, as R. E. McGrew remarked, with perhaps only a tinge of overstatement, regardless of whatever social phenomenon one might want to study, “history provides an inexhaustible supply of examples” (1958: 285). Eager to avail himself of the fruits of the historian’s labors in his own field of comparative sociology, Edward Westermarck declared that “descriptive historiography has no higher object than that of offering materials to this science” (1901:1). A few historians have actually attempted to do “descriptive historiography” and found themselves richly rewarded by the effort. In 1941, the historian Ralph Turner published a two-volume work entitled The Great Cultural Traditions. Volume 1 of this work dealt with “The Ancient Cities,” while Volume 2 examined “The Classical Empires.” And in each volume, Turner emphasized process rather than discrete historical events. In the preface to this work Turner made no secret of the influences that had shaped his treatment of the subject: In the ordering of the assembled data I have used concepts borrowed from other social sciences, such as anthropology, human geography, sociology, social psychology, and economics. I have felt justified in making this attempt on the ground that inasmuch as these social sciences analyze human behavior, their findings must have some significance for the historian who studies human behavior as it has moved in time. Two of these concepts deserve mention, viz. “culture” and “social process,” for they have constantly served my thinking. (19411, ix) Turner also made it clear that the kind of historical synthesis he was concerned with “does not consist of piling up more and more data about more and more subjects;... it involves the integration of data in

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always more ways so that the history becomes increasingly understandable as social movement in time” (1941:I, ix). Another example of this approach was provided by Rushton Coulborn, who carried out an extensive comparative study of feudalism. In this study, he examined the two well-established cases of feudalism (Western Europe and Japan), as well as four alleged cases (Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China), and arrived at important generalizations about the phenomenon (1956b). The fruitful results of this endeavor led Coulborn to consider “proved beyond all doubt the breadth and depth of understanding of history which proceed from studying it comparatively” (1956a:xii). But Turner and Coulborn were more the exceptions than the rule. By and large, as Fritz Stern observed, “Attempts at supranational or comparative history have remained few” (1972:22). Indeed, there has even been an undisguised antagonism toward it. Listen, for instance, to the objection raised by G. R. Elton: The comparative method conceals within itself a self-destructive error.... The devotees of anthropology are particularly prone to this kind of analogical error, as when nineteenth-century Bantus and Polynesians are called in to explain things about supposedly primitive societies of the past like pre–Columbian America or German forest tribes. Study of a more strictly historical kind at once reveals such enormous differences in circumstances and situations that the value of such comparisons—even their capacity to suggest new questions and insights—becomes very problematical. (1970:28, 32) Elton thus refuses even to countenance the possibility that there might have been similarities and parallels between Polynesian chiefdoms and German forest “tribes” (which, in fact, were also chiefdoms) that would shed light on the development of both. This is surely not the road to a science of history, nor even to a modest degree of understanding. Leery of the possibility that instructive parallels might exist between the partitions that led to the formation of Erie and Ulster and of India and Pakistan, William B. Willcox (1966:33) warned that “historical analogies are as brittle as they are provocative, and they cannot be pushed far without breaking in the hand.” But the defining moment in the historian’s entrenched opposition to broad comparisons was reached in 1963 during a series of BBC television lectures in which H. R. TrevorRoper asserted: “The history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history,” Therefore, he

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concluded, we cannot afford to “amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe” (quoted in Fage 1965:2). It is perhaps no exaggeration, then, to say, with James Harvey Robinson, that the historian is at his most typical “when he puts on the armor of the Lord to defend the lawful frontiers of history against invaders” (1965:90). To a large extent, professional historians have avoided becoming comparativists. Instead, they have remained narrowly circumscribed as to the times, places, and peoples they encompass in their work. Usually, they focus on Western societies, and deal only with a few centuries, or at most a millennium or two of the historical record. Thus, they generally disregard the more than 99 percent of human existence that lies behind the curtain of recorded history. By so doing, though, they ignore the important earlier stages of historical development. What, for example, do we learn from historians’ weighty tomes about the onset of clan organization, the emergence of chiefdoms, the beginnings of taxation, the imposition of corvée labor? Are traditional historians even aware of the great divide that was crossed when human societies stopped destroying a person’s property at his death or burying it with his remains, and began instead to keep it in circulation for the benefit of the survivors by devising the principle of inheritance? Of course, all of these developments, historians might argue, were “prehistoric,” and thus none of their business. Indeed, in his History of Scotland, William Robertson went so far as to argue: “Nations as well as men arrive at maturity by degrees, and the events which happened during their infancy or early youth, cannot be recollected, and deserve not to be remembered” (quoted in Black 1965:128). This is, of course, a most constricted view to take for someone who professes to study how things have changed over time. The historians of the New History, with their broad cultural perspective, properly chastised those of their colleagues who took refuge in such a view. Thus Robinson declared: “ ‘Prehistoric’ is a word that must go the way of ‘preadamite,’ which we used to hear. They both indicate a suspicion that we are in some way gaining illicit information about what happened before the footlights were turned on and the curtain rose on the great human drama” (1965:56). I have already alluded to the fact that most historians have not only failed to become comparativists but have shown outright hostility toward those few among their colleagues who have. The case of Arnold J. Toynbee is particularly illuminating in this regard. Toynbee began his career as a historian by studying the Greco-Roman world and pub-

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lishing several works on it, including Greek Political Thought (1924). During the course of this study, it occurred to him that he could discern in the development, decline, and disintegration of Hellenic civilization a pattern that he thought might be a recurring one, traceable in the history of other civilizations as well. Accordingly, he began work on what became his monumental A Study of History, on which he spent two decades, and which ultimately ran to twelve volumes. In these tomes, Toynbee examined and compared twenty-one civilizations from around the world, from the Minoan to the Mayan, and from the Korean to the Andean. He thus cast his net far beyond the ambit of societies normally studied by professional historians, including within his purview a number of societies that ordinarily fall within the province of the anthropologist. Toynbee seems to have looked with favor—perhaps even envy—on the anthropologist, whose working corpus of facts included data drawn from (he said) more than 650 primitive societies. Thus he wrote: “Now 650 examples ... are just enough to enable the student to make a beginning with the formulation of laws. On the other hand, students of a phenomenon are discouraged from attempting more than a tabulation of facts; and this, as we have seen, is the stage in which ‘history‘ has remained so far” (1947:47). Undaunted by the relatively small sample of cases available to him, however, Toynbee went on to assert: “The comparative units of history [which he was to use in his study] remain inconveniently few for the application of the scientific technique, the elucidation and formulation of laws. None the less, at our own peril, we intend to hazard the attempt” (1947:47). As his professional colleagues have pointed out time and time again (e.g., Barnes 1948:107–112; 1950; Rowse 196357–58; Geyl 1949; Plumb 1988:209), Toynbee’s A Study of History has many flaws, not the least of which (as we have seen) is his reintroduction of God into the dynamics of world history. But it is not on the basis of the truth or falsity of his explanations of the rise and fall of civilizations that criticism of Toynbee has centered. Often it is directed at him merely for having made the attempt! Thus, the historian William B. Willcox, appearing to speak for his colleagues, proclaimed that in A Study of History Toynbee had “majestically overstepped the limits of the discipline” (Willcox 1966:24). And W. H. Walsh of Oxford, after describing Toynbee “as seeking to carry out the programme formulated by the early Positivists for discovering the laws of history,” which strikes him as criticism enough, goes on to say, “It seems to me clear that if Toynbee is to be allowed to annex the name ‘history’ for the comparative study of civili-

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zations he undertakes, some fresh name will have to be found for history as we know it.... Ordinary historians would be perfectly justified in telling him that he has not transformed their study, but simply thought of a new one” (1953:167, 168). In Walsh’s opinion, then, once a historian goes beyond the straitened precincts of his discipline and strives (however unsuccessfully) to embrace the entire range of civilizations and to discover the laws of their development—once he attempts something really venturesome and valuable, in other words—he is no longer doing history! One could hardly find a more damning admission of the narrow channel within which traditional historians ply their trade. And as for poor Arnold Toynbee, if he is to be hanged, let it be as a sheep and not as a goat.

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Let us look now at the anthropologist’s view of all this. In contrast to the ways of conventional history, anthropology widens the arena of study—widens it immeasurably. It encompasses the cultures of the entire planet, of the Fuegians as well as the French, of the Paiute as well as the Persians. And it deals not just with a few millennia of culture history, but with the full two million years of it. When it paints with its broad brush, anthropology erases the arbitrary line that historians like to draw between history and prehistory. Moreover, widening the net to catch many more of the facts of human experience pays enormous scientific dividends. Take, for example, the problem of the origin of the state. With the exception of the coming of agriculture, the rise of the state was no doubt the single most important step ever taken by the human race. It was a prerequisite for almost every development that followed. Were it not for the state, the reader of this book would not be holding it between his hands. Indeed, neither this book nor any other, would ever have been written. Instead, both reader and writer, if they existed at all, would be illiterate horticulturalists, living in small, simple, scattered, autonomous villages. Life would have been, if not nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes would have it, at least benighted, monotonous, and pedestrian by modern-day standards. Virtually all the arts, sciences, professions, occupations, and institutions we know and enjoy today depend directly and unequivocally on the prior existence of the state. Supremely important to the lives of all of us as the state is, however, the historian cannot tell us how it arose. Harry Elmer Barnes once observed that “the present type of history, instead of attempting to

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explain the origin, nature and development of the state, simply recites the most striking episodes connected with the history of some particular state” (1925:9; emphasis in the original). The problem, though, is worse than that. Seldom are historians in a position to describe the series of steps by which any state arose. The trouble lies in the fact that almost every society normally studied by historians was already a state by the time it came within their purview. To take a concrete example, it is known that during his studies of politics, Aristotle collected the constitutions of no fewer than 158 Greek city-states. These constitutions undoubtedly helped him understand their governance, but they could not tell him how these states arose. The earlier phases of political evolution—those from autonomous villages, through chiefdoms, to the earliest states—occurred in Greece before there were written records, which is all that Aristotle, like historians in general, had available to him. As a result of this limitation, Aristotle could form no true picture of how the process had occurred. Indeed, in his attempt to do so, he presented only a truncated and erroneous version of it. His own words reveal quite clearly his incomplete and mistaken knowledge of the process. The first stage in human social development, he thought, was the household. Then, after the household, “the next stage is the village, the first association of a number of houses for the satisfaction of something more than daily needs. It comes into being through the processes of nature in the fullest sense, as offshoots of a household are set up by sons and grandsons” (Aristotle 1981:58; emphasis in the original). So far, so good, but then Aristotle failed to recognize the need to bridge the chasm between the village and the state with some intermediate form of political organization, the form now known as the chiefdom. But this stage had been so completely lost from the records and memories of Athenians in Aristotle’s day that he was led to write, in error: “The final association, formed [directly] of several villages, is the state. For all practical purposes the process is now complete; selfsufficiency has been reached, and while the state came about as a means of securing life itself, it continues in being to secure the good life” (1981:59). Having thus brought the state summarily into being, Aristotle’s metaphysical explanation of the process followed: “Therefore every state exists by nature, as the earlier associations [i.e., the household and the village1 too were natural. This association [the state] is the end of those others, and nature is itself an end; for whatever is the endproduct of the coming into existence of any object, that is what we call its nature” (Aristotle 1981:59).

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For Aristotle, then, the state was “natural,” and thus hardly needed to be accounted for by any special set of circumstances. Its coming into being was virtually self-evident. This mode of argument reflected the fact that Aristotle was unfamiliar with anything but states. And whatever is universal in one’s experience tends to be taken for granted. Chiefdoms, the missing link between autonomous villages and states, had vanished from the scene by the time Aristotle was writing. Thus, he was in no position to conjure up this form of society as he attempted to trace the course of political development. In summary, then, Aristotle’s basis of comparison was too narrow for him to have achieved the understanding he was seeking. And this has been a characteristic weakness of historians ever since.

FROM HISTORY TO SOCIAL SCIENCE In the chapter that follows, I return to the origin of the state as an example of the kind of problem that anthropology is equipped to attack and resolve. First, though, let us try to piece together the story of how “history” was turned into social science. Among the first scholars to see the possibility of erecting such a science with the data of history was Henry Thomas Buckle. Buckle was profoundly dissatisfied with what historians had done up to that time (the mid-nineteenth century) in laying bare the underlying processes of cultural development. Thus, he wrote: The unfortunate peculiarity of the history of man is, that although its separate parts have been examined with considerable ability, hardly anyone has attempted to combine them into a whole, and ascertain the way in which they are connected with each other. In all the other great fields of inquiry, the necessity of generalization is universally admitted, and noble efforts are being made to rise from particular facts in order to discover the laws by which those facts are governed. So far, however, is this from being the usual course of historians, that among them a strange idea prevails, that their business is merely to relate events, which they may occasionally enliven by such moral and political reflections as seem likely to be useful. (1903:I, 4) Buckle then issued a clarion call, announcing what could be accomplished by the proper study of history: “In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal

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laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity: and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results” (1857:I, 6). Yet, in his only published book, An Introduction to the History of Civilization in England (1857), while proclaiming what should be done to make history a science, Buckle failed to lay the foundations for such a science. He had read extensively and incorporated a great many historical details into his narrative. But there was no clear thread running through it. The direction of the path never stood out clearly for all the way stations at which he stopped. As Herbert Spencer later wrote, “Buckle had taken in a much larger quantity of matter than he could organize; and he staggered under the mass of it” (1926:II, 4). The scholar who actually got social science off the ground—not just by proposing that it should be done but by actually doing it—was Spencer himself. Like Buckle, Spencer objected that the historians of his day were not fulfilling the promise of attaining a deeper understanding of the past. Indeed, Spencer argued, they had actually resisted such endeavors. “The possibility of Sociology,” he wrote in his autobiography, “was not only not conceived by historians, but when alleged was denied” (1926:II, 253). Elaborating on this point, Spencer later said: “The cultured classes and their leaders—Carlyle, Froude, Kingsley, etc.—were in utter darkness about the matter. They alleged the impossibility of a ‘science of history,’ and were without any conception that there had been going on the evolution of social structures, not made or dreamed of by kings and statesmen, or recognised by historians” (quoted in Duncan 1908: II, 352). Spencer saw two major failings in the way historians regarded human affairs. One of them was the matter of free will. As John Stuart Mill had already pointed out, “Among the impediments to the general acknowledgement, by thoughtful minds, of the subjection of historical facts to scientific laws, the most fundamental continues to be that which is grounded on the doctrine of Free Will, or, in other words, on the denial that the law of invariable Causation holds true of human volitions” (1886:607–608). In this belief, Spencer concurred: “There can be no complete acceptance of Sociology as a science so long as the belief in a social order not conforming to natural laws, survives” (1873:360). A second criticism leveled by Spencer was that the facts amassed by historians were not presented in a way calculated to bring out general patterns and broad tendencies. He was repelled, he said, by

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history as it was then practiced: “I take but little interest in what are called histories, but am interested only in Sociology, which stands related to these so-called histories much as a vast building stands related to the heaps of stones and bricks around it” (1926:II, 185). These “heaps of stones,” moreover, were not the right kinds of building blocks to begin with. What historians traditionally did, Spencer characterized as follows: From the successive strata of our historical deposits, they diligently gather all the highly-colored fragments, pounce upon everything that is curious and sparkling, and chuckle like children over their glittering acquisitions; meanwhile the rich veins of wisdom that ramify amidst this worthless debris, lie utterly neglected. Cumbrous volumes of rubbish are greedily accumulated, whilst those masses of rich ore, that should have been dug out, and from which golden truths might have been smelted, are left unthought of and unsought. (1851:49) Still, Spencer saw some indication that things were changing for the better: That which constitutes History, properly so called, is in great part omitted from works on the subject. Only of late years have historians commenced giving us, in any considerable quantity, the truly valuable information. As in past ages the king was everything and the people nothing; so, in past histories the doings of the king fill the entire picture, to which the national life forms but an obscure background. While only now, when the welfare of nations rather than of rulers is becoming the dominant idea, are historians beginning to occupy themselves with the phenomena of social progress. The thing it really concerns us to know is the natural history of society (1911:27–28) Nevertheless, the steps historians had taken in this direction had been halting and tentative, and Spencer urged them to go further: “The only history that is of practical value is what may be called Descriptive Sociology. And the highest office which the historian can discharge, is that of so narrating the lives of nations, as to furnish materials for a Comparative Sociology; and for the subsequent determination of the ultimate laws to which social phenomena conform” (191129). And indeed, Spencer devoted thirty years of his life to erecting the Comparative Sociology he had called for. This effort culminated in his three-volume work, The Principles of Sociology (1876–1896), one of the truly great landmarks in the history of social science. In this work— which despite its title is much more anthropology than sociology—

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Spencer drew extensively on existing accounts of primitive cultures from around the world. But he also made use of the works of many historians—Tacitus, Froissart, Hume, Gibbon, Michelet, Prescott, and Freeman, to name just a few—extracting from them those nuggets of information that served as building blocks for the great edifice he was constructing. The Principles of Sociology is now all but forgotten. Yet in what it accomplished, it still towers above much of what passes today as social science (Carneiro 1967b:xxxi–xliii; 1981:165–170). Needless to say, most historians looked askance at Spencer’s prescription for reshaping their discipline. No one was going to lecture Carlyle about disembodied social forces when, for him, history was “not abstractions ... not diagrams and theorems; but men in buff coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks, with passion in their stomach and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men” (Carlyle 1972a:90). Referring to Spencer’s works specifically, James Bryce, who evidently preferred the vivid pageantry of traditional history to the formal description of social process, spoke of “the disappointment one feels in perusing books where one seeks bread and seems to receive only stones” (1913:359). Enriching the dietary metaphor but with similar misgivings about the nutritive content of Spencer’s works, Andrew D. White, president of Cornel1 University, remarked that “meeting our ethical necessity for historical knowledge with statistics and tabulated sociology . . . is like meeting our want of food by the perpetual administration of concentrated essence of beef” (1885:18–19). Though not entirely unmoved by Spencer’s appeal for a broader kind ofhistory, Sir Charles Oman nevertheless admitted with a touch of irony that “with the greatest desire to avoid narrowmindedness, I still cannot rise to the duty of acquainting myself with and mastering the history of flint-happing, or of Chinese music” (1939:5). Some writers felt it downright demeaning for history to be cast in the role of handmaiden to sociology, thus making the historian, as Jesse Coursault put it, “a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water for the sociologist” (1920:184). In much the same vein, the historian J. W. Swain (1923:282) lamented that “it would surely be a pity for history to fall from her once lofty estate to become the servant of this new master, for her Muse to become the research assistant of a sociologist.” But not all historians felt diminished at being asked to play an ancillary role. Untroubled by the prospect, John B. Bury wrote simply that “history supplies the material for political and social science” (1972:214). And Carl Becker declared that the historian’s “business is to dig out the facts and pile them up for someone to use. Perhaps he may use them himself; but at all events he must arrange them conveniently

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so that someone—perhaps the sociologist or the economist—may easily carry them away for use in some structural enterprise” (1958a:42). Employing a similar image, Bury saw the process of gathering historical materials, “the patient drudgery in archives of states and municipalities, all the microscopic research that is carried on by armies of toiling students,” as resembling “the bearing of mortar and bricks to the site of a building which has hardly been begun, of whose plan the labourers know but little.” Nonetheless, this “hewing of wood and drawing of water” should be done cheerfully, “in faith that a complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end” (1972:219). Bury had no clear notion of who the architect would be who would construct this great new edifice, nor when it would be built. Still, confident and generous, he gave orders to his troops to assist in the endeavor: “For a long time to come one of the chief services that research can perform is to help to build, firm and solid, some of the countless stairs by which men of distant ages may mount to a height unattainable by us and have a vision of history which we cannot win, standing on our lower slope” (1972:220). Such selflessness, though, was more the exception than the rule among those historians still standing on that “lower slope.” Nor did many of them share Bury‘s optimism as to what lay ahead in the way of historical synthesis. Returning to Spencer’s injunction to them, a few other historians, though a bit grudgingly, actually listened to his message and took it to heart. Albert G. Keller reported that as a graduate student at Yale, he had heard the distinguished historian George Burton Adams, “in the course of an attack on ‘sociology,’ qualify his strictures by saying that the view Spencer had given of society as a whole and in the articulation of its parts had made it impossible for history ever again to be written as it had been before Spencer’s time” (1933:31–32).

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD One of the major contributions of Spencer’s sociology–anthropology to the erection of what might broadly be called a science of history was its comparative point of view. The narrow bounds of European history, which so tightly constricted most historians, were broken, and the ethnography, history, and prehistory of the whole world were encompassed and embraced. The comparative method was, of course, not Spencer’s own invention. It had already been applied to, and scored

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striking triumphs in, anatomy and philology, and was to do the same in religion and jurisprudence. What Spencer did was to show that the comparative method could fruitfully be applied not just to individual aspects of culture, but to whole cultures as well. Among historians, the one who most warmly espoused the comparative perspective was Edward A. Freeman, who in 1873 published an influential book entitled Comparative Politics. Praising the power of comparison, Freeman gave his enthusiasm free rein: “The establishment of the Comparative Method of study has been the greatest intellectual achievement of our time. It has carried light and order into whole branches of human knowledge which before were shrouded in darkness and confusion” (1873:1). And he went on to observe that “many of the simplest and most essential arts of civilized life ... have been found . . . over and over again in distant times and places.... So it is with political institutions also. The same institutions constantly appear very far from one another, simply because the circumstances which called for them have arisen in times and places very far from one another” (1873:31–32). Here, from the pen of a historian, was the kernel and core of comparative science applied to the development of human societies. Of course, as Buckle clearly saw, the more instances of an institution we can examine, the better able we are to account for its development. That is to say, the more examples of it available for study, and the greater the variety of climes and contexts from which they are drawn, the more likely we are of determining what is central and necessary to its rise and what is merely peripheral and subsidiary. The comparative method—today generally called cross-cultural comparison—has remained a cornerstone of that branch of anthropology devoted to searching for the widest regularities and broadest generalizations we can find. Even archeologists, who are not usually as involved in cross-cultural research as ethnologists, have acknowledged its importance. V. Gordon Childe, for one, maintained that the comparative method “offers the brightest prospect for reaching general laws indicative of the direction of historical progress” (1946:251). Colin Renfrew, for his part, remarked, “We have all come to realize that while every society and culture is no doubt in some senses unique, the path to a meaningful understanding of its nature and of its origins lies in recognizing and analysing what it may have in common with other societies which are in certain respects analogous” (1979:2). Furthermore, in an important work entitled Before Civilization (1976), Renfrew made extensive use of ethnohistorical accounts of chiefdoms in Polynesia and the American Southeast in trying to understand how, in

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prehistoric times, chiefdoms had arisen on Malta and in Neolithic England. Even a single instance of a historical development might be projected against a wider screen to help gain a better perspective on some general process. Thus, the archeologist Kwang-chih Chang observed that “as we come to see how civilization, urbanism, and the state form of society arose in China, we also begin to realize what Chinese historiography can do for social science generalizations” (1989:161). Alluding to one of the great advantages of the comparative method, Franz Boas wrote: “If the development of culture in the New World has been quite independent of the advances made in the Old World, its culture will be of the greatest value for purposes of comparison” (1898:5). In other words, as we just noted, the more independent cases of a phenomenon there are to study, the better chance we stand of discovering the causes of its origin and of tracing its evolution. Even when drawn from a single region, parallel instances, looked at comparatively, may shed considerable light on something outside of themselves. Trends that may turn out to have counterparts in other areas of the world may begin to reveal themselves in a small region of it. The historian Edward P. Cheyney presented a good example of this in his summary of social movements that repeated themselves over much of Europe during the later Middle Ages: The most marked characteristic of the history of Europe, considered as a whole, during the period whose events have now been sketched [A.D. 1250–1453] was its uniformity, Notwithstanding a multiplicity of detail, the main movements in this history appear in a single story, What happened in one country happened, in a somewhat different form, in others. Evidences are numberless. Medieval feudalism was dying out alike in all countries of Europe. Town life was encroaching on rural life from Castile to Poland, from Italy to Sweden. Capitalism was at work in all countries. Centralization within larger or smaller boundaries was everywhere in progress. A common language, spoken and written, was coming into use in every considerable stretch of territory. These and a score of other instances of parallel development indicate that the history of Europe was [following] a single current. (1962:328) Still, the nations of Europe were all in direct or indirect contact with one another. How can we know if the developments Cheyney speaks of were not simply peculiar to Europe rather than being part of a more general evolutionary process undergone, at some stage, by nations everywhere? In order to ascertain this, we must, of course, greatly

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broaden the base of our induction. Here it is that the comparative method—the broadly comparative method—comes into play. By examining instances from around the world of societies at roughly comparable stages of development, we will be able to distinguish between truly recurring structural changes and those that are only local or regional. A contemporary historian, Michael Howard of Oxford and more recently of Yale, has also sung the praises of the comparative method and seen its utility if we are to grasp the parallel movements in world history: ”In the eyes of the scholar . . . all ages [and places] are of equal significance. It is as important to understand Byzantium as it is to understand the Soviet Union.... It is as important to understand the pre–Columbian societies of Central America as it is to understand Moghul dynastic rule in India, or the development of municipal government in Leeds” (1991:16). But as long ago as the turn of the century, historians of wider vision were already well aware of the tremendous impetus the comparative method could give to the synoptic study ofhistory. For example, William Milligan Sloane, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, was unreserved in his espousal of it, declaring that “history is the hopeless and grateful debtor of comparative sociology, philology, and mythology, of comparative religions, folklore and ethnology; and above all comparative archaeology“ (1906:31). Historians, then, would do well to adopt as their watchword the thought embodied in the opening lines of Samuel Johnson’s poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes”: Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru; (1958:47) Anthropology cannot experiment with human beings. The comparative method, however, allows us to do the next best thing. It is, in a sense, our laboratory. It provides us with case after case of whatever phenomenon we choose to study, and it permits us to examine the phenomenon from almost every possible angle. By varying now this and now that condition which may be found associated with it, we are afforded the chance of discovering the factors that truly underlie its origin and growth.

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION Up to now, I have made only passing reference to evolution. The time has come to take a look at the birth of evolutionary theory during

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the nineteenth century and to examine its impact on the writing of history. Without question, this impact was profound. “Among the various intellectual and scientific influences which have revolutionized the perspective, orientation and ideals of the dynamic historical writing and interpretation of the present day,” wrote Harry Elmer Barnes, “there is no doubt that the evolutionary hypothesis must be assigned the first and foremost place” (1927:341–342). Evolution had much to do, in fact, with making scholars aware that the data of history could profitably be turned into the raw material of a social science. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species marked a great turning point in human thought. It was Darwin’s book, and the theory it propounded, that proved to be the single greatest influence in altering people’s conception of the course of human life. The Origin of Species, however, was by no means the first work to deal with the past as revealing a gradual development from simplicity to complexity, Anticipations of an evolutionary view had already appeared, although they were scarcely more than a century old. Obvious and incontestable as it now seems to anthropologists, the fact that human history was marked by an irresistible, if fitful, movement in a recognizable direction was not always perceived by the leading scholars of the day. During classical antiquity, the prevailing view of the course of human events was essentially static. Thus, John B. Bury was struck by “the tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise the immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies” (1960:11). And he noted that “Aristotle, considering the subject from a practical point of view, laid down that changes in an established social order are undesirable, and should be as few and slight as possible” (p. 11). Of course, things did change, but that change, though it might seem to show direction, was, in the long run, merely circular, only the limited segment of a recurring cycle. Illustrating this view, Polybius stated that political evolution was “a course appointed by nature in which constitutions change, disappear, and finally return to the point from which they started” (quoted in Einstein 1946:85). During the Middle Ages, a view of the world prevailed that saw change as inimical. The feudal structure of European society seemed natural, inevitable, and enduring. To the extent that there was any notion of a progression of stages through which the human race had passed, it was a purely Biblical one, “based on the prophecies of Daniel, which divided the course of history into four periods corresponding to the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman monarchies, the last of which was to endure till the day of Judgement” (Bury 1960:37–38).

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Even as late as the time of David Hume (1711–17761, the notion that a distinct and discernible trend had characterized history was not generally recognized. Hume himself was convinced that “mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature” (quoted in Becker 1964:95). For Hume, then, the recurring successes and disasters of monarchs and nations quite obscured the silent transformations going on beneath the surface. Edward Gibbon also thought of history as showing no underlying and perceptible trends, but as repeating itself endlessly, one kingdom or dynasty going through the same succession of peradventures as another. As Trevelyan noted, “Gibbon conceived mankind to be essentially the same in all ages and in all countries. In all ages and in all countries his sceptical eye detected the same classes, the same passions, the same follies.... He did not perceive that the thoughts of men, as well as the framework of society, differ from age to age” (1968c:165). Coming from minds as keen as those of Hume and Gibbon, this is powerful testimony that even late in the eighteenth century, evolutionary thinking was still far from being coin of the realm. If any pattern was to be discovered in history, it was likely to be cyclicity. Sir Walter Scott, as much a historian as he was a novelist, expressed this sentiment in verse: World on world are rolling ever From creation to decay Like the bubbles on a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away, (quoted in Trevelyan 1968a:89) The first European thinker credited with having a developmental conception of history was Jean Bodin (1530–1596). Previous writers either regarded history as static or, if they recognized any major changes, saw them as retrogressive—the expulsion from the Garden of Eden or a relapse from a Golden Age. Bodin, however, introduced a rudimentary theory of progress in which he recognized three stages marked by the successive ascendancy of three groups, the Oriental nations, the Mediterranean nations, and the northern European nations (Barnes 1963:117; Bury 1960:38). A century and a half after Bodin, Giambattista Vico, in his The New Science (1725), presented a view that was also broadly evolutionary. Indeed, in his History of France, Michelet declared that Vico had done for history what Newton had done for physics. “Even if this comparison may seem excessive,” writes Whitrow, there is no doubt that Vico can be

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regarded as the first exponent of the modern belief that, in order to understand the nature and structure of society, we must study all of its aspects in historical perspective, that is, from the standpoint of time” (1989:150). In terms of specific notions of its course, Vico held that “human progress does not take place directly or in a straight line. Rather, it takes the form of a spiral. There may seem to be cycles of development, but they never go back to the original starting point. Each turn is higher than the preceding“ (Barnes 1963:175; Bury 1960:269–270). Thus, intermingled with a certain forward motion in history, Vico also saw a cyclical pattern. This was perhaps the first clear and explicit view of cyclicity in history to be put forward in modern times. But it certainly was not the last. As recently as 1956 we find the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough saying, All [that] history has to show is a rise and fall, an upward surge, a grappling with problems, an exhaustion, and a slow, steady decline, a stiffening of the fibres of society after the dying down of creative forces. (1984:230–231) The basic fact remains that we can perceive, and many historians to-day are increasingly accepting, the cyclic nature of civilization. We see history no longer as an upward curve, marred by certain unfortunate drops in the graph, but as the story of a number of cultures, each rising to a height, each falling into a trough and petering out when its creative powers are used up. (1984:232) Such is the myopia that a narrow, particularistic scrutiny of history can engender. But let us return to our survey of efforts to find in history a grander sweep. During the French Enlightenment, half a century or so after Vico, we see the first flowering of evolutionary thinking as applied to history. It should be kept in mind, though, that this view was applied by social philosophers like Turgot and Condorcet rather than by historians, strictly speaking. Condorcet, for example, distinguished a series of nine successive stages of historical development, with a tenth to follow on the heels of the French Revolution. By the 1830s, Auguste Comte was proclaiming confidently that “historical appreciation has no other purpose than to show the reality and the fecundity of the theory of social development” (quoted in Breisach 1994:274). In Germany at about the same time, Johann Gottfried Herder was also writing about human history in developmental terms. Taking his cue from Leibniz’s axiom that “the origins of things present . . . are to be found in things past,” and that “a reality is never better understood than through its causes” (quoted in Bloch 1953:35), Herder, in his major

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work, Thoughts Concerning the Philosophy of Man’s History (1784– 1791), painted an evolutionary panorama with man at center stage, striving through the ages to attain a higher degree of humanity. “The human race,” he wrote, “is destined to proceed through various degrees of civilization” (quoted in Becker and Barnes 1952:I, 490). But here, as in so much of German philosophy, naturalistic notions were intertwined with florid metaphysics. Hegel’s evolutionism, which followed Herder’s and was influenced by it, was again vague and metaphysical, the course of human history being a “self-development and self-realization of the primal ‘Idea’ ” (Rowse 1963:84). Through most of the early decades of the nineteenth century, evolution as a firm and objective interpretive principle was still no more than a glimmer in the minds of a few advanced thinkers such as Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin. “rue, an occasional flash of recognition of something like an evolutionary progression was to be found in a few earlier writings. Thus Geronimo Cardano, in his De subtilitate rerum (1550), argued that not all modern advances were merely further developments of ancient arts, as was commonly alleged, but that some were categorically new inventions. And he cited the compass, gunpowder, and printing as prime examples (Bury 1960:40n.). In 1831, Carlyle caught a similar glimpse of evolutionary advance when he wrote: “As Phlogiston is displaced by Oxygen, and the Epicycles of Ptolemy by the Ellipses of Kepler; so does Paganism give place to Catholicism, Tyranny to Monarchy, and Feudalism to Representative Government” (quoted in Houghton 1957:30). Such glimpses, though, were rare. Evolutionism was not yet part of the historian’s professional armamentarium. At the same time, however, a certain dissatisfaction and restlessness with a narrow, static, particularistic view of history was growing among inquiring minds. The feeling began to take hold of a few historians that their brethren were not fulfilling their proper function, were not taking sufficient advantage of what their raw materials had to offer. Historical facts were accumulating at a tremendous rate, but historical synthesis lagged far behind. Histories were no longer being read, it was argued, by those who sought an understanding of the pattern of the past. A trenchant expression of this discontent was given by the Scottish historian Archibald Alison, who in 1846 wrote: “The greatest cause of this general failure of historical works to excite general attention, or acquire lasting fame, is the want of power of generalization and classification in the writers. [Instead, they were] [i]mmersed in a boundless sea of details, of the relative importance of which they were unable to form any just estimate” (1846a:185).

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This state of affairs was soon to change, however. Just as when a magnet is placed under a collection of scattered iron filings they immediately begin to align themselves into a definite pattern, so the principle of evolution, when it was applied to the events of history, brought forth a striking degree of order. And again it was Herbert Spencer who played the leading role in this development. Though Spencer’s evolutionism was foreshadowed in some of his earlier essays, his application of it to the cultural history of mankind was first put forth explicitly and comprehensively in “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” an essay published in 1857, two years before the appearance of The Origin of Species. Here, Spencer observed: The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back; and in the earliest changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth, and of every organism on its surface; . . . it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its economical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all . . . [the] endless concrete and abstract products of human activity. (1857:465) Then, in The Principles of Sociology, Spencer applied evolution to the full range of human societies, from the simplest bands to the most complex of the early states. And he dealt not only with the development of sociopolitical structure, but also with almost every aspect of culture. At about the same time, Edward B. Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan, among anthropologists, as well as a number of other forward-looking thinkers in other fields, were joining Spencer in portraying the human past as a natural development, from rudimentary beginnings to the complexities of the contemporary world. So optimistic was Henry Adams about the new way of looking at the world that he was led to remark, We cannot help asking ourselves what would happen if some new Darwin were to demonstrate the laws of historical evolution” (1959a:348). But just as the theory of evolution met with fierce resistance when first proposed in biology, so was it resisted by historians when it threatened to invade their domain. What was the basis of this opposition? First of all, history and evolution were seen as two contrasting and opposed modes of interpretation. This difference has been highlighted by Leslie White as follows: “An historical account of events . . . is not at all the same as an evolutionary account. The history of horses, writing or money is quite a different thing from an account of their respective evolutions. The one deals with phenomena as unique events, with reference to specific time and place; the other deals with classes of phenom-

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ena without regard to specific time and place. The one particularizes, the other generalizes” (1946:82; emphasis in the original). Thus, to traditional historians who envisioned their proper task as stringing together the small nuggets of historic fact unearthed by their diligent research, and who were, according to Frederick J. Teggart, “opposed on principle to generalizations,” preferring “the circumstance to the substance of history,” the powerful current of evolutionism ushered in by the writings of Darwin and Spencer came “as a new menace” (1910:709–710). An element of this opposition was the fact that evolutionism put a high premium on tracing out cause and effect, whereas, according to G. R. Elton, the historian “must avoid like the plague any conviction that the course of events was necessary or determined” (1970:100). Evolution, Elton contended, embodied “the notion that what happened was bound to happen.” But this notion, seductive because of its simplicity, Elton went on to say, was “among good historians, readily undermined by the habits of caution and particular study to which they are trained” (1970:31). Allied to this distaste for causal analysis was the fact that historians were mightily impressed with the intricate convolutions of history, and not with whatever broad, general trends it might display. Herbert Butterfield put the case in these words: ‘We may believe in some doctrine of evolution or some idea of progress and we may use this in our interpretation of the history of centuries; but what our history contributes is not evolution but rather the realization of how crooked and perverse the ways of progress are, with what willfulness and waste it twists and turns, and takes anything but the straight track to its goal, and how often it seems to go astray, and to be deflected by any conjuncture” (1965:23). Another flaw of the evolutionary view applied to history, said Butterfield, was that it studied the past with an eye toward the present. Indeed, it made a dedicated effort to see the past as a prelude to the present. This approach Butterfield labeled “The Whig Interpretation of History” (1965:31). Clearly evident in Butterfield’s remarks is a profound distaste for evolutionary thinking, which, after all, is concerned precisely with seeing how the past served as precursor to the present. “Real historical understanding,” Butterfield maintained, “is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own” (1965:16). Nor was Butterfield the first historian to express this view. More than a century earlier, Leopold von Ranke had asserted categorically, “Every period is immediate to God, and its value does not in the least

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consist in what springs from it, but in its own existence, in its own self” (quoted in Geyl 1958:39). And the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, who quoted Ranke’s words with approval, seconded the motion, stating that historiography’s mission was “to look at the past from within, so to speak, to think in terms of earlier generations” (1958:35). There is no mistaking what Butterfield, Ranke, and Geyl are saying. And, up to a point, their strictures are perfectly valid. The depiction of events of a given period should not be so colored by a historian’s knowledge of what is to follow that it appears on his canvas skewed and blurred. “Let the past speak for itself,” is their battle cry. Now, it would surely be of value to know just how a feudal baron of the tenth century perceived his life and times. And in describing feudalism, a historian should strive to portray it so faithfully that were such a baron suddenly brought back to life and confronted with the description, he would instantly recognize it as having the ring of truth. But, having said that, what perspective could a tenth-century baron have had, illiterate and parochial as he no doubt was, on the development of feudalism as an institution? Still less could he imagine the forces that would lead to its demise. Surely, a historical approach that probed the origin, florescence, decline, and disappearance of feudalism, but beyond that, which traced its development into a new form of society, would have much to recommend it. Such an approach would treat feudalism, not in truncated isolation, but as a segment of a continuing process, with consequences traceable indefinitely into the future. It would show feudalism as a stepping-stone to what followed—in other words, as an evolutionary stage. This depiction would present feudalism not just in its everyday workings—the lord presiding over his manor, the serfs tilling their fields, the knights jousting and warring— but would highlight the forces that led irresistibly to its transformation. Thus, it would describe the extension of monarchical power, the increasing volume of commerce, the rise and growth of cities, the successful use of artillery against the walls of feudal castles, and the like. Accordingly, for a historian to lay down his brush and declare himself satisfied with a narrow, if faithful, portrait of feudalism is to admit to very limited objectives. One would think a historian would want to paint with a broader brush and to create a fuller canvas. Or—to change the metaphor—that he would seek to interweave the threads of the past with those of the present. Depth and perspective are hallmarks of an evolutionary treatment of any subject. Can Butterfield and Ranke and Geyl seriously deny the greater light that such a treatment brings to an interpretation of the past? Finally, in analyzing historians’ antagonism toward evolution, it

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appears that the principal mechanism of organic evolution—natural selection—was found uncongenial by them. Such a feeling seems to lie behind Geoffrey Barraclough’s assertion that “the ideas of ‘evolution’ and ‘natural selection’ may be germane to the process by which the human species rose towering above the other animal species; they are not germane to the history of man in civilized societies” (1984:226). The notion of “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson’s vivid phrase) was enough to make academic historians shudder. Yet, Herbert Spencer had shown convincingly in The Principles of Sociology that it was conquest warfare waged between competing societies that had led, successively and inexorably, to the formation of larger and larger political units, culminating in the rise of the great states and empires of the ancient world. And any historian who ignored or denied this fact imperiled his understanding of the past. Regardless of strenuous objections raised against it, the sweeping view of history that evolution imparted placed so many events in better perspective and in broader context, and made so much more sense out of otherwise unintelligible occurrences, that those historians less tied to the narrow traditions of their discipline were not long in embracing it. Edward P. Cheyney, for one, proclaimed that “evolution controls human society as it does organic nature” (1927:84). Frederick Jackson Turner, in his famous essay on the influence of the American frontier, affirmed that the history of the United States “finds its chief claim to attention in its value as a field for the scientific study of social development” (quoted in Benson 1972195). And Henry Steele Commager wrote unabashedly, “The scientific historian is not interested in history for its own sake. He studies it because it is part of the evolutionary process which concerns him” (1965:10). Indeed, such was the eventual reception accorded to evolution by many historians that, writing in a recent decade, Allan Nevins could say: “Subconsciously, if not consciously, most history is . . . written in the partial light of evolutionary theory“ (1975:141). A number of historians tried to put into perspective the effect that an evolutionary viewpoint had had on history. A. L. Rowse, for example, wrote that “the nineteenth century saw a profound intellectual revolution . . . [that] brought about a new way of looking at things that was evolutionary by nature; that is, it regarded them as developing, in ceaseless process of change” (1963:80). And John B. Bury, a child of the first generation of historians brought up with evolution swirling around them, felt no discomfort in stating that “contemporary history represents a more advanced stage than any preceding it, or, in other words, there is a real evolution” (1906:151). The impact of evolution on the interpretation of history he assessed in the following way: “A right

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notion of the bearing of history on affairs ... could not be formed or formulated until men had grasped the idea of ... development. This is the great transforming conception, which enables history to define her scope” (1972:214). And again he declared that “the conception of human history as a continuous, genetic, causal process ... has revolutionised historical research and made it scientific” (quoted in Rowse 1963:83). But how, exactly, did the concept of evolution enable history to take on the attributes of science? The answer is, by providing it with a categorically new way of looking at the past. No longer were historical events to be regarded as singular occurrences in the lives of people, as historians were wont to do. Now, events were regarded as elements of a process, and their succession was seen, not as incidents in human lives, but as changes in cultural forms. It was here that anthropology made its special contribution. For it was anthropology—and not evolutionary biology—hat first recognized culture as a distinct class of phenomena that, by logical analysis, could be isolated and divorced from its human carriers and studied apart from them. Once this was done, culture traits and complexes replaced people as the units of study, and resemblance and recurrence replaced uniqueness as the salient feature of events. The raw material of human behavior, thus transformed into cultural phenomena, became much more amenable to scientific study, While historians had traditionally made kings and cardinals the focus of their works, now some of them at least began to realize that the spotlight might profitably be shifted from people to culture, and from monarchs to monarchy. The beheading of one king and the abdication of another were found to gain in significance and intelligibility when regarded as instances of challenged and changing institutions. From merely a succession of discrete events, historians began to discern the unfolding of a general process. Another contribution of anthropology, already noted, was that of calling the attention of historians to a much broader spectrum of societies than that to which they were accustomed. These societies, drawn from every quarter of the globe, differed not only in surface details, but in more fundamental ways, such as in their stage of development. As the historian John Fiske, a follower of Herbert Spencer, clearly saw, “There is a general path of social development along which, owing to special circumstances, some peoples have advanced a great way, some a less way, some but a very little way; and . . . by studying existing savages and barbarians, we get a valuable clew to the interpretation of prehistoric times” (1891586). This fact had special relevance for history. The earlier stages of

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European nations, which lay beyond the ken of professional historians, were exemplified—at least as to their basic structure—either among living primitive peoples or in ethnohistorical accounts of extinct ones. Nor were these similarities limited to the gross anatomy of social institutions. Striking parallels were often found between many specific features of the societies conventionally studied by historians and those revealed by anthropologists. Most notable in this regard was the work of James G. Frazer. In the three volumes of his Folklore in the Old Testament (1918), Frazer presented countless instances of customs such as the levirate and cutting the hair in mourning, known to the ancient Hebrews, which had their counterparts among contemporary primitives around the world. The inference to be drawn was, of course, that during an earlier period, the peoples of the Near East had possessed numerous traits diagnostic of the simpler culture they once shared, and had retained a good many of these traits as “survivals” even after evolving into a more complex state. The evolutionary approach, then, fostered by anthropology, enriched and energized the study of history. On the one hand, it gave historians a much more panoramic view of the past, while on the other, it permitted them a deeper look at the prehistoric roots of Western culture. If this view was suggestive rather than conclusive, it was at least much broader and more penetrating than traditional historians, limited by their outlook and methods, had managed on their own.

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preceding chapter, I spoke repeatedly of process and, more specifically, of the culture process, contrasting it with “history” in the narrow sense. It is time now to explain what I mean by the culture process more fully, and to offer examples of it in operation. When archeologists reconstruct the evolution of a prehistoric state, they rarely introduce into their discussion the role played by particular individuals. Even were they so inclined, they could not, for in states known only archeologically, without the benefit of written inscriptions, the identity of political leaders is unknown. To be sure, states arose only through the actions of real people, flesh-and-blood individuals. And the rulers of these early states no doubt exhibited the same range of personal qualities found among leaders of historically known states: courage, sagacity, ambition, judgment, tenacity, guile, ruthlessness, and all the rest. Whatever cultural forces were at work giving rise to the earliest states did not exist in disembodied form. They could not have expressed their effect outside of, or apart from, individuals. They were, in fact, funneled through the actions of real people. How could it have been otherwise? However, in accounting for such a widespread and recurring phenomenon as the rise of the state, it is unnecessary to invoke endlessly the need for specific individuals with unique identities to have played a role. After all, what do we gain by repeating the obvious refrain that, “in the last analysis,” it was people who brought the state into being? Their existence was of course a transparent necessity, but their presence alone was not enough to explain the development. More was required. Why, for instance, did states not arise during the Paleolithic N THE

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period? And why did they not arise in Patagonia or Greenland or aboriginal Australia? Surely there were good men in those times and places, with the innate capacity to be forceful leaders and even—given the chance-greatrulers. Why did they fail to actualize their potential? The conclusion forced upon us is that the actions of individuals, no matter how gifted, count for naught in the absence of certain enabling conditions. If the problem we set for ourselves is to account for the rise of the state, then much more is to be learned by investigating and identifying these enabling conditions. When, after untold eons, the requisite conditions for state formation finally emerged in various parts of the world, the “right” persons readily appeared and became vehicles for its formation. We can cheerfully admit that, occasionally, a particularly gifted leader might have accelerated the process by a few decades, but in the broad perspective of two million years of culture history, a decade or two, or even a century, is as dust in the balance. It is the cultural matrix of ever-changing and blending circumstances—with particular individuals assumed to be its agents but nonetheless left out of the equation—that I mean by the culture process. This concept was first enunciated (or at least most trenchantly expressed) by Leslie A. White. In characterizing the culture process, White spoke of it as a stream of interacting cultural elements—of instruments, beliefs, customs, etc. In this interactive process, each element impinges upon others and is in turn acted upon by them. The process is a competitive one: instruments, customs, and beliefs may become obsolete and [be] eliminated from the stream. New elements are incorporated from time to time. New combinations and syntheses—inventions and discoveries—of cultural elements are continually being formed. (1950:76) The anthropologist may study the culture process as it operates synchronically, at essentially the same point in time, or as it unfolds diachronically, that is, over time. An example of the former would be the workings of the subsistence system of a society: how crops are planted, tended, weeded, harvested, processed, brought to market, sold, and consumed, in an enduring and repetitive cycle. But the culture process may also be studied as it manifests itself in a sudden transformation or dislocation of a society, as when it undergoes a revolution. How would the anthropologist—in contradistinction to the conventional historian—deal with such an occurrence? Listen once more to Leslie White:

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Let us say that we are studying insurrections from the ... [culture process] point of view. We would therefore be interested in insurrection A not because it is unique (which of course it actually is) but precisely because it resembles other insurrections. Time and place are irrelevant; we do not care whether the uprising took place in May or December, in France or in Russia. What we are interested in is insurrections in general; we want to formulate a generalization which will be applicable to all insurrections. We want a universal that will explain the particulars. (1945:229) Considered in its broadest terms, the culture process comprises all interactions among cultural elements that have ever occurred throughout the course of history. Looked at in this way, the flow of culture appears as a great unitary stream, embracing every cultural tradition, in all places and at all times. Of course, though, we need not deal with the process as integral and indivisible. We may choose to study some selected segment of it, as it operated, say, in the Nile Valley from 4000 B.C. to A.D. 324, or in Anglo-Saxon England from A.D. 449 to 1066. Or, for that matter, we can examine the culture process at work on the Trobriand Islands in 1915, during Malinowski’s classic fieldwork in that archipelago. The distinctive feature of the culture process approach, I would emphasize, is that it sets individuals aside and focuses on culture. A metaphorical way of putting it would be to say that the culturologist (as the student of the culture process is sometimes called) is concerned with the structure and function of the coral reef rather than with the individual polyps whose tiny efforts contributed to its formation. Without a doubt, there is explanatory power in this approach. We can account better for certain occurrences in “history” from a culture process point of view than we can by “getting down to bedrock” and examining the behavior of “flesh-and-blood individuals.”

THE CULTURE PROCESS EXEMPLIFIED The gain in understanding to be had by dealing with the culture process is brought home most vividly when we consider the nature of inventions. The popular explanation of an invention is to attribute it to the “genius” of the inventor. To be sure, a high degree of intelligence may often be required for a certain invention—let us say the calculus— to be made. Not everyone could have done it. In fact, probably only a

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select few in any given population would have the mental equipment necessary to achieve it. But what do we gain in comprehension of how the calculus was devised by simply attributing it to the genius of Newton? Virtually nothing. Suppose Newton had been born 200 years earlier, in 1442 instead of 1642. Would he have invented the calculus? No, because the mathematical culture of English society at that time had not matured to the point where the requisite elements for this invention were in place. Suppose instead that Newton had been born 200 years later, in 1842. Would he then have invented the calculus? Obviously not, because by then it would already have been invented—as indeed it was by Leibniz, independently of Newton. As a matter of fact, Newton was almost anticipated in this invention by three men—Blaise Pascal, John Wallis, and Newton’s own professor at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, all of whom were “on the brink of this discovery” before Newton finally accomplished it (Crowther 1995:101, 97; Turnbull 1993:95). J. G. Crowther, in a biographical sketch of Newton, offers us an interesting glimpse into the background of this invention: Galileo had shown how to investigate the motion of a body by resolving it into two motions along lines at right angles to each other. Descartes showed how to use algebra to simplify calculations about the geometry of Galileo’s figures. Descartes found that points and lines could be represented by an algebraic equation. But his method provided only snapshots, at any particular moment, as it were, of a point in motion. The next step was the invention of a mathematical method which would enable Descartes’ algebraical geometry to be applied, not only to points and lines at rest, but to points and lines in motion, and hence to the analysis of the motion of actual bodies in space. (1995:101; see also Turnbull 1993:80–81) Newton took the mathematical elements available to him and made the final synthesis. When Leibniz did the same, independently of Newton, priority in making the invention was hotly disputed, the partisans of each man alleging plagiarism on the part of the other. The most likely interpretation, though, is that neither man stole from the other. With three anticipations of the calculus having already occurred just prior to Newton’s and Leibniz’s success, it was clear that the time was ripe for the invention. Had neither man ever lived, some other mathematician would surely have made it not too many years later. But there is more to the invention of the calculus, showing it to be not a single flash of genius, but the end product of a long mathematical

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cumulation. As recounted by Edna Kramer in her book, The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, the story is as follows: Around the year 1600, when Johannes Kepler was working on the problem whose solution led to the formulation of his Second Law of Planetary Motion (the law stating that the radius vector of a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times), he found it necessary to calculate the areas of a succession of triangles. As Kramer then explains, “In the summation of numerous small triangles to estimate the area of an elliptical vector, Kepler may have felt that he was merely using common sense, but we would say that he had solved a problem in integral calculus” (1974:244; emphasis in the original). The story, however, goes back even further, more than 2,000 years before Kepler! To calculate the area of irregular shapes, the ancient Greeks employed what mathematicians call the method of exhaustion, which was “initiated by Antiphon the Sophist (ca. 430 B.C.), perfected by Eudoxus, and put to such excellent use by Archimedes that, if popular demand for a unique originator must be satisfied, he, rather than Newton or Leibniz, should be credited with the invention of integral calculus” (Kramer 1974:249). In summing up the issue of who really invented the calculus, Kramer writes: Newton and Leibniz will not here be named as sole creators of the calculus, but rather as the mathematicians who made the major contributions to a subject that had existed since antiquity, first by establishing its “fundamental theorem,” and second by providing a definite algebraic symbolism and a systematic set of rules for performing operations. These two elements are the essence of elementary calculus as it is studied by college students today, and if this is what any one means by “calculus,” then he would be correct in attributing the source of such subject matter to Newton and Leibniz. The true story of the creation of the calculus [however] is the history of the gradual evolution of its various concepts. (1974:247; emphasis mine) Nor is even this the last word. The Bernoulli brothers, Jacques and Jean, also come into the picture. We again quote Edna Kramer: “They [the Bernoullis] were fired by the importance of the invention of the calculus, and from its very birth took so decisive a hand in its development that Leibniz is known to have pronounced it as much theirs as his” (1974:302). Here, I think, we have a most illuminating instance of the culture process at work. It shows Newton and Leibniz as adding the final

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links to a chain that began to be forged more than twenty centuries before they were born and represented a logical progression in the synthesis of mathematical elements, their own contributions being but the culminating steps in a gradual cultural development. Similar examples of parallel inventions in the field of mathematics may also be cited. It is a matter of record, for instance, that both John Napier and Henry Briggs independently invented a system of logarithms at about the same time. Newton and James Gregory, a Scottish mathematician, are credited with simultaneous but separate discoveries of the binomial theorem (Turnbull 1993:95). Nor are these merely isolated instances. Literally hundreds of cases are known of independent inventions and discoveries. Most famous of all is the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, hit upon independently by both Darwin and Wallace. It is said that example is better than precept, and if this is so, then the existence of such cases goes further than any abstract argument to show that historical advances can be explained more satisfactorily through the workings of the culture process than by fixating on singular creative acts by outstanding individuals. Although anthropologists were the first to grasp and apply the concept of the culture process, a number of historians have come to recognize its validity and importance, and have employed it themselves. To cite but a single example, in an article written nearly a half-century ago, Lynn T. White presented a most illuminating discussion of the effect of the invention of the spinning wheel on the development and spread of printing (1956:73–74). And, in a later work, he showed convincingly the profound impact of the introduction of stirrups on the conduct of war in the Middle Ages (1964:28-38).

THE RISE OF CHIEFDOMS AND STATES Let us turn now to a more typical anthropological example of the culture process in operation and show how it can shed light on a momentous historical development. The problem I propose to examine for this demonstration is the origin of chiefdoms and states. When not totally ignored by historians, this problem has proved singularly intractable to them. However, it yields readily—or at least ultimately—to the approach of anthropology. The solution to this problem begins with the recognition that the rise of chiefdoms and states can be regarded as a unitary process, one that occurred repeatedly and in much the same way in many parts of the world. Let us see how this development is to be explained.

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For the first two million years of culture history, human beings lived in small, simple, nomadic bands. In addition to their diminutive size and extreme simplicity, these bands were politically autonomous. To the best of our knowledge, during the entire Paleolithic period no multicommunity political units ever emerged. However, with the invention of agriculture around 8000 B.C., the picture began to change. First, in certain favored areas of the world, sedentary or semisedentary villages replaced nomadic bands. Then a process ensued that, in a scant three or four millennia, saw the emergence of the first multivillage polities in human history—chiefdoms. The series of events that led to the rise of chiefdoms, and eventually to their further development into states, occurred independently in many regions. The fact that this development began only after agriculture had appeared, but that in a short time thereafter essentially the same result was produced in all five continents, suggests that a process, at once simple, yet almost inexorable, had suddenly been triggered. It seems safe to conclude, therefore, that a common set of circumstances, identifiable and recurring, were at work here, yielding similar results along a broad front. What were they? After concerning myself with this question for many years, I am more than ever convinced that three major factors were involved: (1) environmental circumscription, (2) population pressure, and (3) warfare. The combined action of all three provided a powerful stimulus to political development. For the first time in history, human societies were able to surmount village autonomy and to establish multivillage polities. Some of the chiefdoms thus formed continued to evolve until they had transformed themselves into states. Here, in brief, is how this development seems to have occurred. Their newly acquired reliance on agriculture allowed primitive communities, which until then had been highly mobile, to finally settle down. Thanks to a more reliable subsistence, and especially because sedentism made it easier to rear children, the Neolithic period saw communities increase in size at a rate never before attained. Growing and splitting many times over, villages proliferated. Now, as long as arable land was readily available, the new daughter villages found places to settle and cultivate without having to fight for them. What little warfare occurred during the early Neolithic was usually over such ancient and familiar matters as avenging murder or punishing witchcraft. War for the acquisition of land had not yet entered the picture. However, as the population continued to grow and arable land diminished, warfare became more frequent and began to be redirected to the taking of parcels of land and the subjugation of their previous

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occupants. Moreover, the regions where conquest warfare first occurred were those in which tillable land, being relatively limited and sharply bounded by mountains, deserts, or oceans, ran out the soonest. On the other hand, in extensive valleys or plains, where land was abundant and unbounded, growing populations could spread out peacefully and find vacant areas to occupy. In such uncircumscribed areas it took much longer for arable land to become fully occupied and for conquest warfare to ensue. Thus it was that chiefdoms and states arose first and evolved fastest in tightly circumscribed areas such as the Nile and Euphrates valleys, the Valley of Mexico, and the coast of Peru. By contrast, where arable land was extensive and not tightly hemmed in, as in Northern Europe or West Africa, much more time was required for population pressure to develop and give rise to warfare for the taking of land. Consequently, in such areas, the formation of chiefdoms and states lagged behind. As fighting in circumscribed areas intensified, autonomous villages formed alliances with each other as they sought to protect themselves from enemy attacks. To lead the fighting force of allied villages, war leaders were either chosen or imposed themselves. These war leaders were often village chiefs who, elevated to carry out a more urgent function, found their powers greatly augmented. However, once the fighting ceased and villages returned to their normal condition of autonomy, a war chiefs power reverted back to what it had previously been. Nonetheless, with each successive war, military leaders tended to enlarge their powers and entrench their position. Moreover, they became increasingly reluctant to surrender these powers when the fighting had stopped. Finally, either through a chief's peremptory refusal to relinquish his once-delegated war powers, or (less likely perhaps) through the outright conquest of neighboring villages by the chief of the strongest one, the first permanent chiefdoms were established. Since population continued to grow and pressure could thus not long be relieved, warfare over land persisted. Now, however, the opposing units were no longer autonomous villages, but, more often, chiefdoms. Consequently, warfare was waged on a larger scale. And as stronger chiefdoms defeated weaker ones and incorporated them into themselves, the size of political units steadily grew. While at times chiefdoms did fragment back to autonomous villages in a recurring cycle of breakdown and recoalescing, in the long run, conquest warfare led in many cases to the formation of larger and more complex chiefdoms. In the sequence of political development just traced, the first kinds of chiefdom to be formed were simple chiefdoms, consisting of a rela-

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tively small number of villages under the direct control of a single paramount chief But as warfare continued and the stronger defeated and absorbed the weaker, chiefdoms grew not only in size but in structure. They now often consisted of a number of formerly independent chiefdoms incorporated into the domain, and subordinated to the rule, of a strong and successful paramount chief. What had once been independent wholes now became subordinate parts of a larger and more inclusive unit. With this continued elaboration of the structure of larger chiefdoms, three levels of political organization could be discerned. From top to bottom they were (1) the overarching maximal chiefdom, (2) the district divisions of this chiefdom (consisting of former simple chiefdoms), and (3) the villages themselves, which always constituted the basic units of any chiefdom. Where previously there had been only two levels of political organization—the simple chiefdom and the village— now there were three. And since this more complex form of chiefdom consisted of smaller ex-chiefdoms compounded together to form a larger one, it seems appropriate to call it a compound chiefdom. In its next evolutionary stage, the chiefdom was marked not so much by its enlargement as by its increased integration. Up to this point, district leaders of compound chiefdoms had usually been men who had once been the chiefs of independent simple chiefdoms but had suffered defeat and seen their chiefdoms and themselves incorporated as subordinate units into the victorious chiefdoms. These conquered chiefs were often kept in office by the paramount chief for the sake of stability and continuity in the units they had governed. However, they retained this position of subordinate leadership only on good behavior. And, being former enemies, their allegiance to the reigning paramount was at best grudging and almost always tenuous. Indeed, many cases are on record of a subordinate chief attempting to break away and reestablish his own independence. At the more advanced level of political development we are describing, however, district chiefs of dubious loyalty began to be systematically removed from office and replaced by kinsmen or henchmen of the paramount chief, men more likely to remain loyal to him. In this way there arose what can be considered a third type of chiefdom, for which I have proposed the name of consolidated chiefdom, more firmly integrated than any that had preceded it. So much for the chiefdom. The state, its immediate successor, emerged when the continuing struggles among larger chiefdoms led to the formation of still larger polities, which, as they grew in size, underwent a corresponding elaboration of their internal structure. The

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result of these developments was the creation of a political unit large and complex enough to warrant being called a state. How we define a state is, of course, arbitrary. Under the definition I prefer, though, a society having a centralized government with the power to (1) draft men for war or work, (2) levy and collect taxes, and (3) decree and enforce laws, can be considered a state. In terms of its structure, a state is generally characterized by four levels of administration that, from bottom to top, include (1) the village, (2) the district, (3) the province, and (4) the state as a whole. The process of political development thus outlined occurred repeatedly and independently in every major region of the world. Wherever the requisite conditions prevailed, there chiefdoms developed. Hundreds, or even thousands of chiefdoms, some of which eventually evolved into states, arose in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and South America. The fact that the evolution of chiefdoms and states in these areas proceeded at different rates and to different degrees, was fortunate for anthropology. It meant that, by scanning the entire world, societies could be found at every stage of political development, from autonomous villages through simple, compound, and consolidated chiefdoms, up to states, and beyond them to empires. And, as we emphasized in the previous chapter, where a great variety of forms of a given phenomenon is to be found, we are in a position to apply the comparative method with the promise of significant results. With enough cases in hand, and a judicious treatment of the data, it is possible to reconstruct a diachronic sequence of development from an examination of essentially synchronic data. Thus, even where we lack eyewitness accounts of a process (as is largely true of the formation of chiefdoms), the mere existence of almost every gradation in their development permits us to infer what we cannot observe. We are in a position, therefore, to reconstruct, with a high degree of confidence, the various steps, great and small, by which the entire process took place. Indeed, the detailed sequence of political development just outlined was constructed largely on this basis.

THE THEORY PUT TO USE Now, the question may be asked, can our theory of chiefdom formation, coupled with the inferential reconstruction based on it, be of help to practicing historians in enlarging or correcting their own conception of past events? I believe it can, and offer the following examples. As we noted earlier, in his famous 12-volume work, A Study of

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History, Arnold J. Toynbee investigated the rise and fall of twenty-one civilizations. In accounting for the emergence of these ancient high cultures, he employed the principle of “challenge-and-response.” Of this principle he wrote: We have ascertained that civilizations come to birth in environments that are unusually difficult . . . , and this has led us on to inquire whether or not this is an instance of some social law which may be expressed in the formula: “the greater the challenge, the greater the stimulus.“ We have made a survey of the responses evoked by five types of stimulus—hard countries, new ground, blows, pressures, and penalizations—and in all five fields the result of our survey suggests the validity of the law. (1947:140) Let us see how Toynbee applied the principle of challenge-andresponse to the rise of two of his twenty-one civilizations, the Minoan and the Sinic. In doing so, we will find that the anthropological theory presented here, along with the available archeological evidence, offers a more satisfactory explanation of the emergence of high culture in Crete and China than the theory Toynbee himself proposed. The genesis of Minoan civilization Toynbee ascribed to unknown peoples “who, going north [out of some unspecified part of Afrasia] and striking, not the comparatively easy passages offered by then surviving isthmuses or still existing straits but the intimidating void of the open Mediterranean, accepted this further challenge, crossed the broad sea, and made the Minoan Civilization” (1947:76; emphasis mine). Surely, this is too simple by half’! Here, a vague, general principle is made to do the work of a concrete and specific mechanism. In fact, what Toynbee offers us is no explanation at all. Is there one? I believe there is, even though most Minoanists seem at a loss to find it (e.g., Warren 1985:103). Again, the explanation makes use of the three central factors mentioned earlier, namely, environmental circumscription, population pressure, and conquest warfare. Archeological evidence indicates that the island of Crete was settled by Neolithic farmers around 6000 B.C., fully four millennia before the rise of Minoan civilization, the date for which is taken to be around 2000 B.C. (Warren 1985:97). Sufficient time was thus available for these agriculturalists to increase their numbers until the point was reached at which they began to press hard on the limited land resources. Being an island, Crete was of course sharply circumscribed by the surrounding ocean. But in addition, several mountain chains further cut up the available land into discrete pockets. Under such conditions, only a few

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millennia were required before farmland ran short and warfare over land ensued. Ultimately, this fighting over land led to the virtually inexorable result predicted by our theory and corroborated by the facts, the details of which remain to be worked out as more process-oriented archeology is carried out on that island. Crete, moreover, was of an optimal size for political evolution. On the one hand, it was small enough to allow it to be politically unified without too much difficulty, but at the same time it was large enough so that once unified the population was of sufficient size to permit a complex administrative superstructure—a state—to arise. It was also large enough to allow the high degree of occupational specialization involved in producing the architectural and artistic features characteristic of Minoan civilization. Specific and identifiable material conditions, then, were responsible for the rise of that great civilization, conditions far more tangible and compelling than “the challenge of the open Mediterranean” that Toynbee attempted to fob off as a sufficient determinant of this development (see Carneiro 1988:500–502). We come next to China. Noting that all Chinese were ethnically alike, Toynbee asks, why did Chinese civilization emerge along the Yellow River instead of, say, in the milder climes of the Yangtze Valley where the inhabitants could not have had “so hard a fight for life” (1947:74; 88–89)? Toynbee’s answer again relies on his theory of challenge and response: If we consider . . . the genesis of the Sinic Civilization in the lower valley of the Yellow River we shall find a human response to a challenge from physical nature which was perhaps even more severe than the challenge of the Two Rivers [the Tigris and Euphrates] and of the Nile. In the wilderness which man once transformed into the cradle of the Sinic Civilization, the ordeal of marsh and bush and flood was capped by the ordeal of a temperature which varied seasonally between extremes of summer heat and winter cold. (1947:74) Moreover, the failure of Chinese populations living along the Yangtze to develop a civilization of their own, while their fellows to the north were achieving one, does not surprise Toynbee. Thus, he continues: “If certain members of that wide-spread race created a civilization while the rest remained culturally sterile [!], the explanation may be that a creative faculty, latent in all alike, was evoked in those particular members, and in those only, by the presentation of a challenge to which the rest did not happen to be exposed” (1947:74).

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In point of fact, though, there was a lot more to the story than that. Certain evidence, of which Toynbee seems to have been unaware, sheds a very different light on the origins of Chinese civilization. George Trevelyan, noting that, today, a number of auxiliary disciplines regularly come to the aid of history, once spoke of ”our archaeological age where the spade corrects the pen” (1968c:164–165). And this felicitous phrase is pertinent here, for the archeology done in North China does indeed correct Toynbee’s pen and points to a more complex origin for Sinic civilization than he was able to discern. Here, in brief, is what can be gleaned from Chinese archeology, coupled with the evolutionary mechanisms provided by our own theory of state formation. It is perfectly true that the emergence, or at least the florescence, of the early Chinese civilization known as the Shang occurred along the broad plains of the lower Yellow River. But if we are searching for the roots of this civilization we must look several hundred miles upstream. For it was not along the lower course of the Yellow River, but much higher up, that the first Chinese states appeared. They emerged in a region resembling an inverted “T,” the so-called “Nuclear Area,” where the Wei flows into the Yellow River at the big bend of the latter. The archeological evidence strongly suggests that it was here that the Neolithic Yang-shao and Lung-shan cultures gave rise to the first states ever to appear in China (Chang 1968:85–87, 133, 193, 201–202). And how was this development to be explained? Very readily. In this region of North China, the banks of the Wei and the Yellow are reasonably wide and relatively fertile, but at the same time, they are hemmed in on all sides by mountains that rise up to 5,000 feet. In other words, this was an area of environmental circumscription. It was here, then, that conditions were most favorable for the emergence of the earliest states, and it was here that they in fact arose. However, an area best suited to give rise to a state is not necessarily best suited for its subsequent florescence. And this distinction played a key role in determining the course of Chinese prehistory. The cramped quarters surrounding the confluence of the Wei and Yellow rivers were not propitious for the further development of high culture in China. For the elaborate and complex civilization known as Shang to be achieved, the states that arose along the upper Yellow River, or at least the culture they represented, had to push down into the much larger and more fertile plain flanking the lower Yellow. Already at a state level of organization, the intruders were better able to cope with “the ordeal of marsh and bush and flood” than the original inhabitants. And so effectively did they do so that in short order the great Shang culture—

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Toynbee’s Sinic civilization—firmly implanted itself in this region and unfurled its banners. These two examples, I think, give a taste of what anthropological theory, with the specific and robust mechanisms it has to offer, can do to further historians’ understanding of the origin and early development of cultures whose later fruits fall squarely within their province. Chiefdoms and states arose in so many parts of the world and developed in such similar ways as to argue for their being the result of a fundamentally similar process, a process that did not depend on the fortuitous appearance of Great Men or the happy confluence of peculiar circumstances. Only a few basic and recurring conditions of environment, subsistence, and population (along with sufficient time, of course) were required to set the train of events in motion. One could hardly ask for a clearer manifestation of the culture process unfolding itself systematically along a broad front. The operation of this process, moreover, spanned almost the full range of political development, carrying cultures from the stage of simple autonomous villages to that of large and complex states. That such a major segment of social evolution should be marked by such regularity brings us again to the great question we have alluded to before, namely, whether in fact there may not be, here and elsewhere, laws of history. To this question we turn our attention in the next chapter, but first some unfinished business remains.

ECONOMIC FACTORS AS HISTORICAL DETERMINANTS In earlier chapters, we examined a variety of factors proposed by historians at various times as major determinants of history. None, however, proved itself equal to the task. It is now time to find one that does. Our discussion of the rise of chiefdoms and states should afford a clue as to what the answer will be. It should have suggested the kinds of factors that anthropologists—or at least a certain segment of them— generally look to as providing the principal determinants of cultural advance. And if we think of history, broadly speaking, as “culture-inmotion,” then the combination of factors that drives the culture process can also be said to constitute the motive force of history, With these preliminaries out of the way, we are finally ready to assert that, by and large, it is the material conditions of existence, along with those elements of culture devised to deal with them, that

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make up the single most important set of societal determinants. This view is often called “economic determinism,” but it is in fact broader than that. Ecological determinism would perhaps be a better term. The ensemble of elements it comprises includes environment, technology, subsistence, and warfare, as well as economy in the narrower sense. It is this core of life-sustaining activities that makes up a society’s primary means of adjustment to its surrounding conditions. To these conditions a society must adapt before it can begin making other sorts of adjustments. In fact, how a society solves the problems of subsistence and defense goes a long way toward determining its general structure. We might almost say that man-to-nature relationships determine man-to-man relationships. Considerations of subsistence have effects that ramify throughout the entire culture. They may be reflected, for example, in a society’s religious system, as when a pantheon of gods is devoted to making life secure in the face of a hostile environment. Similarly, a heavy involvement in warfare may clearly be mirrored in a society’s art. Witness, for instance, the Bonampak murals of the ancient Maya, which in bold colors graphically depict bound and humbled enemy prisoners, the fruits of successful wars. Conventional historians have generally shied away from singlefactor determinisms, from “monolithic causes.” And this has been especially true when confronted by what many of them regard as the dreaded specter of “economic determinism.” At least two reasons help account for this uneasiness. First of all, it seemed crass and ignoble to many historians to assign a dominant role in history to matters of the pocket or the paunch, to agree with Rabelais that “the Belly is the mother of arts and sciences” (quoted in Taylor 1923:47). But even more of a deterrent to the historian’s acceptance of economic determinism was the fact that it bore the unmistakable stamp of Karl Marx and his revolutionary doctrines. About “crass” and “ignoble” nothing much can be said. A truth may be unpalatable and still be true. But the association of a materialist doctrine such as economic determinism with the full spectrum of Marxist ideology is by no means inescapable. One can be a historical materialist without being a dialectical one. Leslie White, for example, was a thoroughgoing historical materialist who, in no uncertain terms, pronounced technology to be the prime mover of culture. Yet White had no use for the dialectic, and this made him, according to Stanley Diamond (an anthropologist who considered himself a true Marxist), “a mechanical ... as opposed to a dialectical materialist.” Accordingly, said Diamond, “although obviously influenced by Marx, [White] is not a Marxist in the traditional sense” (1974:341).

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However much we may wish to distance ourselves from Karl Marx’s use of the dialectic and his advocacy of world revolution, we must still concede that Marx established the historical importance of economic factors more firmly than anyone had before him. Accordingly, before proceeding to assess the influence of Marx’s views, it is worth examin— ing, in brief compass, Marx‘s own conception of the driving forces of history. Although Marx was by no means the first thoroughgoing materialistbeing preceded, for example, by Baron de Holbach—he was clearly the first to erect a comprehensive and cohesive philosophical system in which material conditions played the leading role. Before establishing his materialist philosophy, however, Marx had to dispel, or at least rebut, the prevailing tenets of metaphysical philosophy abroad in the land. Marx himself had grown up in the intellectual climate of German idealism, especially that brand of it propounded by Georg Friedrich Hegel. But he soon found himself unable to accept it and ultimately formulated a philosophy of history that was its diametric opposite. To Hegel’s notion of ideas as primary and self-generating, Marx opposed the view that they were secondary and derived. They sprang, he said, from the underlying and preexisting social milieu. In 1844, Hegel published his Philosophy of Law, in which he once again espoused the primacy of ideas. Marx, however, vigorously denied this premise. “I was led by my studies,” he wrote, “to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life” (1911:11 Of the various elements making up these material conditions, Marx looked especially to economic factors, of which the productive forces, he thought, stood out above all others. “The mode of production,” he argued, “. . . determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual process of life” (1911:11). However, “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production,” that is, the way in which individuals are organized in carrying out production. “Then begins an epoch of social revolution,” a process on which Marx placed great emphasis, calling revolution “the driving force of history“ (1995:186). Revolutions, moreover, were not singular but repetitive occurrences; thus, he spoke of “the revolutionary convulsion periodically recurring in history“ (1995:186). Pitted against each other in these revolutions were the social classes into which society was divided, each with its own set of economic interests to defend. “The history of all past society,” wrote Marx (1995:

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265), “has consisted in the development of class antagonisms.” A successful revolution was one that saw the abrupt overthrow of the ruling class by the oppressed class. And with the changes in the economic foundations that such a revolution brought about, “the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed” (1995:187). This, in a nutshell, was Marx’s conception of the historic process of social change. The basic determinants were economic, and they set the interests of one class against those of another in a fierce struggle that was ultimately decided through the mechanism of revolution. This scheme of economic determinism, however, was not meant to be airtight. Marx, after all, was a revolutionary, and his writings were meant as a clarion call to the oppressed masses to rise up and throw off the chains that bound them. Thus, Marx left room for individuals to act “freely,” within the not-so-iron laws of history, against the weight of circumstances that oppressed them. But not too freely. Their actions were always subject to severe constraints. Accordingly, in one of his most often quoted passages, Marx affirmed: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (1995:277). And finally, what of the role of ideology, the prevailing modes of thought of a society? “The ruling ideas,” said Marx, “are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations” (1995: 302). Thus, Marx reversed Hegel’s causal arrow, maintaining that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” (Marx1911:11–12). For years, Marx’s doctrine of economic determinism was ignored, when not actively opposed, by traditional historians. In time, though, disassociated from its revolutionary message, Marx’s central thesis spread to most branches of learning, including history. Gradually, historians became increasingly amenable to assigning economic factors a powerful influence in shaping the past. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the effect of economic forces had firmly impressed itself on American historians. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1908, for example, George Burton Adams told his colleagues: “So far-reaching have been the discoveries of the economic historians, so profound the influence whose operation he has uncovered, so satisfactory the explanations which he offers, that it is not strange if many have found here the final explanation of history” (1909:226). Four years later, reflecting this new climate of opinion, James

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Harvey Robinson wrote in The New History : “Few, if any, historians would agree that everything can be explained economically.... But in the sobered and chastened form in which most economists now accept the doctrine [of economic determinism], it serves to explain far more of the phenomena of the past than any other single explanation ever offered” (1912:50-51). And half a century later, the British historian A. L. Rowse (1963:95), summing up the effect of Marx’s economic determinism on the writing of history, concluded similarly that “taken at its broadest and best, it has had a stimulating and fruitful influence.”

CHARLES BEARD’S ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION The first full-blown effort to apply this doctrine to an explanation of a major event in American history came in 1913, with the publication of Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. For more than a century prior to this, the Constitution of the United States had been an object of awe and veneration, even to historians. John Fiske, for example, called it “this Iliad, or Parthenon, or Fifth Symphony of statesmanship,” and the British prime minister William Ewarts Gladstone considered it “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain of man” (quoted in Wish 1960:114– 115). Beard, however, was not disposed to treat this illustrious document so reverentially. On the contrary, in his study of it, he set out with “tough-minded zeal to purge history of false idealism” (Higham 1989: 180). Beard’s iconoclastic thesis, wrote John Higham, “attributed the Founding Fathers’ statecraft to the immediate personal gain they could realize through appreciation of their own security holdings.” In doing so, said Higham, Beard had “pressed the knife of class conflict to the very heart of American political institutions” (1989:180). The struggle of ideas that brought forth the American Constitution Beard saw at bottom as a clash between class interests. “The Constitution and the Federalist party were the instruments of merchants, manufacturers, and associated speculators and creditors,” he noted, while the opposing faction, representing men who came to be known as Jeffersonian Democrats, “rested on a broad farming basis.” Essentially, then, “Beard arrayed capitalists, whom he considered for the most part creditors, against resident landowners, whom he regarded chiefly as debtors” (Higham 1989:181). Nor was Beard content to limit his economic interpretation of history to this one instance. Having applied the thesis with notable success

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in this case, he was intent on pushing it even further. Thus, he followed An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution with Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). In this work, as in the previous one, Beard saw “convulsive shifts of power dictated by severely materialistic considerations” (Higham 1989:180). Seven years later came still another volume reinterpreting, along economic lines, institutions that had traditionally been looked at in a different light. In The Economic Basis of Politics (1922), Beard summarized his views on the driving forces of American history as follows: The grand conclusion, therefore, seems to be exactly that advanced by our own James Madison in the Tenth Number of the Federalist. To express his thought in modern terms: a landed interest, a transport interest, a railway interest, a shipping interest, an engineering interest, a manufacturing interest, a public-official interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in all great societies and divide them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests . . . constitutes the principal task of modern statesmen. (1947:70) In a still later work, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), written jointly with his wife, Mary, Beard again gave voice to his conviction that American history—indeed, all of history—could best be understood as a struggle among competing material interests. Accordingly, we find in this work such passages as the following: “The roots of controversy lay . . . in social groupings founded on differences in climate, soil, industries, and labor systems, in divergent social forces, rather than varying degrees of righteousness and wisdom, or what romantic historians call ‘the magnetism of great personalities’ ” (quoted in Loewenberg 1972:322). Hotly debated in its day—it was denounced editorially by the New York Times (Zinn 1995:89)—and controversial for decades to come, Beard‘s basic tenet nonetheless came to exert enormous influence on his professional colleagues. No longer could American historians fail to seriously consider economic factors in assessing any major event about which they were writing. So much is this the case today that it is a commonplace to find historians saying, as Allan Nevins once did, that ”certainly economic forces had a heavier impact on the American Constitution than any individual political ideas of James Madison” (1975: 176). Despite his placing heavy emphasis on material interests in determining the course of history (see also Beard 1960:xx–xxvi), it should be

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noted that Beard did not consider himself a Marxist. Indeed, he made it clear that the roots of his economic views were broader and deeper than Marx: “I cannot speak for others, but so far as I am concerned, my conception of the economic interpretation of history rests upon documentation older than Karl Marx—Number X of the Federalist, the writings of the Fathers of the Republic, the works of Daniel Webster, the treatises of Locke, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, and the Politics of Aristotle—as well as the writings of Marx himself” (1972:326). Moreover, Beard also took pains to disassociate himself from the political philosophy of Marxism. Thus, after once again affirming his allegiance to the explanatory power of economic conditions, Beard continued: “But that does not mean that any economic interpretation of history must be used for the purposes which Marx set before himself. It may well be used for the opposite purposes. It has been. It may again. Or it may be employed as the basis for impartiality and inaction.... In other words there is nothing in the nature of an economic interpretation of history that compels the interpreter to take any partisan or doctrinaire view of the struggle of interests” (1972:326). This inclination to place heavy reliance on material conditions while at the same time distancing oneself from the political ideology of Karl Marx has been a leitmotif of recent American historiography In 1950, for example, Sidney Hook wrote that “as a heuristic principle the theory of historical materialism has proved fruitful .... It has been adopted, with modifications, by many influential historians who remained indifferent, when they were not hostile, to the political program of Marxism” (1950:76). To exemplify this view among contemporary historians, we may quote the words of Gabriel Jackson, professor of history at the University of California, San Diego: In placing first the question of economic organization, of the “modes of production,” I gladly acknowledge the immense influence of Karl Marx, not only on me personally but on thousands of historians and social scientists who may be very decidedly antiMarxist in their political sentiments. Any careful reader can, of course, separate Marx’s insistence on economic structure as the most basic characteristic of a society from his political program. Nor was Marx’s insistence a novelty. When Madison and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers spoke of “factions,” they were pointing to economic and class pressure groups, and they constantly assumed that the most important determinants of a man’s political attitudes are the way he makes his living and the extent of his wealth. (1969:29)

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In his recent survey of American historiography, John Higham sounded the same note. The economic interpretation of history had so appealed to American historians, he wrote, that even conservative ones, along with “the more advanced progressive intellectuals, found they could separate Marxism as an analytical tool from socialism as an ideological credo” (1989:179). However, lest anyone fear that, once let into the tent, the ogre of “economic determinism” means to make himself master of the entire universe of historical causation, listen to the reassuring words of the economist E. R. A. Seligman. Writing as long ago as 1907, Seligman noted that the “economic interpretation of history means, not that the economic relations exert an exclusive influence, but that they exert a preponderant influence in shaping the progress of society” (1907:67; emphasis mine). Now, at the risk of incurring Trevelyan’s reproach that I am “hanging a tail at the end of a cow,” let me offer my own example of how economic factors, or, more broadly, material conditions, effected a major historical transformation. The event I have in mind is one I have alluded to before, namely, the demise of feudalism. In accounting for the decline and ultimate collapse of this institution, and its replacement by centralized monarchies, we can immediately point to three material conditions as having played a major role: (1) the introduction and increasing use of artillery, which made castles, the traditional stronghold of the feudal lord, no longer impregnable (technology); (2) the great development of commerce, which led buyer– seller relationships to outstrip lord–vassal relationships in the general scheme of things (economy); and (3) the rapid growth of cities, which greatly facilitated commercial exchange by agglomerating people in large urban centers (demography). Any “ideology“ that went along with the dissolution of feudalism was, I would argue, a reflection rather than a cause of the material circumstances that brought it about. Let me add one last thought on the subject of economic determinism and how it might be weighed against other theories of historical causation. Nothing so helps one to choose between contending theories as seeing them in direct competition with each other. It is then that their relative merits stand out in boldest relief. Thus, if anyone wishes to subject the theory of economic determinism to a test, let him seek out an instance in which it is squarely arrayed against a conflicting theory. Let me suggest such a test between it and its diametric opposite, namely, the view that ideology holds center stage in the drama of historical causation. Now, which set of conditions was most instrumental in giving rise

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to the phenomenon of capitalism has long been the subject of debate. And as it happens, in this arena ofhistorical controversy there exist two classic studies in which an ideological theory and an economic one are pitted against each other. The first of these studies is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), originally appearing in German in 1922, and the second is R. H. Tawney’s Religion and The Rise of Capitalism (1926), written as an answer to Weber. Let anyone interested in a spirited passage of arms on this issue read both books and see which side he thinks has made the better case. This test, I think, will prove decisive. With this much out of the way, we are finally ready to tackle the question we have been pointing to throughout much of this book, namely, the possibility of establishing laws of history.

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Are There Laws of History?

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the hallmarks of physical science is that it formulates laws governing the phenomena it studies. Can history do the same? This is the great question we propose to examine in this chapter. Without attempting a formal definition for the moment, we can simply say that a scientific law is a statement of a strict regularity in the behavior of some element of nature. As such, the idea of scientific law is a relatively modern conception. During much of recorded history the only laws recognized were those of man and of God, with an additional category of vaguely phrased “natural law” sometimes existing beside them. Human and divine laws were basically proscriptive: “Thou shalt not ....”; the “natural laws” referred to above were generally prescriptive: fundamental principles that often served as moral precepts and injunctions to guide right conduct. Thus, they differed from the “laws of nature” as recognized by modern science, which neither enjoin nor exhort. To give scientific law a formal definition, as used today, it is a statement of an invariant relation between two or more classes of phenomena under stated conditions. As such, the first scientific laws were not formulated until the beginning of the seventeenth century, a period of history brightened by the presence of several distinguished pioneers of science. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), first in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and later in Novum Organum (1620) championed empiricism, induction, and causation as basic principles of science. Also active at this time and contributing mightily to the emergence of physical science were Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–16301, and Descartes (1596– 1650). How did the notion of scientific law come about? It would be useful, NE OF

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I think, to trace the history of this concept, and in doing so I will draw heavily on Edgar Zilsel’s classic paper, “The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law” (1942), as well as on Stephen Mason’s A History of the Sciences (1962). Early Greek philosophers such as Leucippus and Democritus were thoroughgoing believers in the operation of determinism in the physical world. Nevertheless, they did not employ the notion of scientific law. At some point, however, the Greek concept of law, nomos, which originally referred to the strictures laid down by judicial codes, was extended to the realm of nature. This can be gleaned from the fact that the study of the stars was called “astronomy,” and, as Zilsel (1942:252) points out, “the science of the stars could not have been called astronomy if the idea had not existed that the order and regularity of the stellar movements were analogous to human law.” Somewhat later, in the third century B.C., we know that Archimedes was familiar with three physical laws—the law of the lever, the optical law of reflection, and the law of buoyancy (having formulated the latter himself)—but he never referred to them as laws, speaking instead of the “principle” of the lever, the “principle” of buoyancy, and so forth (Mason 1962:172). And in De Rerum Natura, Lucretius also called the regularities exhibited by nature “principles” rather than “laws” (Zilsel 1942:253). Still, it is clear that the idea that nature operated according to certain fixed rules, independent of the will of the gods or of men, had begun to emerge. After the fall of Greece and Rome, however, an intellectual eclipse shrouded all of Europe. The reign of immutable cause and effect, which ancient Greek philosophers such as Leucippus and Democritus had accepted, was now undermined by strong religious convictions. In fact, it was largely supplanted by the Christian belief in direct, recurring, and capricious divine intervention in the affairs of the world. According to Mason (1962:172), During the middle ages it . . . [was] thought that God participated in the day-to-day running of the universe, delegating power to the hierarchies of angelic beings who propelled the heavenly bodies round their course and who observed and guided terrestrial events. Exceptional happenings were then of great interest, such as miracles or more evil portents, like the appearance of comets, which were thought to be due to Divine or diabolical interference with the customary movement of the cosmic process. In the centuries following the Middle Ages, however, the conditions of society changed profoundly, leading to a fundamental transformation

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in human thought. As we noted in a previous chapter, God‘s role in governing the world, if not absolutely diminished, was at least substantially curtailed. With the coming of the Renaissance, as Zilsel (1942:277) points out, “the idea of God’s reign over the world shifted from the exceptions in nature to the rules.” Although the concept of physical law was not formally introduced until the first half of the seventeenth century, there were, as with all cultural developments, foreshadowings of it somewhat earlier. A strongly deterministic view of nature was already expressed by Leonardo da Vinci around 1500. In what amounts to an invocation of undeviating causation, Leonardo wrote: “O marvelous Necessity . . . by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the directest possible process . . . ; thou, by thy law, containest all effects to issue from their causes in the briefest possible way” (quoted in Zilsel 1942:263n.– 264n.). Not only does Leonardo enthrone determinism in this passage, he sees it operating according to the principle of least effort! In 1546, eighteen years before the birth of Galileo, the Italian mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia, through experiments carried out in the field, ascertained a principle of gunnery usually attributed to Galileo, namely, that in order for a projectile to carry farthest, the cannon from which it is fired should be inclined at an angle of 45º from the horizontal (Zilsel 1942:264). Galileo, of course, carried out all manner of physical experiments, from swinging a pendulum to sliding a ball down an inclined plane, and these experiments culminated in the formulation of his famous law of falling bodies. The work leading up to it “laid the foundation stone of modern mechanics and mathematical physics” (Zilsel 1942:262). Yet Galileo also failed to use the term “law” to label the mathematical relationships he had discovered, speaking of them as “principles,” “ratios,” and “proportions” (Zilsel 1942:262, 264; Mason 1962:172). In his astronomical researches, Johannes Kepler occasionally used the term “law” to describe the regularities he was studying. For example, with regard to the earth’s motion he remarked that “the laws of its celerity and slowness” were in proportion to its movement as it approached the sun and then receded from it”—his Second Law (Zilsel 1942:265). But, curiously enough, he failed to apply the term “law” to the striking regularities in the relations between the periods of planets and their distance from the sun—his Third Law, which he worked out between 1609 and 1619 (Zilsel 1942:265). By whatever term they were called, though, the first examples of genuine scientific laws were Galileo’s law of falling bodies and Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. These laws neither prescribed what phenomena “ought” to do, nor proscribed what they ought not. They

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simply described what certain phenomena of nature actually did. And that, needless to say, is the essence of a scientific law. Newton’s law of universal gravitation, formulated in 1687, some fifty years after Galileo’s and Kepler’s laws, showed that these earlier laws could be subsumed under a still broader generalization, making nature seem even more fathomable, and its behavior more expressible in scientific formulae. Accordingly, when social philosophers began to regard human history as something other than the unfolding of a divine plan and sought to discover and describe its regularities in precise terms, the laws of celestial mechanics stood as a model. However, neither the form of Newton’s laws nor the substance of his thought contributed to the advancement of the philosophy of history itself, or to the discovery of historical laws. This is made apparent by J. G. Crowther’s observation regarding Newton’s major work, Principia Mathernatica Philosophiae Naturalis: “One of the most striking features of the Principia is the absence of a sense of history. There is no hint in its propositions that the universe has a history, and has passed through an evolution. He regarded the universe as a machine, created by God in the beginning, and in essentials running unchanged for ever” (1995:122–123). Why should Newton’s view have been so limited in this regard? Crowther suggests that the answer may lie in the status of technology in the late seventeenth century: “The characteristic machine of ... [Newton’s] time was the watch, or a small water wheel or windmill. The steam engine with its promise of ever-increasing and unlimited power was not present to suggest to his imagination the idea of growth and development” (1995:123). But we are jumping ahead of the story. It was not Newton but René Descartes, several decades earlier, who first made explicit and repeated use of the notion of scientific law. According to Zilsel (1942:267): The concept of natural law occurs fully developed in Descartes. In his Discours ale la Méthode (1637) Descartes starts the short exposition of his new philosophy of nature with the declaration that he has found “laws which God has put into nature.” God has impressed the ideas of them on the human mind in such a way that their universal validity cannot be doubted.... After the creation of matter, [God] let nature develop from chaos in accordance to these laws. In his Dioptrique, a study of optics, and in his Principia Philosophiae (1644), Descartes elaborated his notion of scientific law, presenting additional examples of them, including a law of refraction and a law of inertia (Zilsel 1942268).

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It was not until the writings of Baruch Spinoza, a quarter of a century later, however, that we find for perhaps the first time not only physical bodies, but also human behavior brought under the control of natural laws. Spinoza was, first of all, a strict determinist. “Everything,’’ he said, “is determined by the universal laws of nature” (Zilsel 1942:270). In his major work, Ethics, published in 1677, Spinoza made it clear that human affairs, like the physical world, “follow the common law of nature.” Regarding the human will, Spinoza (1936:118) argued unequivocally that “there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to will this or that by causes.” A further step toward placing human history under the reign of law was signaled by the work of Montesquieu. Although in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu proposed no actual laws of history, he did devote the first chapter to a discussion of physical laws in general (Zilsel 1942:276). In an earlier work, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734), Montesquieu noted a tendency for mankind to be “obliterated in the play of vast impersonal forces which work themselves out inexorably in the course of history” (Rohden 1933:638). And he made it clear that such forces operated, not just on individuals, but on institutions as well. With penetrating insight he wrote: ”There are general causes, whether moral or physical, which act upon every monarchy, which create, maintain, or ruin it. All accidents are subject to these causes, and if the chance loss of a battle, that is to say, a particular cause, ruins a state, there is a general cause that creates the situation whereby this state could perish by the loss of a single battle” (quoted in Richter 1968:470). The course was thus charted for those who were to follow and propose full-blown philosophies of history: Human actions, like physical bodies, were subject to the rule of law, and if these laws were searched for with sufficient diligence and rigor, there was every possibility of discovering them. The first work in the philosophy of history that can also be regarded as a treatise on social science was Giambattista Vico’s La scienza nuova (The New Science), first published in 1725, but not known outside of Italy until many years later. In this work, Vico spoke freely of social laws, especially of “a universal law of nations,” according to which all societies over the course of time go through a similar cycle of stages (House 1936:107). This “law,” however, was broad and nebulous, and its importance lies mostly in attesting to Vico’s belief that human history was no chaotic jumble of events but contained discernible regularities. As the eighteenth century progressed, the notion that history exhibited laws came to command an increasing number of adherents. Most prominent among them was the French Encyclopedist Condorcet.

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In his Sketch of a Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind, published in 1795, Condorcet noted that this “progress of the mind [which today we would call the evolution of culture] is subject to the same general laws which can be observed in the individual development of our faculties” (quoted in House 1936:111-112). Summarizing his efforts in this regard, one of his biographers, J. Salwyn Schapiro (1930:177), wrote: “Condorcet worked out a system of a social mathematics which would reduce the historical process to the operation of laws as ‘necessary and constant’ as the laws of natural science. He was one of the first to proclaim the idea that the purpose of studying history was to discover these laws of social progress and through them to direct the future course and development of humanity.” As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the philosophy of history as a form of secular understanding had made great strides. The earlier view that divine providence played an intrusive and idiosyncratic role in determining human affairs was giving way. The view that replaced it in the thinking of social philosophers as they tried to decipher the course of history was summarized by Archibald Alison (1846b: 367) in the following words: “They spoke of the minds of men as permanently governed by certain causes, and of known principles always leading to the same results; they treated of politics as a science in which certain known laws existed, and could be discovered, as in mechanics and hydraulics.” But it was one thing to declare history to be governed by laws and quite another to discover what these laws actually were. When philosophers tried to propound them, what emerged were vague statements that fell far short of the rigor found in the laws of physical science. The proposed historical laws, in fact, were as likely to inspire derision as to command respect. Such was the case, for instance, with Herder’s “natural laws of history,” one of which stated that “if a being or system of beings be forced out of the permanent position of its truth, goodness, and beauty, it will again approach it by its internal power” (quoted in Robinson 1965:39). The nineteenth century, which saw enormous progress in the physical sciences, also witnessed a strengthening of the scientific viewpoint among historians and social philosophers. One manifestation of this trend was the attempt to formulate laws of social development. The first one to advance such a law in the nineteenth century was Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon. “The ‘law’ which Saint-Simon educed from history,” Bury informs us, “was that epochs of organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution, succeed each other alternately. The medieval period was a time of organisation, and was

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followed by a critical, revolutionary period, which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch of organisation” (1960:284). (It may not be out of place here to mention a curious parallel to Saint-Simon’s “law.” Many years ago, before I was acquainted with his work, I raised the possibility that a “law” of alternating phases might be a recurring feature of social evolution. While derived from only one instance—a study of 600 years of Anglo-Saxon history, this case alone seemed enough to warrant suggesting that social evolution might be marked by an alternating series of stages: first, a period in which development, the devising of new traits, predominated, followed by a period of growth, during which a proliferation of these traits was the dominant feature. These two phases, it was proposed, succeeded each other in repetitive cycles during the history of any evolving society [see Carneiro 1969:1020–10221.) While Saint-Simon’s law of alternating phases is today all but forgotten, the whole world remembers Auguste Comte’s “Law of the Three Stages,” which followed closely on its heels. First put forward in brief compass by Turgot, this law was greatly elaborated by Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842). The history of human thought, Comte argued, had necessarily passed through three successive stages, the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Positive or Scientific: “The theological stage is that in which all questions of causation are answered in terms of the activity of supernatural beings; the metaphysical state is that in which abstract forces or entities are conceived as the causes of phenomena [e.g., nature abhors a vacuum]; while in the positive state a branch of knowledge abandons the search for absolute causes and seeks simply to establish laws of coexistence and sequence” (House 1936:115). Moreover, Comte had no doubt that historical laws, beyond the Law of the Three Stages, would in time be formulated, for he confidently proclaimed that “history has now been for the first time systematically considered, and has been found, like other phenomena, subject to invariable laws” (quoted in Commager 1965:12). The greatest scientific breakthrough of the nineteenth century was, as we have seen, the introduction of the great principle of evolution. Ushered into biology by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (18591, it was extended to sociology and anthropology by Herbert Spencer in his First Principles (1862). Thereafter, as the century progressed, the belief that human history had worked itself out according to discernible laws was expressed with increasing frequency by a variety of writers. In A System of Logic, first published in 1843, John Stuart Mill, a

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disciple of Comte, followed his mentor in holding that “the course of history is subject to general laws” (1930:607). But, as Mill noted in a later edition of this work, when he first expressed this view, “it was almost a novelty [in England], and the prevailing habit of thought on historical subjects was the very reverse” (1930:607). However, in little more than a decade following the first edition of Mill’s Logic, the climate of opinion changed dramatically. By 1857, we find Henry Thomas Buckle writing confidently in his History of Civilization in England of “the laws which regulate the progress of civilization” (1904:131). His boldest statement of this conviction, quoted earlier but deserving to be cited again, was the following: “In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity: and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results” (Buckle 1903:I, 6). Less than a decade after Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and very much influenced by it, Walter Bagehot (1868:453) wrote, with optimistic overstatement, that “every one now admits that human history is guided by certain laws.” In the same positivist tradition, Sir Leslie Stephen, in 1882, affirmed that “society is not a mere aggregate but an organic growth,... it forms a whole, the laws of whose growth can be studied apart from those of the individual” (1882:29–30). Around the same time, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were repeatedly expressing a strongly deterministic view of social development, talking freely of the “iron laws of history.” In Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels (1970:48) held that “the course of history is governed by inner general laws.” In the preface to his magnum opus, Capital, Marx asserted that “it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” (1906:14). And in the preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire, Engels declared that “it was . . . Marx who . . . first discovered the great law of motion of history” (quoted in Cameron 1993:20), On the other side of the Atlantic, a similar view regarding historical laws was being expressed by a number of scholars. John William Draper, a noted author and lecturer on the struggle between science and religion, argued that “social advancement is as completely under the control of natural laws as is bodily growth” (Draper 1864:iii). John Fiske (1868:287), a historian at Harvard and a follower of Herbert Spencer, likewise held that “social like physical changes conform to fixed and

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ascertainable laws.” In a similar vein, George Bancroft, writing in 1888, assured his readers that “the movements of humanity are governed by law” (quoted in Holt 1940:356). In 1894, in a letter addressed to his fellow historians attending a meeting of the American Historical Association, Henry Adams stated: “Those of us who read Buckle’s first volume when it appeared in 1857, and almost immediately afterwards in 1859, read the Origin of Species and felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of natural laws, never doubted that historians would follow until they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history” (1959a: 347). And he went on to proclaim with unbridled confidence, “You may be sure that four out of five serious students of history who are living today have, in the course of their work, felt that they stood on the brink of a great generalization that would reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws which govern the material world” (1959a:347). Throughout much of the nineteenth century, then, a growing number of scholars believed that history was not simply a series of fortuitous events but was subject to general laws which, if not already known, were at least knowable.

HISTORICAL LAWS OPPOSED It should not be surmised, however, that no dissenting voices were to be heard. Opposition to the notion of historical laws was not only vehement but no doubt also represented the majority opinion. Arguments against the existence of such laws came mostly from academic historians, who, more than anyone else, were in possession of the raw materials from which such laws, if they existed, must be extracted. Let us sample a few statements of their views. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, delivered in 1863, Charles Kingsley spoke with a strange ambivalence, not to say confusion of thought, about historical laws. While appearing to accept their existence, he nonetheless had grave reservations about their application and their strength. Whatever laws might exist, he said, “assert themselves, and are to be discovered, not in things [social or economic conditions?] but in persons; in the actions of human beings” (1864b:xiii). Such laws, moreover, hardly exhibited the potency generally attributed to the laws of nature since, Kingsley believed, “man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being“ (1864b:xxiii). In fact, Kingsley went on, “every law which we know has been outraged again and again” (1864b:xxviii). Therefore,

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“what hope have we of laying down exact laws for . . . [history‘s] growth, in a world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a thousand times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by the stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so, by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the mob?” (1864b:xxviii). Mankind, then, was made of stuff too intractable to display anything like the regularity and order called for by real laws. Appearing to give up hope of ever finding such, Kingsley (1864b:xxxxi) concluded: “There is in human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying all law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause, as easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can calculate that of the vines upon the slopes of Aetna, with the lava ready to boil up and overwhelm them at any and every moment.” With fewer convolutions of thought but with equal literary flourish, James Anthony Froude, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, also asserted that no realistic chance existed of establishing historical laws: “There are laws for his digestion, and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it would be as easy to calculate men’s actions by laws like those of positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot rule, or weigh Sirius in a grocer’s scale” (1909:123). The American philosopher William James spoke with equal fervor against the endeavor to formulate laws of history. “I for my part,” said James, “cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary sociological school about ... general laws, ... with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual feelings, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms” (1890–18912439).

LAWS OF HISTORY CHAMPIONED Well into the twentieth century, the controversy continued to rage. Were there laws of history or weren’t there? Undaunted by the general skepticism of many of their colleagues, a small group of American historians kept insisting that there were. In 1908, George Burton Adams, Professor of History at Yale, assured those attending his presidential lecture to the American Historical Association that “the events with which ... [history] is concerned have been determined by forces which act according to fixed law” (quoted in Frank 1945:4). And in another presidential address fifteen years later, Edward P. Cheyney, Professor of

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History at the University of Pennsylvania, insisted that “human history, like the stars, has been controlled by immutable, self-existent law” (1927:8). Moreover, he said, “I look forward to some future meeting of this Association when the search for the laws of history and their application will have become the principal part of its procedure” (1927:28). Similar words came from the pen of several continental historians. In the article, “History“ commissioned by the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, the French historians Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre (1932: 362), members of the positivist Annales school, predicted confidently that “the laws of history will most certainly eventually be established.” And with the boundless optimism of a novelist-turned-historian in an age when the triumphs of science were bursting forth all around him, H. G. Wells wrote in the introduction to The Outline of History: “History is no exception among the sciences; as the gaps fill in, the outline simplifies; as the outlook broadens, the clustering multitude of details dissolves into general laws” (1921:vi).

HISTORICAL LAWS DENIED But for every historian who asserted that historical laws existed and would be found, there were more doubters and deriders. The German historian Eduard Meyer, for example, considered in his day “the greatest living historian” by Harry Elmer Barnes (1925:294), maintained, “During many years of historical research, I myself have never discovered a law of history, nor have I encountered one found by anyone else” (Meyer 1924:32). Even James Harvey Robinson, of all the New Historians, the one most dedicated to the pursuit of historical regularities, felt compelled to declare: “History must always remain, from the standpoint of the astronomer, physicist, or chemist, a highly inexact and fragmentary body of knowledge. This is due mainly to the fact that it concerns itself with man, his devious ways and wandering desires, which it seems hopeless at present to bring within the compass of clearly defined laws of any kind” (1965:54). Surveying the course of American historiography during the early twentieth century, Richard D. Challener and Maurice Lee, Jr. (1956: 333) concluded that after flirting with the notion in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most historians “became highly skeptical about the possibility of discovering ‘laws.’ ” And as midcentury approached, W. Stull Holt (1940:360–361) expressed what he took to be current histori

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cal thinking on the issue: “The law-in-history school of thought has proven barren. The unrelenting search for ‘a great generalization that would reduce all history under a law,’ which Henry Adams confidently predicted fifty years ago, has, in fact, never materialized. The occasions when a student of history in America has seriously occupied himself with an attempt to formulate a historical law have been rare indeed, and the fruits of these attempts have neither interested nor satisfied other historians.” Such also was the verdict of Henry Steele Commager, regarded in his day as the dean of American historians. Commager not only saw no laws emerging from history but made vividly clear his reasons for denying the possibility of their existence: “The effort to compress the incalculably vast, infinitely complex, and wantonly elusive stuff of history into any single framework, or to express it in any single formula, is doomed to futility” (1965:89). As the twentieth century passed midcourse, British historians, like their American counterparts, continued to deny the existence—indeed, the possibility—of historical laws. For example, Gordon Leff, professor of history at the University of Manchester, maintained that “history is a body of knowledge, not a store of axioms or laws” (1971:67). Moreover, this was necessarily so because “the unrepeatability—or uniqueness— of historical events precludes their subsumption under general laws” (1971:68). And Leff quoted professor W. H. Walsh of Oxford as noting that “despite everything that has been said on the subject in the last 200 years, no one has yet produced a reputable example of an historical law” (1971:73). G. R. Elton (1970:27) summarized the prevailing view among his British colleagues in this way: “Few practicing historians would probably nowadays fall victim to the search for laws; the experience of research is enough to cure such ambitions.”

LAWS OF HISTORY PROPOSED This brief excursus should be enough to show something of the positions taken on both sides of the issue. We need now to look at what those few hardy historians who argued for the existence of laws in their field proposed as examples. It will no doubt have struck the reader that most of the scholars quoted earlier as believing in historical laws, anticipated their discovery sometime in the future rather than claiming they had already been

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found. For example, we have just seen that Henry Adams, one of the most sanguine apostles for the existence of such laws, ventured the guess that four out of five of his colleagues had, at one time or another, felt they “stood on the brink of a great generalization that would reduce all history under a law ....” (1895:18). Laws of history, then, seemed to lie tantalizingly close to the historian’s grasp, yet somehow not quite within his reach. “Year after year [has] passed,” wrote Adams, “and little progress has been made” (1895:18). A few historians, though, actually did venture to propose laws of history. Charles Kingsley, for example, who, as we have seen, stressed humanity’s tendency to trample under foot whatever laws of history might somehow exist, nonetheless allowed himself to formulate one just the same. Thus, he spoke of “the great historic law which the Hebrew prophets proclaim; and that is this:—That as the prosperity of a nation is the correlative of their morals, so are their morals the correlative of their theology” (1864b:xlviii). This, of course, is no law at all, but a transparent projection into history of Kingsley’s own religious convictions. (He was, after all, not only a historian but also a clergyman, who for a time served as chaplain to Queen Victoria and later became a canon of Westminster.) A more serious attempt to set forth laws of history was made by the German historian Kurt Breysig in his work Der Stufenbau und die Gesetze der Weltgeschichte (1927). In a section dealing with Gesetze der Weltgeschichte (“laws of history”), Breysig (1927:159–165) enumerated no fewer than thirty-five “laws of growth” (Wachstumsregeln). Later in the same section, he propounded several Gesetze zweiter Ordnung, “secondary laws” (1927:180–183). By any critical standard, though, Breysig‘s proposed laws fail to pass muster. They were, in fact, nothing but hypothetical stages, most of them highly improbable at that. His fellow historian, Eduard Meyer, dismissed them out of hand. “The element of necessity which is of the essence of natural laws,” he remarked, “is altogether lacking in all these rules; they merely state the possibility—or different possibilities—of a future . . . historical development” (1924:33). Formulating historical laws seems to have been especially appealing to German historians, for besides those of Breysig, purported laws of history were propounded by Karl Lamprecht, Paul Barth, and Ernst Bernheim. Their formulations, however, found little favor among historical scholars, R. G. Collingwood (1956:176), for one, calling them “perversions of history.”

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One cannot discuss efforts to formulate historical laws around the turn of the century without taking account of the work of the Adams brothers, Henry, Brooks, and Charles Francis, all three historians, and two of them presidents of the American Historical Association. In 1895, in his well-known volume, The Law of Civilization and Decay, Brooks Adams proposed the theory that the center of world trade “had consistently followed a westward movement from the ancient crossroads in the east to Constantinople, Venice, Amsterdam and finally London, occurring in accord with a law relating to the density of population and the development of new and centralizing techniques of trade and industry“ (Childs 1966:122). Had he lived longer, Adams would surely have been heartened to see his “law” exemplified once more as the center of global commerce continued to move westward, crossing the Atlantic from London to New York. Charles Francis Adams was the next to set forth what he regarded as a law of history. Based in part on the work of Mommsen and Carlyle, Adams proposed the law that “every great, aggressive and masterful race tends at times irresistibly towards the practical assertion of its supremacy, usually at the cost of those not so well adapted to existing conditions” (quoted in Ausubel 1950:199). If Charles Francis Adams’s “law” was vague and general, Henry Adams’s law was specific and precise, reflecting his dogged assurance that “any science of history must be absolute, like other sciences, and must fix with mathematical certainty the path which human society has got to follow” (1959a:349). Once before, a serious thinker had proposed that a strict numerical relationship governs the length of historical stages. Back in the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin had claimed that the durations of certain significant periods of history were powers of 9. For example, the time from the founding of Rome to the Battle of Actium, which marked the end of the Roman Republic—729 years— was equal to the number 9 raised to the third power: 93 = 729 (Bury 1960:42). But this was sheer numerology. Henry Adams’s projections had a sounder basis. In an essay entitled “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” inspired by his study of physics, Adams used what he called “the law of squares” to express in quantitative form the progressive decrease in the length of historical periods. According to this “law of squares,” if Stage A had lasted 10,000 years, then the succeeding Stage B would last the square root of 10,000, or 100 years. Wrote Adams in 1910: “Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the —— next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to √ 300, or about 17 years, and a half, when—that is, in 1917—it would pass into another

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—— Phase . . . which . . . would last only √17.5, or about four years and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921” (1859b:379). Unlike his brother Brooks, had Henry lived a few decades beyond the date of his death, 1918, he would have failed signally to see his prophecy fulfilled. A little later, in the twentieth century, the American historian Edward P. Cheyney made the boldest attempt to set forth historical laws. Cheyney took the occasion of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1923 to propose no fewer than six of them. He told his colleagues: [L]aws of history there must be, and my guesses at some of them are these: Looking over the field of history there is evidently a law of continuity. “There is no new thing under the sun.” All events, conditions, institutions, personalities, come from immediately preceding events, conditions, institutions, personalities. (1927: 10-11) Secondly, looking over the past, there seems to be a law of impermanence, of mutability. The fall of empires is one of the most familiar of historic phenomena. (pp. 12–13) Thirdly, looking over the field of history there seems to be a law of interdependence—interdependence of individuals, of classes, of tribes, of nations. The human race seems to be essentially an organism, a unit. (p. 15) Fourthly, there seems to be a law of democracy, a tendency for all government to come under the control of all the people. (p. 18) Fifthly, looking over the field of history I am convinced there is a law of necessity of free consent. Human beings are free agents in their relations to other human beings; they cannot permanently be compelled. (p. 21) Sixthly, and lastly, so far as this groping search extends, there seems to be a law of moral progress. Obscurely and slowly, yet visibly and measurably, moral influences in human affairs have become stronger and more widely extended than material influences. (p. 22) Even if all six propositions were true—and some can certainly be challenged—none is actually presented in the strict form of a law. We noted earlier that a scientific law, as understood in physical science, is a statement of an invariant relation between two or more classes of phenomena under stated conditions. The relations indicated by Cheyney’s “laws” are not invariant, nor does he specify under what condi-

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tions they apply. At best, then, they are merely long-term trends rather than laws at all. In 1939, Professor Frederick J. Teggart of the University of California, in his book Rome and China, A Study of Correlations in Historical Events, proposed what he considered a historical law. Teggart found “a correlation between political disturbances in Western China and the Asiatic frontier region of the Roman empire on the one hand and barbaric invasions in the Danube and Rhine region on the other” (Zilsel 1941:575n.). More specifically, Teggart noted that whenever political turmoil erupted in Western China, the effect was invariably transmitted by a series of shock waves across Asia and eastern Europe, all the way to the Rhine, resulting ultimately in the stirring up of Germanic tribes pressing on Rome’s northern border. Despite the fact that Zilsel considers this the first genuine law of history to be propounded, there is reason to be somewhat less than sanguine about it. The correlation may indeed be true, and the causal arrow may point consistently from east to west, but it is a very limited generalization, applying at best to a restricted (if important) segment of human history. In this respect, it is much like Grimm’s “Law” in linguistics, which describes a striking regularity in sound shifts but holds only for a single group of languages and not for linguistic change as a whole. Let us look at a couple of other proposed laws of history. Consider first a proposition advanced by the British historian Edward Hallett Carr (1964:116) in his little book What Is History? After a disclaimer in which Carr indicates that it is not his usual practice to make such attempts, he goes on to say: If I were addicted to formulating laws of history, one such law would be to the effect that the group—call it a class, a nation, a continent, a civilization, what you will—which plays the leading role in the advance of civilization in one period is unlikely to play a similar role in the next period, and this for the good reason that it will be too deeply imbued with the traditions, interests, and ideologies of the earlier period to be able to adapt itself to the demands and conditions of the next period. The most striking thing about this generalization is that—apparently quite unknown to Carr—it had been proposed before, independently, by several other scholars. In fact, the very year preceding the first edition of Carr’s book, this same proposition was advanced by an anthropologist, Elman R. Service, who called it the “Law of Evolutionary Potential.” Because it is part of the small body of laws put forward

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in anthropology, we postpone discussing it until the next chapter, when we deal with proposed laws of culture. Finally, let us consider one more historian who has ventured to propound laws of history. In Chapter 5, “The ‘Laws’ of History,” in his book History: Its Purpose and Method, G. J. Renier advanced several propositions that he was prepared to call laws. The following is his discussion of one of them: Time has its ups and downs, like wine that lives bottled in a cellar. There is an “optimum” moment for certain occurrences.... [A] particular event may take place before, or after, the most suitable shape for it to fit into has been reached. Before the optimum moment there may still be too much fluidity, after it there may be an excess of rigidity, and the event cannot in those circumstances be absorbed into the general configuration of human experience. I like to call this particular habit of events by the name of [the] “law of the appointed time,” (1950:232) While a significant truth may lie embedded in this proposition, it is again merely a broad assertion, lacking the crisp specificity or precise formulation of a true scientific law. After surveying the general run of what historians have proposed as laws of history, we are tempted to agree with W. G. Runciman that “history ... is a consumer of laws, not a producer of them” (1970:10). If there are in fact genuine laws of history, historians have not succeeded in ferreting them out and presenting them in a sufficiently rigorous and convincing manner. Why not? Was it the fault of the historians themselves? Did they simply lack the skill to recognize and extract laws from their materials? Apparently not, at least not in the opinion of Eduard Meyer (1924:35), who wrote, “That there are no laws of history is not due to the intellectual weakness of historians or to insufficient data, but to the very nature of history itself.” Well, then, what is it about history that renders it unsuitable for the formulation of laws? According to Challener and Lee (1956:334), “There are always too many imponderables,” and for Huizinga (1972: 290), the fault lies in that history’s “concept of causality is extremely defective.” And still other reasons have been advanced for this failure. Let me offer my own interpretation. It is well understood that the law of falling bodies could not be deduced from observing a single leaf fluttering to earth from the top of a tree. Gravitation is certainly at work, but other forces, such as wind currents, may be at work too, interfering with the free fall of the leaf.

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And such interference obscures the uniform effect that gravity would exert if considered apart from other such forces. (I shall have more to say about this in the next chapter.) Similarly, the admixture of many factors and forces in the unfolding of historical events has been cited as vitiating any attempt to discover separate and distinct laws of history. George M. Trevelyan (1972:233,231), for one, affirmed that “there is no way of scientifically deducing causal laws about the action of human beings,” believing that “you cannot so completely isolate any historical event from its circumstances as to be able to deduce from it a law of general application. An historical event,” he maintained, “cannot be isolated from its circumstances, any more than an onion from its skin.” And so, Trevelyan implied, if you separate out all the circumstances of an event, as in peeling the layers of an onion, you are left with ... nothing! History is all circumstance. Finally, speaking more generally, James Harvey Robinson (1965: 55) argued that “history can no doubt be pursued in a strictly scientific spirit, but the data we possess in regard to the past of mankind are not of a nature to lend themselves to organization into an exact science.” A rather surprising statement, this, coming from the leader of the New History, one of whose stated objective was pursuing regularities to the utmost. And the statement is not only surprising, but also wrong. The contention that the data of history “are not of a nature to lend themselves to organization into an exact science” fails to grasp the nub of the issue. Nothing inherent in the totality of events constituting history renders them unsuitable to serve as raw material for a science of culture. After all, the phenomena of every science come to us not only as particular and unique, but also as intricately bound up with each other. Yet all the factors at work are carefully sorted out and categorized by the scientist, and laws are derived for their individual behaviors. If we can do the same with culture–historical events as they have unfolded over time—and there is no intrinsic reason why we cannot— then there is a science of culture. And if a science of culture exists, there is every prospect of formulating its laws. Rather than the inherent properties of historical data presenting an insuperable obstacle to propounding such laws, it is the manner in which these data are treated that makes the difference between being able to formulate laws and denying their existence. Historians themselves have at times recognized this fact. Geoffrey Barraclough (1962:590), for instance, saw clearly that the historian’s decision to treat his data idiographically rather than nomothetically “is not imposed on him by the nature of the facts.... It is a purely voluntary choice. It is not difficult to show that there is no essential

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difference, from this point of view, between the facts used by the historian and the facts used by the physicist.” Or, as he might better have said, the anthropologist. Social scientists were quicker than historians to see that the data of history—that is, the sum total of past human events—can readily and properly be taken over and recast so as to facilitate the quest for laws. Moreover, they also recognized the disquieting professional implications of this for the historian. Thus the sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (1924:8) affirmed that “as soon as historians seek to take events out of their time and space relations, in order to compare them and classify them; as soon as historians begin to emphasize the typical and representative rather than the unique character of events, history ceases to be history and becomes sociology.” Or, as the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, “The moment historical facts are regarded as instances of general laws, history is dismissed” (1933:154). Needless to say, this was not regarded as a happy prospect by many historians. According to G. J. Renier (1950:39), the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne “warned against the danger of making a confusion between history and sociology, and of drowning history in sociology.” Now, of what might this “drowning of history in sociology” consist? Perhaps it might be putting large chunks of actual history into a concentrated acid bath of science, in which the hard historical nodules would dissociate from their particular time-and-space matrix and float around freely, ready to be picked up and put to use by those proposing to erect a science of social phenomena. If so, then it strikes me as something to be welcomed rather than feared. The French historian Paul Veyne took a broader and less worried view of this possibility, “Because the history of historians cannot be a science,” he wrote, “it does not follow that a science of historical experience is impossible” (1984:239). And, directing a slight frown at his professional colleagues, Veyne added, “Historians would be mistaken to reproach a sociologist for having tried to cultivate a field that they were wrong to leave fallow” (p. 287). Even while remaining within the framework of their own profession, if historians approach their data with the proper frame of mind, it is possible for them to approximate what the sociologist and the anthropologist frankly set out to do. And if it is still not possible for them to formulate universal laws, they may at least be able to find scattered throughout their material recurring patterns and general trends. Nor are historians wanting who have pointed this out. Fred Morrow Fling, for one, declared, “It cannot be denied that the natural-science method

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may be applied to the study of the material from which I constructed my historical synthesis, and may produce something quite different. Neither synthesis is false. The points of view are different; that is all. Because paper may be used for writing a letter does not debar us, on an occasion, from using it to light a fire” (1903:17; see also Fling 1920:16–17, 19–20, 138–139). More recently, Morton G. White (1943:227) correctly noted that “if it is the purpose of the historian to give a picture of the social structure and development of a given society, then historical statements will not be distinguishable from sociological statements.” So now we are brought back to the question once more, What is the social science point of view? What exactly distinguishes it from that of conventional historians and makes it possible for them (the social scientists) to assert with confidence the possibility of formulating laws governing the human past? Much of the answer lies in the contrasting ways the two disciplines have of dealing with the elementary unit of history—the event. To the traditional historian, an event is always concrete and particular; it happened once and will never recur. As such, it is to be described and explained in terms of the unique constellation of circumstances that preceded and surrounded it, that gave it its distinctiveness and individuality, Let us examine a few examples of the logical consequences that flow from this approach. The German historian Alfred Feder remarked that “in the case of historical knowledge the concrete historical fact with its particular circumstances and its relations to other historical facts is absolutely necessary. Hence, historical knowledge simply cannot neglect these specific circumstances and relations. Consequently history of itself will never be able to induce general laws” (quoted in Schmidt 1939:17– 18). And the British historian G. R. Elton (1970:11) held staunchly that “to the historian, facts and events . . . must be individual and particular: like other entities of a similar kind, but never entirely identical with them. That is to say, they are to be treated as peculiar to themselves and not as indistinguishable statistical units or elements in an equation.” More simply, the Romanian historian Alexandru Xénopol noted that “history deals only with phenomena individualized by time,... those that are produced but once in the course of the ages; such a conception could not furnish opportunity for the formation of notions of law, but only for that of unique and particular series” (quoted in Fling 1903:9). Paul Veyne (1984:236) put the distinction in a nutshell: While an object dropping in space, he said, conforms to Galileo’s law of falling bodies, “the course of the Fourth Crusade is not determined by a law.” And to quote again from Fred Morrow Fling (1903:474), “An historical

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law, a law of what has happened but once and cannot happen again, is a contradictio in adjecto.” But now the other side of the coin must be examined. Opposed to the view that sees historical events as inescapably unique is, of course, the view that envisions them as constituting types and places them in general classes. Arnold J. Toynbee, much maligned by his professional colleagues though he was, nonetheless had a clear appreciation of this point: ‘While every fact, like every individual, is unique and therefore incomparable in some respects, it may be also in other respects a member of its class and therefore comparable with other members of that class.... No two living bodies, animal or vegetable, are exactly alike, but that does not invalidate the sciences of physiology, biology, botany, zoology and ethnology” (1947:43). Indeed, even when dealing with events in their essential particularity, historians can hardly avoid erecting certain general categories and distributing the events they study among them. Moreover, confronted with this issue, most of them would readily admit that they do just that. Herbert Butterfield, for instance, remarked: “Certainly each person and each historical event may stand unique and may comprise a unique combination of elements or circumstances. But in each there is something of a compound, and the parts which compose this may be grouped and compared.... Every battle in world-history may be different from every other battle, but they must have something in common if we can group them under the term ‘battle’ at all” (1960:102). And William H. McNeill, among contemporary historians perhaps the readiest to seek general trends, and quite aware of how to go about it, has reminded his colleagues that this can be achieved “only by leaving things out, and lumping varying individual instances together into categories and classes” (1986:83). What the social scientist does by placing the events of history into general categories is to remove them from their specific temporal matrix and convert them into phenomena. Forbidding as that word may sound to the historian, there is nothing mysterious about it. Phenomena, as we have said before, are simply things and events looked at from the point of view of science. As soon as we begin dissolving individuals, and the singularities of their lives, in the universal solvent of general types and classes, that is, turning them into phenomena, we have crossed the Rubicon. No longer are we concerned, as historians are, with individuals as such. We have made the unequivocal transition from people to culture. Charlemagne’s being crowned as the first Carolingian emperor by Pope Leo III in the year A.D. 800 now ceases to be a unique occurrence in

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the life of a single individual and moves into the class of royal coronations, or more broadly, of accessions to political office. The British Parliament’s passing of the Reform Bill of 1832 no longer represents a unique event in English political history but takes its place as one of a long series of legislative acts as monarchy and privilege slowly yielded to constitutional democracy. The sequence of events with which social scientists, particularly anthropologists, deal now becomes a stream of interacting cultural elements. It has turned into what we previously termed the culture process. While the uniqueness of events is a quality of theirs that the professional historian wishes to retain, it is one that the student of the culture process proposes to transcend. Historians who study the death of Caesar deal with it as singular and distinctive. To them, it is precisely the characteristics setting it off from all other events—the time, the place, the mode of death, the thoughts and emotions of the conspirators, the last words of the great man—that arouse their interest and command their attention. The student of the culture process, on the other hand, approaches this or any other historical event quite differently. Its uniqueness, while not denied, is no longer put forward as its primary and overriding attribute. A historical event now attains significance only by being subsumed under a general class of cultural phenomena having other representatives as well. Caesar’s death would thus be placed in the context of political assassinations, or of conflicts for power in autocratic states, or some similar category. Only then would it begin to take on scientific, as opposed to merely historical, interest.

PEOPLE AND CULTURE DISTINGUISHED I have made much of the fact that historians focus on the individual in writing history. The word individual, of course, has two distinct meanings. One (the one considered so far) refers to the particularity and singularity of events. The second meaning of individual refers to a person. In this second sense, as well as in the first, conventional historians are committed to embracing the individual, the “very men,” as Carlyle put it. History for them is a succession of events in the lives of people, especially “important” ones. From the very beginning of written history, one finds in the works of the leading historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and so on—that “human transactions are uniformly regarded as they have been affected by, or called forth the agency of,

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individual men.” The historians of classical antiquity, noted Archibald Alison, “constantly regarded history as an extensive species of biography.” As a result, “they not only did not withdraw the eye to the distance necessary to obtain such a general view of the progress of things, but they did the reverse. “heir great object was to bring the eye so close as to see the whole virtues or vices of the principal figures which they exhibited on their moving panorama; and in so doing, they rendered it incapable of perceiving, at the same time, the movement of the whole social body of which they formed a part” (1846b:367). One must admit, of course, that writing history as vivid and intimate biography adds immeasurably to the color and dash of the narrative. We cannot read Plutarch,” said Emerson, “without a tingling of the blood” (quoted in Ludwig 1941:xxi). And this manner of depicting history continued, undiluted, through the centuries. Emerson himself was convinced that “there is properly no history, only biography” (1940:127), following in this regard his mentor, Carlyle (1972a:93), for whom “history is the essence of innumerable Biographies.” Again and again, historians of the midnineteenth century reasserted this proposition. “History is the history of men and women, and of nothing else” wrote Charles Kingsley (1864b:xi); “if you would understand History, [you] must understand men” (1864b:xii). And, on the other side of the Atlantic, John Fiske (188180) assured his readers that “history is made by individual men, as much as a coral reef is made by individual polyps.” In his History of English Literature, the French historian Hippolyte Taine (1908:2–3) gave full-throated expression to the same belief: “Nothing exists except through some individual man; it is this individual with whom we must become acquainted .... Genuine history is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street.” Writing in 1845, the die-hard materialist Karl Marx lent his support to those upholding the view that “history” is merely an abstraction, and that, “in the last analysis,” it is simply the sum total of the actions of individual men. Asserting an opinion that we might call “unvarnished realism,” Marx wrote: “History does nothing; it ‘does not possess immense riches,’ it ‘does not fight battles.’ It is men, real, living men, who do all this, who possess things and fight battles. It is not ‘history’ which uses men as a means of achieving... its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends” (1956:63; emphasis in the original). Speaking for many of his professional colleagues, Frederick J. Teg-

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gart (1942:4) asserted that “the historian endeavors to make what has happened intelligible through emphasis on human agency. It is assumed that, for the historian, ‘the individual is always the principle of explanation’; that for him ‘the only concrete cause is the individual human will.”’ With even greater emphasis, the British historian Herbert Butterfield (1951:66–67) echoed the thought: “The genesis of historical events lies in human beings. The real birth of ideas takes place in human brains .... If we start imagining that the French Revolution stood up and did something as though it were a self-acting agent . . . we are moving into the world of optical illusions in which historians play such clever conjuring-tricks for the purpose of mystifying themselves.” Even the institutional historian Marc Bloch (1953:26), a leading figure of the positivist Annales school, whose aim was to write social history, nonetheless thought it necessary to remind his colleagues that “behind institutions, which seem almost entirely detached from their founders, there are men, and it is men that history seeks to grasp.... The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.” What are we to say of these repeated assertions of the historian’s central focus? Of course it is the actions of individuals—concrete, fleshand-blood human beings—that constitute the ore that the historian mines. In its narrowest sense, history is precisely what human beings have done and said and thought and felt. At its very minimum, the historian’s job is to collect, assemble, and display a record of what people have actually accomplished in the course of time. It is perfectly legitimate, therefore, for the historian to write history simply as a record of human activity. The problem arises, though, when we try to account for what human beings have done. Why this and not something else? If that is our problem, then an unswerving fixation on events in the lives of people hampers our efforts to understand and explain the general course of history. The British historian John B. Bury (1930a:38), only too well aware of the chaotic nature of events in much of classical antiquity, asserted that “the action of individual wills is a determining and disturbing factor, too significant and effective to allow history to be grasped by sociological formulae.” And half a century later, Herbert Butterfield (1951:94) agreed: “It is ... the incalculability of a human personality,” he wrote, “that is ‘the starting-point of historical change.’” Clearly, then, with human wills acting as “disturbing factors,” and the “incalculability” of personalities figuring so largely in the minds of historians, the prospect of their discovering the underlying determi-

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nants and major trends of historical events is seriously jeopardized. To grasp the causes of these great movements, it is not to individuals, with all their quirks and foibles, that we must look. Rather, it is to the flow of the culture process, and to the interaction of cultural elements within it that we must turn. In a word, we must examine the forces behind history. The concept of depersonalized and disembodied historical forces, however, is one that sets on edge the teeth of most historians. R. E. McGrew (1958:281–2821, for one, objects that “great ‘forces’ and impersonalized ideas submerge the individual, and historical personalities are treated only as they are carried along by history’s creative stream, while the historian is drawn inexorably from his proper focus, the men who made and participated in events.” The British historian G. R. Elton (1970:101-102) was even more emphatic on this score: “The trouble arises when . . . forces are made to act without agents,... are themselves made to act.... History does not exist without people, and whatever is described happens through and to people. Therefore let us talk about people, by all means imposing categories on them and abstracting generalizations from them, but not about large miasmic clouds like forces or busy little gnomes like trends.” In response to these objections, we would argue as follows: Anthropologists do not pretend to do the historians’ work for them. Nor do they presume to tell them how to do it. If historians set themselves the task of ascertaining just why Leopold of Austria was moved to take Richard the Lionhearted prisoner, then “great impersonal forces” will not help them. They must deal with a series of unique events that transpired in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade and created a deep animosity between the two men. Needless to say, when the uniqueness of an event is retained, the personal attributes of the actors involved, as well as a whole series of “accidents” in their lives, are all elements in the fabric of occurrences and must become part of the historian’s focus. Thus, in his recent history of the French Revolution, Olivier Bernier (1989:x) quite rightly notes, “Of course, the French Revolution had societal and economic causes; but it was also a moment when people mattered, when cleverness or stupidity, eloquence or insensitivity could make an enormous difference. With a different cast of characters, the ancien régime might not have collapsed so fast or so completely.” Who can dispute this? Gabriel Jackson (1969:35) gave a measured summary of the issue when he wrote that “the more one focuses on a short series of events the more he will find himself dealing with individual character and choices. In addition, the more complex the broad

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pressures and conflicts, the more crucial will be the role of individuals.... Meaningful history must always be the history of persons, not simply the interplay of ‘objective factors.’ ” As long as “meaningful history“ is taken to be that of the traditional historian, one would have to agree. If one is writing a fine-grained account of the French Revolution, it will of course be necessary to probe deeply into the character, motives, and deeds of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, of Danton, Mirabeau, and Robespierre, of Marat and Charlotte Corday To be portrayed in all its singularity, any event requires that the day-to-day activities of the participants be closely examined and described. Do we wish to know what prompted Charlotte Corday to leave a provincial French town and come to Paris to assassinate Marat? Then we need to investigate the preceding events in her life. As part of the rich and striking tapestry of the French Revolution, these are matters that the professional historian, writing about the event, must legitimately interweave. But Marat and Corday and the other actors in this drama begin to blur and dissolve as we step back from the concrete reality of the swirling events of the French Revolution and view it instead as but one example of the disintegration of absolute monarchies. What we seek now are overall patterns, recurring elements, and general trends. No matter how bold their personalities or how dramatic their actions, the individuals who took part in the French Revolution begin to lose their sharp outlines and relinquish their significance. No longer are their personal crotchets, colorful as they might be—Mirabeau is said to have died in bed with two French opera singers!—of any use to us. Only those actions of the participants in which they appear as instruments of general, impersonal cultural forces now concern us. However, conventional historians, carefully embroidering the fabric of events, be it Washington’s crossing of the Delaware or the defeat of the Spanish Armada, will never discover a law of history. Indeed historians are likely to deny that they exist! And in a narrow sense, they are right. There are no laws of history as long as “history“ is construed as an infinitely detailed narrative, embracing the totality of events in their full particularity. The one point on which everyone agrees is that there can be no laws of singular occurrences. Historians, however, would be guilty of a lapse in logic were they to go beyond this to assert that no one else can formulate laws from the same body of data of which they are the primary compilers and custodians. Because if anthropologists carefully sift through the totality of historical experiences, extracting from them those that manifest or exemplify widespread sociocultural developments, they have every rea-

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sonable expectation, as Buckle said, of being able to formulate laws of “history.” Or, to put it more correctly, laws of culture. Every other realm of nature that has been subjected to scientific study has yielded laws. Why should human affairs prove an exception? As E. B. Tylor declared more than a century ago, “If law is anywhere it is everywhere” (quoted in L. A. White 1949:107). The classical evolutionists agreed on this point and were dedicated to pursuing laws of culture in their own field. Eloquent statements to this effect can be found in the writings of James G. Frazer, who in Psyche’s Task, for example, wrote: The aims of this, as of every other science, is to discover the general laws to which the particular facts may be supposed to conform. I say, may be supposed to conform because research in all departments has rendered it antecedently probable that everywhere law and order will be found to prevail if we search for them diligently, and that accordingly the affairs of man, however complex and incalculable they may seem to be, are no exception to the uniformity of nature. Anthropology, therefore, in the widest sense of the word, aims at discovering the general laws which have regulated human history. (1913:159–160) At the risk of wearying the reader, let me repeat that the student of the culture process does not deny the individual his or her role in the unfolding of events “as they actually happened.” Had he or she behaved differently, they would have been different too. “Had Cleopatra’s nose been a half-inch shorter....” However, in accounting for those sociostructural changes that are the most salient features of human history when we survey it panoramically, it is far more illuminating to look beyond personal achievements, no matter how vividly they may strike the eye, and focus instead on the general, gradual, and inexorable sociocultural forces and processes at work. The rich rewards to understanding that this approach not only promises but delivers, were already grasped by social scientists in the nineteenth century. Speaking of great historical changes, Herbert Spencer (1851:433) remarked, “These changes are brought about by a power far above individual wills. Men who seem the prime movers, are merely the tools with which it works; and were they absent, it would quickly find others.” Thus, as I argued in a previous chapter, if every individual who lived in Europe between A.D. 1000 and 1500 had never existed, and their places been taken by totally different persons, the feudal system would still have succumbed irresistibly to centralized monarchies, and done so in the same way. To take another example, as

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Sidney Hook noted, “The tremendous impact of urbanization on modern culture,... one of the consequences of the industrial revolution, would have taken place no matter what crowned heads and ministerial figures had flourished at the time” (195054). Other nineteenth-century social scientists besides Spencer held similar views of the role of individuals in history. Thus, with only a slight overstatement, the Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz (1899: 157) avowed, ”There is a law of... optics by which we compute the angle of refraction from the angle of incidence, and in the realm of mind there is a similar law though we cannot observe it so exactly.... The individual simply plays the part of the prism which receives the rays, dissolves them according to fixed laws and lets them pass out again in a predetermined direction and with a predetermined color.” On this point, Marxists were in full accord with the social scientists just quoted. Engels (1941:49–50), for example, maintained that “the really operating motives of men who figure in history are by no means the ultimate causes of historical events;... behind these motives are other motive forces, which have to be discovered.” Looking again at the transformation of feudalism, we would argue as follows. The social, political, economic, religious, and military forces at work in Europe during the Middle Ages, acting through the agency of individuals whose wills and desires these forces largely shaped, brought about the great series of changes that led Europe from the age of lords and vassals to the threshold of the Renaissance. This is how the demise of feudalism is to be understood, not through an appeal to any particular actions of Charles the Wise, Louis the Fat, or Philip the Fair. Yet so concerned—even fearful—are historians that social scientists, with their alleged fixation on disembodied and impersonal forces, will overlook the role of flesh-and-blood individuals that it is perhaps not superfluous to try yet again to make the relationship between the two approaches crystal clear. Spencer was right in asserting that great historical events come to pass “by a power far above individual wills.” Nonetheless, such forces, no matter how strong or pervasive, could never act on their own. How could they? Only a deranged metaphysician would argue that they could. The only way the underlying forces and processes of history can act is through individuals. With his usual good sense, A. L. Rowse noted, “No sane theory of history involves a belief in impersonal forces extraneous to men; whatever forces are seen at work in history must act through and by men” (1928:59). Such forces act by penetrating the consciousness and wills of individuals, taking possession of them, and making their human vehicles

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feel that those great social ends toward which these forces are inexorably pushing them are their very own personal goals! Thus are individuals duped into believing that they are freely choosing what they will aspire to and what they will defend, when in reality they are little more than the chosen instruments, the cat’s-paws, of the inevitable. Such is the power and subtlety of culture. Being surrounded and possessed by his culture, imbibing it at his mother’s breast, the individual becomes its unconscious and willing tool. And this is just as true of the radical as it is of the conservative. The two simply occupy different positions—the vanguard and the rearguard— in the moving cultural stream of which they are both a part. No one is born with political leanings. They are instilled into him during the course of his life. A radical is simply someone in whom the culture process has infused a discontent with existing conditions, and who envisions, and fights for, a different and “better” society. A conservative, on the other hand, is content with his culture as he finds it and opposes any effort to bring about drastic changes in it. But switch them in their cradles, and the radical and the conservative will grow up with their political philosophies entirely reversed. In all fairness, I should point out that not all historians insist on stressing the individual’s role in history above all else. There are exceptions. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1931:142), for example, wrote that the actions of men are “but shadow-symbols of greater struggles going on somewhere behind the screen, significant chiefly as indicative of . . . mightier forces. The historian of today is on a still hunt for these underlying forces, for he believes that if he can find them he will have the key to the motivations of events.” And Allan Nevins (1975:175) once declared that “for understanding the past in general,. . . biography can never be adequate. Insofar as we wish to gain a full comprehension of the past we should throw the emphasis of our study on groups and masses, on trends and impersonal forces.” Other historians can be found who would agree, even though they are far from constituting the mainstream of their profession. We have seen, then, that sociologists and anthropologists (and not a few historians) have talked a good deal about laws of history, meaning by the term specifiable regularities in the general flow of human events. But it is time to put manifestos to one side and to ask, Are there really such laws?, and if there are, to present a few of them for inspection. Reduced to their most elemental, scientific laws take the form: “If a, then b.” And this relationship must hold not just in a single instance, but in every instance in which all the specifiable conditions can be met. Still, the unique contribution of science was not the formulation of

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causal statements accounting for phenomena. After all, mythology, an earlier and once universal mode of thought, had already done so. The myths of primitive peoples around the world provide all manner of answers to why things are the way they are, and how they came to be that way. The novel concept introduced by science was verification. A hypothesis is proposed that purports to explain the behavior of a certain class of phenomena. How do we know it is true? In the physical sciences, the hypothesis may be subjected to testing in the laboratory to see if the relationship proposed actually holds. Experimentally, condition a is created to see if, indeed, outcome b will follow. Nor is one experiment usually enough to satisfy the scientific community. The same experiment may be performed again and again, in different laboratories. Only after enough instances of b have uniformly followed instances of a are scientists ready to accept in full a proposition that invariably connects them. Once this has occurred, certain relationships among the phenomena of nature—if important enough and sufficiently well established— are dignified by being called laws. Look now, however, at the plight of historians, even those favorably disposed toward finding historical laws. The field of their research is usually sharply bounded, both in time and in space. Suppose one to be a specialist in Medieval Europe and assume that during the course of his research a certain pattern strikes his eye. Let us say he discerns a previously unnoticed regularity about the incidence of regicide. But as regularly as this relationship might appear to hold throughout Europe from, say, A.D. 800 to 1400, how can he claim to have found a “law of history“? Did such a relationship also exist in Imperial China or in Pharaonic Egypt? Did it hold among the Lowland Maya or the Highland Inca? Among the kingdoms of central Africa or in the civilizations of southeast Asia? Our medievalist simply does not know. And, being ignorant of whether the regularity held true outside of Europe, proud as he may be of his discovery, how can he possibly call it a general law? In their quest for laws, traditional historians are handicapped in two ways: (1) They cannot conduct experiments to test any hypothesis that might occur to them, and (2) they are unfamiliar with the much larger body of evidence that must be examined before any broad generalization can seriously be proposed as a universal law. For all he knows, our medievalist’s generalization may apply only to Feudal Europe. Anthropologists, of course, share one of the historians’ limitations: They, too, cannot experiment. But at the same time, they enjoy an enormous advantage over the historian in commanding a much wider body of data. In anthropology, the use of a large sample of cases serves much the same function that experiment does in the physical sciences.

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It provides a great many instances of any phenomenon they may be investigating—from soul loss to regicide—in which the conditions surrounding the phenomenon in question will vary widely, By a close examination of these cases, anthropologists can determine what circumstances—if any—regularly surround a phenomenon such as regicide, and which are merely incidental or adventitious. Thus, we encounter here one of the salient features of anthropology, a feature we have pointed to several times before, namely, the dedicated use of the comparative method. By means of broad-ranging comparisons, anthropologists can—at least in theory—formulate, test, and verify law-like propositions. Since in order to be a law of culture a proposition must hold, if not always and universally, at least under specifiable conditions, we need to embrace the universe of known cultures, or some large and representative sample of them, if we are to establish such a law. Historians, it might be noted, show very little inclination to seek the help of anthropologists in determining the scope of any general proposition they might have formulated. To do so would entail venturing outside their own narrow realm, and this most of them are disinclined to do. Insularity of this kind goes hand in hand with historians’ inveterate distaste for wide generalizations, a fact we have already demonstrated. Of course, to the extent that historians continue to cling to their predilection for the uniqueness of events, they debar themselves from establishing general laws. Even among events that fall within their own field, historians often insist on stressing their individuality rather than looking for parallels elsewhere. Take, for example, Gordon Leff, Professor of History at the University of Manchester, who in his History and Social Theory deliberately avoids looking for parallels between the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and the Battle of Britain in 1940, or between the parliamentary careers of the Younger Pitt and the Younger Churchill. Why? “[B]ecause,” Leff tells us, “like all the historical phenomena worthy of investigation they are unique” (1971:67; emphasis mine). And, it would seem, Leff is determined to keep them that way. In a previous chapter, I quoted a passage from Leslie A. White, showing how the anthropologist would try to factor out the particularities of the French and Russian revolutions in an effort to discover their common elements and underlying uniformities. Professor Leff, however, will have none of it: To examine different . . . events of the same kind—such as a revolution ...—is to be concerned with different circumstances,

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which cannot be reduced to one another. The French Revolution—not any revolution—took place in France and in the epoch of pre-revolutionary Europe; the Russian Revolution broke out in Russia and was the result of war and a century of revolutions. Danton, Marat and Robespierre were different individuals with different experiences from Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. ”he EstatesGeneral was not the Duma; Brest was not Brest-Litovsk. (1971 67; emphasis in the original) Needless to say, if Professor Leff sets out not to find parallels and similarities between revolutions, he is bound to succeed. But need we be shackled by his limited perspective? By no means. Nor is his narrow view necessarily shared by all of his colleagues. How much greater promise of understanding is to be found, for instance, in the attitude of the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse: “Over and over again one notices in the history of revolutions ... the same kind of crisis cropping up, a situation with very much the same elements constituting it, whether it is England in the 1640s, France in the 1790s, or the Russia of 1917: one sees the situation ill understood and worse handled by an old regime feebly directed, whether it be by Charles I, Louis XVI, or Nicholas II, and one sees the situation get out of hand in much the same manner” (1963 : 19–20). And listen to the way in which Sidney Hook, in The Hero in History, vividly lays down the conditions that commonly underlie a revolution— any revolution, making its coming not only detectable, but well-nigh inevitable: Where the vital needs of submerged classes are unfulfilled, where conflicts of interest are so deep that they cannot be negotiated without cutting into the vested powers of men who are firmly convinced of their divine or social right to those powers, where customary political rule becomes increasingly inept or oppressive, where the moral professions of those in the saddle sound hollow in the light of actualities—we can already feel the vibrations of discontent that may suddenly erupt into a cataclysmicflood. (Hook1950:113) In a volume first published in 1938, a distinguished historian, Crane Brinton, actually did try to deal with revolutions as a general phenomenon with an identifiable set of causes. The Anatomy of Revolution is a systematic study of four revolutions—the English Revolution of 1640, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, and the Russian Revolution of 1917—in an effort to extract what seemed to be their underlying regularities.

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At the outset, Brinton (1965:7) states that he was “approaching the study of revolutions, in something of the spirit the natural scientist carries to his work.” But despite his conviction that “on the rough level of common sense some kind of uniformities can be discerned in history” (pp. 18–19), he noted that “among many professional historians there is a tendency to deny that these uniformities are real and important” (p. 19). As an example, he cited the words of the English historian W. C. Abbott, who claimed that “comparisons in history as elsewhere are odious, and revolutions are more remarkable for their particular differences than for their common elements” (p. 19). But Brinton would have none of this, countering that “the doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems nonsense” (p. 19). Then, summarizing his findings at the end of his study, he stated that even after making certain concessions “to those who insist that events in history are unique, it remains true that the four revolutions we have studied do display some striking uniformities” (p. 250). These uniformities he identified as follows: 1. Each society in which a revolution occurred was on the upgrade economically. 2. There were bitter antagonisms between the social classes in those societies. 3. During the revolution itself, there was a transfer of allegiance on the part of the intellectuals from one class to another. 4. The machinery of government in place prior to the revolution was inefficient and unable to make changes in the old institutions. 5. Members of the ruling class began to distrust themselves and to lose faith in the old traditions. (pp. 250–252). Brinton was modest enough in the claims he made for his findings. “We must repeat,” he said, “that we are simply trying to establish certain uniformities of description” (p. 254). However, he felt confident that “wider uniformities will ... someday emerge from more complete studies of the sociology of revolutions’’ (p. 261). Now, is this not a more useful and satisfying view of the matter than that which sees each revolution as completely distinct? Let me offer another example of the rational understanding to be gained by actively looking for historical parallels rather than denying their existence. In Civilization on Trial, Arnold Toynbee, speaking of the American Civil War, asks: ‘Was the Civil War . . . a unique event, or do we find other historical events that display sufficient similarity and affinity to it to warrant us in treating it and them as so many represen-

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tatives of a class of events in which history has repeated itself?" (1948:34). And he answers the question in this way: The crisis represented in American history by the Civil War was, surely, repeated in a significant sense in the contemporary crisis in German history that is represented by the Bismarckian wars of 1864–71. In both cases, an imperfect political union had threatened to dissolve altogether. In both cases, the issue between the dissolution of the union and its effective establishment was decided by war. In both cases, the partisans of effective union won, and, in both, one of the causes of their victory was their technological and industrial superiority over their opponents. In both, finally, the victory of the cause of union was followed by a great industrial expansion. (1948:34–35) Even more broadly, we can see both cases as examples of a common and recurring process, the use of coercive measures often taken by large and expanding states as they try to counteract attempts at schism, while at the same time undergoing political consolidation and expansion. What is left to say to Gordon Leff? Of course, the constellation of particular circumstances preceding and surrounding the French and Russian revolutions—or any other revolution—were unique. But while most historians may share a tropismatic aversion to looking beneath the singularities for underlying commonalities, anthropologists (and a few like-minded historians) bring to bear on the problem a diametrically opposite point of view. They may have under their scrutiny the very same events as the historian, but they look at them with a very different eye, and expect to achieve very different results. Armed with a nomothetic approach, as opposed to an idiographic one, with a readiness to abstract cultural phenomena from the behavior of individuals, and having access to a vastly larger corpus of facts, anthropologists are well equipped for their quest for general laws. Sir Isaiah Berlin is of a different mind. With a skepticism amounting to denial, he asked, What . . . sociologist, what anthropologist can claim to have produced empirical generalizations remotely comparable to the great uniformities of the natural sciences?” (1954:74). Let us see if we can prove him wrong.

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ORE THAN half a century ago, the distinguished anthropologist A. L. Kroeber wrote: “It will be a great and intensely stimulating day in the course of human understanding when we determine definable and measurable processes operating under precise laws in history and culture. But a realistic attitude compels us to admit that that millennium is not yet here” (1935:568). And Kroeber was not very wide of the mark. Anthropology has been slow in advancing anything that one could accept as a law of culture. The reason for this failure, however, was not so much the refractory nature of cultural phenomena. Rather, it stemmed from the fact that for the first sixty years of this century, cultural anthropology was dominated by an overriding antievolutionism, working hand in glove with an exaggerated cultural relativism. And the habit of mind engendered by these doctrines effectively kept ethnological theory at bay. This being the case, any concerted search for cultural laws can hardly have been expected. However, things eventually changed, and as theorizing crept back into anthropology, laws began to be sought and eventually propounded. The first such law was put forward by Leslie A. White in 1943, at a time when anthropology still had not emerged from the intellectual blight of antievolutionism. White’s proposed law appeared first in “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” an article later rewritten and included in The Science of Culture (1949). In this essay, White set forth what he considered “the basic law of cultural evolution”: “Other factors remaining constant, culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased” (1949:368–369). There is little question that, with this proposition, White had got-

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ten hold of a fundamental truth. Human societies are, at bottom, thermodynamic systems that capture energy from external sources and apply it to satisfying their immediate needs. Moreover, with the surplus of energy left over, societies are able to grow in size and to elaborate their structure. White’s Law can be seen at work during the Paleolithic, when fire was first tamed, and again with the coming of the Neolithic, when domesticated animals began to provide societies with new sources of energy. This enlargement of the energy base, along with the increase in population that it fostered, led eventually to the transcendence of simple village life and the establishment of larger and more complex societies. Some of the details of this transition were briefly sketched in Chapter 7. The most dramatic expression of White’s Law, however, did not appear until the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Then, for the first time in human history, the energy locked in fossil fuels was liberated on a massive scale. It was to this vast increase in energy utilization that the present enormous complexity of culture is largely due. So long as societies relied solely on human and animal muscle power, such a development could never have occurred. Now, in my earlier discussion of scientific laws, I stated that they describe regularities that hold under stated conditions. One might ask, therefore, under what conditions does White’s law hold? And when told that it holds unconditionally, the question might be raised: If so, is it then a proper law? I believe it is, for while it does not specify—and cannot predict—when a society will harness additional quantities of energy, it does state unequivocally that if more energy is harnessed, then the society will evolve correspondingly. And any categorical statement to this effect—provided it is true—surely has the force of law. Less well known than White’s energy law is another law he proposed to account for the order in which the various sciences made their appearance. This law was first presented in “The Expansion of the Scope of Science,” an article originally published in 1947, and also reprinted in The Science of Culture. Entering into the great debate on the filiation of the sciences, which had not been appreciably advanced since the days of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, White proposed the following generalization: “Science emerges first and matures fastest in fields where the determinants of human behavior are weakest and most remote; conversely, science appears latest and matures slowest in those portions of our experience where the most intimate and powerful determinants of our behavior are found” (1949:69). To the operation of this law White attributed the fact that astronomy was among the first sciences to emerge, while culturology—his

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term for the science of culture—was the last. The stars and constellations, so distant from the earth and so lightly impinging on people’s daily lives, were closely observed and their movements carefully charted by the Babylonians more than 4,000 years ago. By contrast, culture, as a separate and distinct class of phenomena, and the major determinant of human behavior, was not recognized as such until barely more than a century ago. As recently as the late eighteenth century, so profound a thinker as Immanuel Kant could speak of the “categorical imperative,” which he considered to be an inborn moral sense impelling people toward right conduct. He was, therefore, evidently unaware that even our deepest ethical convictions are not innate but are purely cultural standards, unconsciously absorbed by us in early life from our sociocultural milieu. White’s second law, which strikes me as being, by all odds, the most convincing explanation proposed thus far of the order in which the sciences developed, is nonetheless all but unknown to historians of science and, indeed, to scientists generally.

THE LAW OF EVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL I turn next to another cultural law, this one proposed in 1960 by Elman R. Service, once a student and later a colleague of Leslie White. In the previous chapter, we encountered this law as set forth independently by the British historian Edward Hallett Carr: As it turns out, though, this proposition, which Service called the “Law of Evolutionary Potential,” has a long and interesting pedigree. Service (1960:99) himself noted when he first proposed it, that in doing so he had been preceded by Thorstein Veblen and Leon Trotsky, and thereafter, he came across other independent expressions of it, the “law” having been proposed in the nineteenth century by N. G. Chernyshevski and Theodore Herzl. I myself have encountered what may be the earliest statement of this law in Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1961: 56–62). Incidentally, the various separate expressions of this law suggest still another law, namely, that as culture evolves, more and more independent and essentially simultaneous discoveries and inventions will be made. Such a law was, in fact, actually proposed a century ago by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in his “La logique sociale.” “The likelihood of a given invention,” he wrote, ”varies directly as the number of minds possessing and capable of fusing the ideas composing it, and inversely as the number of antecedent inventions necessary to be made”

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(quoted in Ross 1905:66). (Illuminating discussions of the phenomenon of simultaneous and independent inventions as illustrating the operation of the culture process can be found in White’s The Science of Culture [1949:169–170, 205–207, 209–211, 292–2931 .) Returning to the Law of Evolutionary Potential as formulated by Elman Service (1960:97), we read: “The more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller is its potential for passing to the next stage.” The corollary of this law, Service points out, is that the next important new development in culture is most likely to be made by a society or nation other than the one currently in the cultural forefront. Veblen had labeled the first element of this law “the penalty of taking the lead,” while Trotsky referred to the second portion as “the privilege of historic backwardness” (Service 1960:99). (While I was writing these pages, yet another expression of the law of evolutionary potential came to my attention. Writing in 1776, the German historian Christian Gottlieb Heyne observed, “It is a great disadvantage for the history of most of the German states that the writing of it was begun too early [the penalty of taking the lead], before people knew properly how to collect the material from the sources and to handle it in a critical manner” (quoted in Butterfield 1960:37n.). In this regard, Heyne considered Russia to have been more fortunate, since “her historical studies were only beginning now, at a time when men had just learned how to hunt out, examine and purify the sources; Russia could start off, therefore, on the right foot” [the privilege of historic backwardness] (Butterfield 1960:36). (This passage reinforces the belief that, as we saw in the case of the calculus, great ideas—such as Service’s law—tend to have a long pedigree that, if traced backward in time, disappears into antiquity.) Service offers several examples of the Law of Evolutionary Potential in operation. To explain why the Neolithic began, not where Paleolithic culture had reached its zenith, in southwestern France, but in the Near East, Service quotes the following passage from the archeologist V. Gordon Childe: “The [Neolithic] revolutionaries were not the most advanced savages of the Old Stone Age—the Magdalenians were all too successfully specialized for exploiting the Pleistocene environment— but [were instead1 humbler groups who had created less specialized and less brilliant cultures further south” (1960:107). Another example of the Law of Evolutionary Potential cited by Service was the fact that in the development of Western civilization, not every great advance was made by the same peoples, but rather, the torch was handed on from one society to another:

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A sudden and unprecedented precipitation of culture into the level of true civilization occurred somewhere in Mesopotamia and this civilization then diffused widely in the Fertile Crescent. But then it differentiated, adapted, and became established, with local peculiarities and at higher levels in some places like Babylon and Egypt.... Yet even these high levels finally fell behind the advance of newly civilized Greece. Then upstart Rome, which began in tribal organization ... advanced over Greece only to be surpassed later by the Arabs and finally Northern Europe. (pp. 107–108) One difficulty involved in accepting Service’s proposition as a law of culture is that it fails to specify the precise conditions under which the cultural leadership of Society A will cease, and be supplanted by Society B. The same society, after all, might be at the forefront of cultural evolution for centuries before yielding the scepter to some other culture. At just what point, then, will cultural leadership change hands? Service takes cognizance of this question: “With respect to a particular people or locality, any evidences of a continuum of progressive changes are likely to represent development within a single historic line. But a sudden leap forward is apt to be accomplished by a different, relatively unspecialized culture; rapid advance would appear as a historical . . . discontinuity” (p. 106; emphasis in the original). Here, at least, is a clue to the solution of the problem, if not the final answer. This is perhaps as precisely as the Law of Evolutionary Potential can be pinned down. It expresses a distinct and recurring regularity in history—one society passing on the torch of cultural advance to another when it cannot itself take the next major step. But it cannot readily specify when one “continuum of progressive change’’ will play itself out and be replaced by another. Nonetheless, despite this limitation, an important truth is embodied in Service’s law, and it deserves to be placed among the broad and valid generalizations of cultural evolution.

STATISTICAL LAWS OF CULTURE In his engaging little book, The Use of History, the English historian A. L. Rowse maintains that although one “may hardly say that there are historical laws of the regularity and exactness of physical science, there are generalizations possible, of something like a statistical character” (1963:18–19; see also pp. 75–76). I would like now to propose, for general scrutiny, such a statistical law.

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The results of much recent work in anthropology aimed at discovering fundamental regularities in culture have been expressed in terms of statistical correlations. Let us examine the relationship between some of these correlations and cultural laws. Attempts to work out detailed correspondences among cultural phenomena have a long and distinguished history in anthropology, going back as far as 1889, the year of Edward B. Tylor’s classic paper, “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent.” And these attempts, which were continued after Tylor’s death, have held out the promise of leading to the discovery of cultural laws. Fred Eggan, for example, voiced the optimism felt by many anthropologists carrying out cross-cultural research. “Studies in correlation and covariation of social phenomena,” he wrote (1950:7–8), “may lead to hypotheses which when adequately tested and verified may be considered generalizations or even ‘laws.’ ” However, traditional endeavors along these lines have almost always suffered from two shortcomings. First of all, anthropologists have usually correlated only a single factor with the phenomenon being studied. And second, after obtaining positive correlations, researchers have tended to rest on their laurels instead of proceeding to refine their hypotheses further in order to raise the coefficients as high as possible. That continued refinement of hypotheses by specifying additional relevant factors acting as determinants will yield correlations approaching +1.00 was recognized and demonstrated by George P. Murdock in his landmark volume, Social Structure (1949). The significance of this demonstration for the science of culture is so great, and yet so little recognized, that it is worth examining the pertinent passages in Social Structure in some detail. After presenting several sets of correlations (all of them positive) that he obtained from statistical tests of his thirty “Theorems” and “Propositions,” Murdock wrote: Although the ... results are perhaps unprecedented in social science, they by no means do justice to the actual possibilities. It must be remembered that multiple factors are operative in every instance, but that in most of our theorems we have isolated only a single factor for analysis. If several factors are taken into consideration at the same time, the magnitude of the coefficients rises appreciably.... This can be demonstrated for the social system in our own society. (1949:178–179) Earlier, Murdock had found a correlation of + .68 between neolocal residence (the bride and groom living away from their parents) and the

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use of lineal kinship terms for the trio of relatives: mother, mother’s sister, and father’s sister. (In kinship terminology of the lineal type, such as our own, mother is called by a distinct term, not applied to any other relative, while mother’s sister and father’s sister are classed together and called by a term equivalent to “aunt.” On the other hand, by way of contrast, in the so-called “Dakota–Iroquois” type of kinship terminology, mother and mother’s sister are both called “mother,” while father’s sister is called “aunt.” And in the “Hawaiian” kinship system, Ego calls all three women “mother.”) Murdock also found a correlation of + .56 between the presence of the isolated nuclear family (that is, the nuclear family not forming part of an extended family) and the use of lineal terminology for the same set of kin (mother, mother’s sister, and father’s sister). After pointing this out, Murdock continues: “If we combine these two factors [neolocal residence and the isolated nuclear family] and add two other characteristic features of our own social structure—strict monogamy and the absence of exogamous unilinear kin groups [e.g., lineages and sibs or clans]—we arrive at the results shown in Table 54” (p. 179). This table reveals that the correlation of lineal kinship terminology for mother, mother’s sister, and father’s sister with the combination of (1) monogamy, (2) isolated nuclear family, (3) neolocal residence, and (4) the absence of exogamous lineages or sibs, is a very impressive + .91. In other words, there is a high probability that these four factors, acting in concert, will give rise to a lineal type of kinship terminology, thus reflecting a marked degree of determinism at work in this sphere of social life. Thus, under specifiable conditions, we can say with considerable assurance what such a society’s system of kinship terms is likely to be. Concluding the discussion, Murdock observes: “Similar results are obtainable from an exceedingly large number of similar combinations” (p. 179). We cannot say a priori just how high such coefficients can be raised if additional relevant factors are included in the correlation. Even with the most painstaking refinements, though, it may never be possible to achieve correlations of +1.00. Continued ignorance of a few of the relevant variables may prevent this. But a more serious problem arises from the time lag that often exists among social phenomena between a cause and its effect. Anthropologists are well aware of this. Alexander Lesser (1935:392), for example, noted that a structural feature we see in a primitive society today may have been “determined more by events which happened prior to the occasion . . . than by what can be observed contemporaneously with

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it.” Thus, not only does it take time for a cause to produce its effect, but having done so, the cause may recede into the background or even disappear altogether. Consequently, it may lie undiscernible to the anthropologist who, years later, tries to account for the phenomenon to which this now-obscure cause once gave rise. Such contingencies may well preclude formulating statements of statistical association that hold without any exceptions. Many of the hypotheses about cultural phenomena in which we will come to have the greatest confidence may therefore never be verified to a degree higher than that represented by a coefficient of, let us say, +.95. Propositions of this kind, while stating relationships that are not absolutely invariant, might nevertheless be considered statistical laws. Nor need this demean their status, for as the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach pointed out, “Statistical laws are not ‘less dignified’ than causal laws—they are more general forms, among which the causal law represents the special form of statistical correlations holding for 100 percent of the cases” (1951:122). “Moreover,” Reichenbach adds, “causal laws, at least in quantitative form, are never found to hold strictly in observational terms. We do not observe 100 percent validity; we notice exceptions. Causal laws are introduced by a process of schematization; we assume them to hold for ideal conditions, knowing that the inevitable ‘errors of observation’ will lead to deviations from the ideal” (p. 122). But more than mere “errors of observation” are involved. There is a common belief that a scientific law is not a true law unless it is capable of expressing itself whatever the circumstances. But this is an erroneous view of the matter. It demands too much of a scientific law. We can demonstrate this with the following example. Newton’s law of universal gravitation, popularly regarded as the most powerful and pervasive of all natural laws, would nevertheless fall victim to a stricture that required a “real” law to “win out” 100 percent of the time. Consider the following cases:

• A sudden gust catches a falling leaf and lifts it high above the treetops.

• For a split second, the riders in a loop-the-loop at a county fair are suspended upside down in their gondola car without falling out. • A powerful current in an electromagnet is turned on and a wrecked car is plucked from a flatbed truck and deposited on a scrap heap. • Tree roots suck up water from deep beneath the ground and, through narrow tubules, carry it to the highest branches.

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• A hard rubber rod is rubbed vigorously against a coatsleeve and held over a bit of paper, which rises to meet it. Here are five different instances in which the force of gravity, while never ceasing to operate, has nevertheless been temporarily overridden. Other physical forces—wind currents, centrifugal force, electromagnetism, capillary action, and static electricity—have in turn held it in check. Yet no one imagines that the law of gravity has thereby been suspended or revoked. And so it is with other physical laws. Only when they operate in complete isolation, or under ideal conditions—which, of course, seldom happens—can we expect them to express their full effect, undiluted and unalloyed. Nor, in practice, do we really expect them to do so. And what we do not require of physical laws, we should not require of cultural laws either.

COMPLEXITY AS A FUNCTION OF SIZE Next, let me bring forward another cross-cultural regularity and propose it as a candidate for a law of culture. In a broad comparative study of single-community societies, that is, of autonomous bands and villages that did not form part of any larger political unit, it was found that a definite, quantitative relationship existed between their size and the number of organizational features they possessed (Carneiro 1967a; 1987a:115–-117). This relationship was expressed mathematically as follows: N α p2/3 where N = the number of organizational traits in a society, p = its population, and 2/3 = the exponent indicating the rate at which the number of its structural features increases with the growth of its population. The Kuikuru of central Brazil, for example, with a population of 145, had 11 structural traits, while the Ao Naga of northeastern India, with a village size of about 600, had 27. After examining a worldwide sample of 40 such cases, we found a regular relationship between community size and societal complexity that could be expressed by the equation N a p2/3. And this relationship held true for single-community societies ranging all the way from the Tasmanian aborigines, with bands of around 15 persons, to Acoma Pueblo, whose population approached 2,000. To those who remain skeptical that this constitutes a genuine law of culture, I would say, look, for example, at the Stefan–Boltzmann Law

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in physics. This law states that the energy radiated from the surface of a heated body increases as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. Our law states that the number of structural elements in a singlecommunity society increases as the 2/3 power of its population. Are the two any different in form? That a close relationship should exist between community size and social structure is certainly no surprise. Bands and villages require a certain degree of internal organization to be able to function. And as societies grow larger, it stands to reason that their internal structure will have to be further elaborated in order to accommodate and integrate the greater number of people they now contain. This is commonplace in social science. Around the turn of the century, the German sociologist Georg Simmel observed that “the sociological structure of a group is essentially modified by the number of the individuals that are united in it. ... Beyond a certain stage in its increase of numbers, [a group] must develop for its maintenance certain forms and organization which it did not previously need” (1902:2). To be sure, other factors than the size of its population are at work in determining the degree to which a society will develop its internal structure. Frequent involvement in warfare, for example, can be expected to lead to an augmentation of a society’s military organization, and other related elements of its social structure may grow along with it. But the point is that an increase in size alone can account for much of a society’s structural elaboration. There is, however, another aspect to the relationship between size and social structure that I have yet to mention. In the study just cited, only the different kinds of structural units in a society were counted. The tally did not take account of the number of such units present. For example, if a society had a system of clans, this was counted as one trait, “clans present,” no credit being given for the number of clans involved. Thus, a society with six clans would receive no more credit than one with two. (The reasons for carrying out the tally in this way are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the interested reader will find them discussed in Carneiro [1967a:234–2361.) Having six clans, however, clearly betokens a greater degree of structural elaboration than having just two. And, by the same token, a fuller picture of the complexity of the Kuikuru’s social structure emerges if we take account not only of the fact that they had “ceremonies” as a unit trait, but also that they had no fewer than seventeen of them. In order to gauge a society’s social structure more precisely, then, it would be preferable to count not only the presence of a trait but also its incidence. I have not actually carried out such a count, which would certainly

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increase the trait inventory of each society in the sample used in the study just cited. It seems quite possible, though, that a fuller assessment of the number of structural features present in a society would reveal a relationship between community size and social structure that, while perhaps as regular as the one just described, might nevertheless reflect a relative rate of increase involving a different exponent, It could turn out, for example, that with a revised method of scoring, proportionately more traits might be added to larger societies than to smaller ones. In that case, plotting size against structure for the societies in the sample would produce a regression line with a steeper slope. Structure might then be found to increase as, say, the 3/4 power of the population rather than as the 2/3 power. But this is purely speculative at this point and I suggest it here merely to indicate the possibilities. The test has still to be made. There is yet another question to be raised in this connection. As indicated earlier, the study cited above included only single-community societies. Chiefdoms, states, and empires, each of which are multicommunity societies, were excluded. Once again, it seems plausible to suppose that a regular, yet different, mathematical relationship might hold between size and social structure in the case of multi-community societies. After all, we would now have two kinds of structure with which to contend: that within communities, serving to keep each of them integrated; and that overlying all communities, placed over them by a higher authority to give this larger political aggregate coherence enough to remain a viable and functioning unit. Having merely suggested that different mathematical relationships might hold depending on the types of societies examined, I leave the matter at that.

PREDICTING THE ONSET OF CHIEFDOMS Let us turn to another proposed law of culture. It is generally agreed that one of the most striking features of a scientific law—indeed, the characteristic that makes it a law in many people’s eyes—is that it is predictive. Nearly a century ago, Goldwin Smith observed, “The crown of science is prediction. Were history a science, it would enable us to predict events” (1905:514). It is one of the attributes of scientific laws to specify the conditions under which certain events that have occurred in the past will recur in the future. Can anthropology offer anything approaching such predictive laws? In a way, the proposition just discussed can be considered

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predictive. Or perhaps it might be better to say postdictive or retrodictive. Thus, were we to come across a totally unknown native village in New Guinea or Amazonia, for example, and found it to have 200 inhabitants, we could “predict,” within a fairly narrow margin of error, just how many kinds of structural features it would have. Still, this is not quite what most people think of as prediction. As commonly understood, prediction involves the specifying of a time at which something not now present will occur. An astronomer’s forecasting the exact time of an eclipse is, of course, the most dramatic and convincing instance of scientific prediction. So let us ask again, in this more restricted sense, are there any predictive laws in anthropology? Tentatively, I would like to put forward a candidate for such a law. It is one that, beginning with certain specifiable initial conditions for a designated inhabited region of the world, attempts to predict at what point village autonomy will give way and the first supravillage polities— chiefdoms—become established. This law—if such it proves to be—is based on certain understandings of the process of political evolution. One of these understandings is that every autonomous village holds on to its individual sovereignty with extreme tenacity, surrendering it only as a result of coercion, either outright conquest or at least intimidation. It was for this reason that it took the human race more than three million years to surmount community autonomy and advance to the next stage beyond it, that of multivillage chiefdoms. What was it, after countless millennia of political stability, that enabled village autonomy to be transcended? The necessary first step was (with a few negligible exceptions) the introduction of agriculture. This new mode of subsistence enabled villages to remain more or less permanently settled, and with this new sedentism came an altered relationship between human societies and the land. No longer was land simply there to be exploited; now it was carefully tilled and the crops it produced were harvested. Thus, land began to acquire a value it had previously lacked. The coming of this Neolithic revolution (as anthropologists like to call it) had a further consequence. It gave great impetus to the growth of population, so that before long, in certain regions of the world, a critical imbalance developed in the man–land ratio. When all the arable land in a populated valley or island had become incorporated into the agricultural cycle of the autonomous villages occupying it, the residents began to experience a shortage of land. At this point, according to the now-familiar scenario presented in an earlier chapter, competition over resources ensued, especially where the existence of geographic barriers such as mountains, deserts, or the sea, sharply limited the amount of

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arable land available. At the same time, these barriers prevented landhungry villagers from readily moving out and occupying whatever untilled land might lie beyond. As discussed earlier, the competition for farmland took the form of warfare. And by successive steps these conflicts led to the forceful aggregation of what were once autonomous villages into larger political units—the successive levels of chiefdoms I have already described. This was the general sequence of events. But how do we move from a broad understanding of the process that gave rise to chiefdoms to a formula that permits us to predict the approximate time of their onset? The first step is to identify all the relevant variables at work in this process. Moreover, these variables should be such that we can assign numerical values to them. With appropriate symbols for each, they are as follows: W = the area of arable land (in, let us say, acres) within the circumscribed valley or island in which the development is taking place. C = the area (in the same units) required to provide the average person with the amount of food he or she normally obtains from agriculture over the course of a year. P = the total population of the valley or island at the time the calculation begins. r = the average annual rate of population increase in the area, expressed as a decimal fraction. t = the unknown being solved for, which is the number of years required for the increase in population to bring all of the arable land under cultivation. Next, we arrange these variables into an equation that, for reasons we need not go into here, is best expressed in logarithmic form. So now we have W log- – logP C t= log(1 + r) In this equation, t, the unknown, is, as just stated, the time it would take given its average annual rate of increase for a growing population to completely fill the circumscribed area it occupied. According to our theory, it is at this point (if not slightly earlier) that intervillage warfare would become directed toward the taking of land for cultivation, accompanied by the subjugation of defeated enemies previously in possession

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of that land. And by a process already alluded to and explained more fully elsewhere (Carneiro 1970), this form of warfare would quickly lead to the coalescing of villages into chiefdoms. The predictive “law,” then, indicates how long it would take, starting from the stipulated initial conditions, for chiefdom formation to begin. In order to show the “law” in operation, let us work through a concrete (if hypothetical) example. Suppose we are dealing with a circumscribed valley of 100 square miles (64,000 acres), all of it arable, containing at the start of our calculations, three villages with a population of 100 persons each, giving a total population of 300. Let us say that the average person in the valley requires .95 acres of land to feed himself for one year, and that the population is increasing at an average annual rate of 1 percent. Given these initial conditions, how long would it take for the population to grow to the point at which all the land would have come under cultivation, bringing on the “flashpoint” of chiefdom formation? Inserting the figures given earlier into the equation, we have 64,000 log ——— – log300 .95 t= log (1.01) Carrying out the calculation, we find the answer to be 544 years. That is to say, given the numerical values assigned to the relevant variables, it would take somewhat more than 500 years for the initial population to reach the point at which all the land in the valley would be completely in use, engendering territorial competition, with the political consequences already described. It should be noted in passing that during the 500-odd years it would take the valley’s growing population to completely fill it, individual villages would have grown and fissioned many times over. But no special provision need be made in the formula for this occurrence. Thus, we do not need to know how large the villages would have grown before splitting into two, or the total number of villages into which they had proliferated by the time the saturation point of the valley had been reached. To solve for the time required for our hypothetical valley to become completely filled, the only variables we need are those already in the formula. I should point out that this formula applies to cases where the arable land in a region can be continuously cultivated without having to be fallowed. And this, admittedly, is a relatively unusual situation. The more common condition is that fallowing is required after several years

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of tilling. Whenever this is the case, two new variables must be introduced into the equation: (1) the length of time a plot can be cultivated before having to be fallowed, and (2) the length of the fallow period. These factors, however, can readily be accommodated in a slightly more complex version of the formula. In fact, this was already done in the original presentation of the formula (see Carneiro 1972:66–68). Provision can also be made in the formula for a region in which sharp environmental circumscription did not exist, and where some of the population could thus “leak” out to surrounding areas, beyond the circumscribing mountains or deserts. Naturally, with such “leakage,” it would take longer for the core area to fill up and thus for chiefdoms to arise. A formula to deal with this contingency was also presented in the article cited above (Carneiro 1972:75–76). It may seem presumptuous to call a formula predicting the time of chiefdom formation a “law” before it has been verified—or if not presumptuous, at least premature. Yet this would not be the first time a strict regularity or law was proposed on theoretical grounds alone, before being subjected to an empirical test. When the great mathematician Leonhard Euler submitted the prize-winning solution to an actual nautical problem posed by the Paris Academy, he remarked of the results that, “since they were deduced from the surest foundations in mechanics, their truth . . . could not be questioned” (Kramer 1974:303; emphasis in the original). Far be it from me, however, to claim the same privilege of exemption from verification that Euler felt entitled to assume—especially since I have argued that verification is the very cornerstone of science. Thus, from the beginning of the work that led to the proposed law, I considered it essential that it should be submitted to a test. The problem was to find data that allowed such a test to be made. Since chiefdoms are no longer arising from autonomous villages, and since the ethnohistoric literature lacks the quantitative data that testing the formula requires, the only hope left seemed to be archeology. Here, though, the same difficulties arose. Archeologists cannot readily supply the quantitative data needed to allow a prediction to be made and tested, yet such data are essential. If we are to test the predictive power of the formula, then, for some circumscribed area of the world in which chiefdoms arose, we need to know (1) its approximate size, (2) its total population at some base date, (3) the average rate at which the population was growing, and (4) the amount of land required to feed the average person. And, of course, archeology must also tell us, within narrow limits, when the first chiefdoms in that area actually arose.

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It seems likely to me that for some circumscribed valley or island, some archeologist should be able to provide a reasonable estimate of the numerical data we require. And so we await—and invite—such an estimate. Moreover, we await it with confidence. After all, in circumscribed regions over much of the world, the coming of agriculture was consistently followed within a millennium or two by the rise of chiefdoms. At worst, then, predictions made by the formula are likely to be no more than a few centuries off. And seen from the perspective of two million years of cultural development, we would say that a formula capable of forecasting a major event in human history within a margin of mere centuries would have a fair claim to being called a law of culture. As I have said before, something almost inevitable surrounded the emergence of chiefdoms. Once agriculture was in place in circumscribed areas, population grew and villages proliferated. As they did so, more and more land was required for their sustenance, and to obtain this land, villages were prepared to fight. Thus began the chain of events that, in short order, led to the rise of chiefdoms. The fact that chiefdoms arose in so many widely separated parts of the world argues strongly for the fact that some common, general, and almost irresistible process was at work, a process strong enough to override all manner of local differences in climate, customs, ideology, and minor environmental variations to produce everywhere the same result. At the heart of this process was population pressure; thus, our formula seeks to assess how long it would take, given certain initial conditions, for this pressure to assert itself Triggered by population pressure, the enlargement and expansion of political units proved to be a most powerful force. With the hitherto “immovable object” of village autonomy finally surmounted, political evolution continued at a quickening pace. Growing progressively larger, chiefdoms ofttimes evolved into states, and, under favorable conditions, states grew into empires.

A LAW OF CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT Finally, let me offer one more law of culture, this one, again, statistical. The regularity underlying it came to light during a study of cultural evolution using a technique known as Guttman scale analysis. Applied to cultural evolution, this tool enables one to determine if there is a regular order to the way in which societies by and large have evolved certain traits. The results of this work have been published in a number of places (e.g., Carneiro 1968) to which the interested reader is

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referred. Here, I limit myself to summarizing one result obtained from this study. In carrying out the study, a specially devised list of 354 culture traits was drawn up and the presence or absence of these traits determined for a worldwide sample of 100 societies. Of these 354 traits, a significant number—well over 100—were found to scale significantly well. This meant that from the distribution of these traits on a diagram called a scalogram, it was possible to infer the relative order in which they had arisen among the 100 societies included in the study. Moreover, widening the inference, we were ready to assert that this same order of development had been followed (within limits), by all societies, if and as they evolved. Here, then, we seemed to have a genuine, specific, and detailed evolutionary sequence. To give some notion of the particulars of this sequence, I have listed below a few selected traits taken from it, followed in parentheses by the number of occurrences of each trait among the 100 societies in the sample. The inferred order of development of these traits is that from bottom to top. This is based on the inference that the more widespread a trait, the earlier its appearance among societies in general, whereas the fewer instances of the trait, the later its development in the general evolutionary sequence. Empire (6) Code of laws (8) Monumental architecture (8) Sumptuary laws (10) Markets (15) Military conscription (16) Corvée (21) Full-time craft specialists (23) Judicial process (47) Formal political leadership (81) Special religious practitioners (94) It is important to emphasize that this sequence was derived by use of the comparative method. That is to say, it was obtained by comparing a large sample of essentially contemporaneous societies that differed widely among themselves in their degree of cultural complexity. Having arrived at this developmental sequence, the question naturally arose: To what extent did the sequence, derived as it was from synchronic data, actually reflect a diachronic process? In other words, was this the order in which these traits by and large actually arose in history? There was only one way to find out, and that was to test the

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derived or inferred sequence against an actual historical sequence. For this purpose we decided to use Anglo-Saxon England between A.D. 450 and 1086, a period of more than 600 years for which extensive historical information was available. The test was conducted, and it revealed that, indeed, a high degree of agreement existed between the evolutionary sequence deduced from the pattern of traits on the scalogram and the actual order of historical development in a particular society (Carneiro 1968:356–358). Now, although the overall regularity of this evolutionary sequence was striking, it was not perfect. Deviations from the expected order of development occurred. To put it schematically, while Trait A seemed to have appeared before Trait B in most societies, it did not do so in all. In some cases the order was reversed, Trait B seeming to appear before Trait A. The interesting point about these deviations, though, was that they were not random, but patterned. The pattern was rather subtle and was not immediately perceived, but once discerned, it could be demonstrated statistically, and its significance interpreted (Carneiro 1968:360, 367). While it was not possible to predict the precise evolutionary behavior of each trait in the sequence, it was found that a high degree of regularity could be seen in the behavior of aggregates of these traits. Moreover, this regularity was such that, without hesitation, it could be called a statistical law. The law might be said to be analogous to the gas laws of physics. The behavior of any given gas molecule is erratic, but that of large numbers of molecules is highly predictable. Let us see just what this cultural law consists of. A full presentation of this evolutionary regularity, as well as its ramifications and implications, requires several pages and can be found in Carneiro (1968:358–363). However, it may be summarized briefly as follows: The further apart two traits are in a general evolutionary sequence, the more likely it is that in any given society the two will have evolved in the same relative order in which they occur in the general sequence. Conversely, the closer two traits are in a general evolutionary sequence, the greater the likelihood that this order might have been reversed in the way any given society developed them. A concrete example helps make this relationship clear. Let us take the following two traits, the “Corvée” and “Full-time craft specialists.” The two had nearly the same incidence in our worldwide sample of 100 societies, namely, 21 and 23 instances, respectively. Thus, the evolutionary distance between them is small. That is to say, in the course of cultural development, the Corvée seems to arise shortly after Full-time craft specialists. Another way of stating this is to say that relatively few

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traits intervened between the appearance of Full-time craft specialists and the appearance of the Corvée. Among the 12 test cases we have in our study that allow us to compare the relative order of development of these two traits, Full-time craft specialists preceded the Corvée 58 percent of the time, while the Corvée preceded Full-time craft specialists 42 percent of the time. For any two traits that are relatively close in evolutionary distance, then, we can conclude that the one that appears later in the general sequence may nevertheless develop before the earlier one in a substantial proportion of cases. (There is one important exception to this rule, however. If between two traits there is a relationship of functional prerequisiteness, so that one of them cannot occur without the prior existence of the other, then, even though they may be close together in evolutionary distance, the earlier trait will appear before the later one in 100 percent of the cases. For example, “Courts of law” and a system of “Higher and lower courts,” two traits in the overall sequence, are relatively close together in evolutionary distance. Yet the former, being a functional prerequisite of the latter, never appears after it, but always before it.) Now, if we examine traits at or near opposite ends of the sequence, such as “Empire” and “Special religious practitioners,” that is, traits between which there is great evolutionary distance, we find no exceptions to the general order of development. Thus, among the 88 test cases we have for comparing “Special religious practitioners” and “Empire,” we find that the former arose before the latter every time. Naturally, when we look at pairs of traits at intermediate evolutionary distances from each other, we find intermediate degrees of regularity in their relative order of development. Indeed, so closely does the magnitude of the percentages reflect the magnitude of the evolutionary interval between them that the relationship may be formulated as a statistical law: The degree of regularity in the relative order of development of any two traits in a sequence is directly proportional to the evolutionary distance between them; the greater the evolutionary distance, the greater the regularity. Again let me ask the question: Is it too presumptuous to call this a statistical law? I think not. Those who disagree may perhaps have an exaggerated notion of what a statistical law actually states. Consider, for instance, the well-known statistical law in physics known as Boyle’s Law of gases. The law is statistical in that it does not predict the

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behavior of any individual gas molecule but only expresses the regularity found in the behavior of large numbers of them. For such an aggregate of molecules, Boyle’s Law states that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure. That is to say, the greater the pressure, the smaller the volume, and vice versa. That is all there is to it. Now, is our law relating the degree of regularity in the relative order of appearance of any two traits to the evolutionary distance between them any different in form from Boyle’s Law? Not at all, except that one expresses a direct proportionality and the other an inverse one. Moreover, the cultural law turns out to be much more precise than the gas law in that it allows us to say a good deal more about the behavior of individual culture traits than Boyle’s Law permits one to say about the behavior of individual molecules. And if one likes to think of scientific laws as possessing a certain degree of subtlety or elegance, is our law any less subtle or elegant than Boyle’s?

CONCLUSION Let me summarize what I have attempted to do in this chapter. More than 50 years ago, Franz Boas, considered in his day the dean of American anthropologists, wrote: “Cultural phenomena are of such complexity that it seems to me doubtful whether valid cultural laws can be found.” And if found at all, Boas maintained, they will be “necessarily vague and, we might say, so self-evident that they are of little help to real understanding” (1932:612). I am ready to challenge this assertion. In the final chapter of this book, I have presented several propositions that I believe can stand as laws of culture. Moreover, they are neither vague nor self-evident. On the contrary, they are precise and by no means immediately obvious. They point to truths that were previously unknown or, at best, but dimly perceived. And they are not merely qualitative assertions, but quantitative ones. Since it is generally recognized that being able to quantify the relationship between phenomena, as opposed to simply stating that some relationship holds between them is important, what we have offered here is clearly a step ahead in scientific understanding. As Herbert Spencer pointed out: The general advance of Science . . . is best shown by the contrast between its qualitative stage, and its quantitative stage. At first the facts ascertained were that between such and such phenom-

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ena some connexion existed—that the appearance of a and b always occurred together or in succession; but it was known neither what was the nature of the relation between a and b, nor how much of a accompanied so much of b. The development of Science has in part been the reduction of these vague connexions to distinct ones. (1890:376–377) The number of law-like statements so far proposed by anthropologists, let alone verified by them, is still small. But this is due largely to the fact that, for so many years, virtually no effort was expended in this direction. Things, though, seem to be changing. The laws marshaled above, while perhaps lacking the rigor and precision of the law of universal gravitation, nonetheless express significant cultural regularities that hold for a large number of cases in widely separated domains of culture. But a lot more may be in the offing. And we get some inkling of what that might be by looking at regularities in some of the other sciences. For example, astrophysicists have discovered that an inverse relationship exists between the atomic weight of the chemical elements and their abundance in the solar system: the heavier the element, the scarcer it is. Thus, for every trillion atoms of hydrogen (the lightest element, with an atomic weight of 1), there are 100,000,000 atoms of nitrogen (atomic weight 141, 1,000 atoms of strontium (atomic weight 88), and 1 atom of uranium, the heaviest of all elements, with an atomic weight of 238 (Bartusiak 1993:122). Turning from astronomy to biology, consider the following regularity—perhaps even a law—formulated some years ago by G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Robert MacArthur. They found that there is an inverse ratio between the number of species of mammals in a taxonomic group and the characteristic size of those species. This relationship is expressed by the equation S α L –2, where S = the number of species, and L = the typical linear dimensions of a species (Blackburn and Gaston 1994:471). In plain English, the formula states that the larger the size of a mammal, the smaller will be the number of species of that size in the genus or family to which those species belong. The plausibility of this relationship is readily apparent when we consider that there are fewer species of deer than there are of mice, and fewer species of elephants than there are of deer. These two instances raise the possibility that an inverse relationship may exist in various domains of nature between magnitude and abundance. Do we find such a relationship manifested by human societies? Evidently so. The relationship holds, for example, between the

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size of autonomous political units and the frequency of their occurrence. While this relationship may no longer hold true today, it surely did two or three thousand years ago, at which time there were more autonomous villages in the world than chiefdoms, more chiefdoms than states, and more states than empires. Conceivably, this relationship might even have been regular enough to find mathematical expression. To offer a wild conjecture as to what this relationship might have been, perhaps the number of chiefdoms was proportional to the cube root of the number of autonomous villages, and the number of states proportional to the cube root of the number of chiefdoms. Some kind of regular relationship was probably in evidence here, but no anthropologist so far has proposed it, let alone tried to express it mathematically. I suspect that a good many similar relationships lie hidden in the realm of culture, waiting to be discovered. And I am ready to suggest another possible one. Some years ago, I was struck by the idea that some kind of regularity might underlie the common phenomenon of village fissioning. Although no one, as far as I know, has approached village splitting from a theoretical point of view, anthropologists would probably subscribe to the notion that the larger an autonomous village, the more likely it is to split. It occurred to me, therefore, that the increasing tendency for a village to fission as it grew in size might reveal a definite mathematical relationship. I went so far, in fact, as to suggest (on theoretical grounds which we need not go into here) that the probability of a village splitting might be proportional, not to the first power of its population, as one might at first surmise, but to the square of its population. Thus, for example, a village of 200 persons, would be four times as likely to split as one of 100 persons. And I proposed a procedure (admittedly a difficult one to carry out) by which the theory underlying it could be tested. The test involved, first of all, devising a formula that, if numerical values could be assigned to the variables, would enable one to determine the probability that an autonomous village of any given size would split during the course of a year. The formula arrived at was the following: p = 1 – (1 – p)(Sd/Md) where M = modal village size in the region being studied; S = the size of the particular village whose probability of splitting is being ascertained; d = the power best representing the mathematical relationship between village size and tendency to split (a power I argued would be 2); p = the probability that a village of modal size (M) will split during the course of a year; and finally P = the probability that the village being investigated, S in the formula, would split during the year.

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The problem, not a simple one, is discussed in detail in Carneiro (1987b). I present it here merely to show (1) that there may be an unknown but regular mathematical relationship between the size of a village and its tendency to fission, and (2) that there are ways of determining if such a mathematical relationship exists, and if it does, what form it takes. My hunch is that many such relationships exist, unknown and unrecognized, in the great body of cultural data and are waiting for the day when anthropologists seriously turn their attention to ferreting them out. Once discovered, some of these relationships may prove to be of sufficient regularity to warrant being annointed with the name of “laws.” Establishing additional laws of culture in the future will no doubt be proportional to the amount of effort expended in searching for them. Admittedly, the present moment in anthropology, which finds powerful antiscientific forces in control of much of the discipline, is hardly conducive to such efforts. But this state of affairs will not last forever. And as anthropologists once more decide that their discipline can be pursued as a science, and turn their attention to trying to propound its laws, we shall see tangible progress made along these lines. We may well reach the goal that some historians sought with small success and others vehemently denied could be attained—the formulation of laws of history, taking “history” to be the grand sweep of human cultural experience. When, after more than a decade of effort, Johannes Kepler finally succeeded in formulating his magnificent Third Law of Planetary Motion, he felt such great elation at the achievement that, exuberance overcoming modesty, he wrote: “The problem which inspired my lifelong devotion to astronomy.... I have solved at last.... The book [containing it] may be read now or by posterity, it does not matter. If it must wait a century to be read, I care not, since God himself has had to wait six thousand years” (Kramer 1974:245–246). Well, God had to wait even longer for the first laws of culture to be propounded. Let us hope that the flurry of such laws to follow will amply reward his patience.

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Cast of Characters

Selected List of Historians and Other Scholars and Writers Cited in the Text

Historians Wilbur C. Abbott LordActon BrooksAdams Charles Francis Adams George Burton Adams Henry Adams Konrad Adenauer ArchibaldAlison Grant Allen Jacques Amyot Aristotle Thomas Arnold William C. Atkinson W. H Auden St. Augustine Herman Ausubel Sir Francis Bacon Philip Bagby Walter Bagehot George Bancroft Harry Elmer Barnes GeoffreyBarraclough Paul Barth Jacques Barzun

Dates 1869–1947 1834–1902 1848–1927 1835–1915 1851–1925 1838–1918 1876–1967 1792–1867 1848–1899 1513–1593 384–322B.C. 1795–1842 1902–1992 1907–1973 354–430 1920–1977 1561–1626 1918–1959 1826–1877 1800–1891 1889–1968 1908–1984 1858–1922 1907– 257

Nationality American English American American American American German Scottish English French Greek English English American North African American English English English American American English German American

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Historians Charles A. Beard Mary R. Beard Carl L. Becker Howard Becker Edward S. Beesly Lee Benson Isaiah Berlin Ernst Bernheim Olivier Bernier Henri Berr Otto von Bismarck John B. Black Marc Bloch Franz Boas Kenneth E. Bock Jean Bodin Napoleon Bonaparte Bishop Jacques Bossuet James Boswell Fernand Braudel Kurt Breysig Crane Brinton James Bryce Henry Thomas Buckle William C. Bullitt Jacob Burckhardt Ernest W. Burgess John W. Burgess Jean Buridan Edmund Burke John B. Bury Herbert Butterfield Tomasso Companella Thomas Carlyle Edward Hallett Carr Kwan-chih Chang Francois Chateaubriand Lord Chesterfield Edward P. Cheyney V. Gordon Childe John L. Clive Thomas C. Cochran Morris R. Cohen

Dates

Nationality

1874–1948 1876–1956 1873–1945 1899–1960 1831–1915 1948– 1909–1998 1850–1922 1930– 1863–1954 1815–1896 1883–1964 1886–1944 1858–1942 1916– 1530–1596 1769–1821 1627–1704 1740–1795 1902–1985 1866–1940 1898–1968 1838–1922 1821–1862 1891–1967 1818–1897 1886–1966 1844–1931 1300–1358 1729–1797 1861–1927 1901–1979 1568–1639 1775–1881 1892–1982 1931– 1768–1848 1694–1773 1861–1947 1892–1957 1924–1990 1902–1999 1880–1947

American American American American English American English German French/American French German English French German/American American French French French Scottish French German American English English American Swiss American American French Irish/English Irish English Italian Scottish English Chinese/American French English American Australian/Ehglish American American American

Selected List of Historians

Historians Charles W. Colby Samuel Taylor Coleridge R. G. Collingwood Henry Steele Commager Auguste Comte Marie-Jean-Antoine Condorcet Edwin Grant Conklin Rushton Coulborn Benedetto Croce J. G. Crowther Jean Le Rond D’Alembert Leonardo da Vinci Lloyd De Mause René Descartes Denis Diderot Wilhelm Dilthey John William Draper Johann Gustav Droysen William A. Dunning Victor Duruy Fred Eggan Albert Einstein Geoffrey R. Elton Ralph Waldo Emerson Ephraim Emerton Frederick Engels Leonhard Euler Lucien Febvre Alfred Feder Francois de Fénélon Johann Gottfried Fichte Moses I. Finley H. A. L. Fisher John Fiske Fred Morrow Fling Robert Flint Bernard De Fontenelle Anatole France Jerome Frank Tenney Frank James G. Frazer Edward A. Freeman Sigmund Freud

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Nationality

1867–1955 1772–1834 1889–1943 1902–1998 1798–1857 1743–1794 1863–1952 1907–1968 1866–1952 1899– 17 17– 1783 1452–1519 1931– 1596–1650 1713–1784 1833_1911 181 1–1882 1808–1884 1847–1922 1811–1894 1906–1991 1879–1955 1920–1994 1803–1882 1851–1935 1820–1895 1707–1783 1878–1956 1872–1927 1651–1715 1762–1814 1912–1986 1865–1940 1842–1901 1860–1934 1838–1910 1657–1757 1844–1924 1889–1957 1876–1939 1854–1941 1823–1892 1856–1939

Canadian English English American French French American American Italian English French Italian American French French German American German American French American German/Swiss English American American German Swiss French German French German American/English English American American Scottish French French American American Scottish English Austrian

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Historians Jean Froissart James Anthony Froude Numa Fustel de Coulanges Francis Galton Patrick Gardiner Peter Gay Pieter Geyl Edward Gibbon Morris Ginsberg William Ewarts Gladstone Joseph Arthur Gobineau Alexander Goldenweiser Stephen Jay Gould Alvin W. Gouldner Arthur James Grant J. R. Green Thomas Hill Green Jacob Grimm George Grote Philip Guedalla M. J. Guest Francois Guizot

Ludwig Gumplowicz Henry Hallam Oscar Handlin Carlton J. H. Hayes Arnold Ludwig Heeren Georg W. F. Hegel Werner Heisenberg Johann Gottfried von Herder Christian Gottlob Heyne John Higham Gertrude Himmelfarb Philip Hitti Homer C. Hockett Richard Hofstadter C. Warren Hollister Sidney Hook Walter E. Houghton Floyd House Michael Howard H. Stuart Hughes Johan Huizinga

Dates

1333–1400? 1818–1894 1830–1889 1822–1911 1922– 1923– 1887–1966 1737–1794 1889–1970 1809–1898 1816–1882 1880–1940 1941– 1920– 1862–1948 1837–1883 1836–1882 1785–1863 1794–1871 1889–1944 1839–1909 1787–1874 1838–1909 1777–1859 1915– 1882–1964 1760–1842 1770–1831 1901–1976 1744–1803 1729–1812 1920– 1922– 1886–1978 1875–1960 1916–1970 1930–1997 1902–1989 1904–1941 1893–1975 1922– 1916– 1872–1945

Nationality

French English French English English American Dutch English English English French American American American English English English German English English English French Polish English American American German German German German German American American American American American American American American American English American Dutch

Selected List of Historians

Historians David Hume Julian Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley Washington Irving Andrew Jackson Gabriel Jackson William James William Stanley Jevons Samuel Johnson Immanuel Kant Justin Kaplan Albert G. Keller Johannes Kepler Abdal-Raman ibn-Khaldun Martin Luther King, Jr. Charles Kingsley Edna E. Kramer A. L. Kroeber Joseph Wood Krutch George Kubler Karl Lamprecht Charles V. Langlois Henry C. Lea Gustave Le Bon W. E. H. Lecky Gordon Leff Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Alexander Lesser Robert Jay Lifton Abraham Lincoln Brett J. Loewenberg Robert H. Lowie Lucretius Emil Ludwig Gabriel Bonnet de Mably Thomas Babington Macaulay Joseph de Maistre David Samuel Margouliath Felix Markham James Martineau Karl Marx William H. McNeill Friedrich Meinecke

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Dates 1711–1776 1887–1975 1825–1895 1783–1859 1767–1845 1921– 1842–1910 1835–1882 1709–1784 1724–1804 1925– 1874–1956 1571–1630 1332–1406 1929–1968 1819–1875 1902–1984 1876–1960 1893–1970 1912–1996 1856–1903 1863–1929 1825–1909 1841–1931 1838–1931 1926– 1646–1716 1902–1982 1926– 1809–1865 1905–1974 1883–1957 99–55B.C. 1881–1948 1709–1785 1800–1859 1753–1821 1858–1940 1908–1992 1805–1900 1818–1883 1917– 1862–1954

Nationality Scottish English English American American American American English English German American American German Arabic American English American American American American German French American French English English German American American American American American Roman German French English French English English English German American German

Cast of Characters

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Historians Eduard Meyer Jules Michelet Francois Auguste Mignet John Stuart Mill Theodor Mommsen Gabriel Monod Charles de Secondat Montesquieu John L. Motley George P. Murdock Gilbert Murray Sir Lewis B. Namier Lynn H. Nelson Allan Nevins Sir Isaac Newton Barthold Georg Niebuhr Max Nordau Michael Oakeshott Sir Charles Oman Robert E. Park Francis Parkman Blaise Pascal Mark Pattison Edward John Payne Harold Perkin Charles Petit-Dutailles Henri Pirenne George Plekhanov John H. Plumb Plutarch Polybius Frederick York Powell Sir Maurice Powicke William H. Prescott Sir Walter Raleigh Leopold von Ranke Friedrich Ratzel Hans Reichenbach Ernest Renan Colin Renfrew G. J. Renier Heinrich Rickert

Dates

Nationality

1855–1930 1798–1874 1796–1884 1806–1873 1817–1903 1844–1912 1689–1755 1814–1877 1897–1985 1866–1957 1888–1960 1931– 1890–1971 1642–1727 1776–1831 1849–1923 1901–1990 1860–1946 1864–1944 1823–1893 1623–1662 1813–1884 1844–1904 1926– 1868–1947 1862–1935 1857–1918 1911– A.D.46–120 203–125 B.C. 1850–1904 1879–1963 1796–1859 1552–1618 1795–1886 1844–904 1891–1953 1823–1892 1937– 1892–1962 1863–1936

German French French English German French French American American English English American American English German German English English American American French English American English French Belgian Russian English Greek Greco-Roman English English American English German German German/American French English Dutch/English German

Selected List of Historians

Historians William Robertson James Harvey Robinson Charles Rollin Edward A. Ross A. L. Rowse Steven Runciman W. G. Runciman Bertrand Russell Edward N. Saveth Saint-Simon Charles Auguste Sainte-Beuve J. Salwyn Schapiro Friedrich von Schelling Friedrich von Schlegél Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. Sir Walter Scott Henri Sée John Robert Seeley Charles Seignobos Edward R. A. Seligman Elman R. Service James T. Shotwell Georg Simmel William Milligan Sloane Goldwin Smith Lacey Baldwin Smith Preserved Smith Pitirim A. Sorokin Herbert Spencer Benedict de (Baruch) Spinoza Chester G. Starr Sir Leslie Stephen Fritz Stern Lawrence Stone Lytton Strachey William Stubbs J. W. Swain John R. Swanton John Addington Symonds Tacitus Hippolyte Taine Gabriel Tarde

263

Dates

Nationality

1721–1793 1863–1936 1661–1741 1866–1951 1903–1997 1903– 1934– 1872–1970 1913– 1760–1825 1804–1869

Scottish American French American English English English English American French French

1879–1974

American

1775–1854 1772–1829 1888–1965 1771–1832 1864–1936 1834–1895 1854–1942 1861–1939 1915–1996 1874–1965 1858–1918 1850–1928 1823–1910 1922– 1880–1941 1889–1968 1820–1903 1632–1677 1914– 1832–1904 1926– 1919–1999 1880–1932 1825–1901 1820–1895 1873–1958 1840–1893 A.D. 55–117 1828–1892 1843–1904

German German American Scottish French English French American American American German American English American American Russian/American English Dutch American English American English English English American American English Roman French French

Cast of Characters

264

Historians Niccolò Tartaglia Richard H. Tawney A. J. P. Taylor Henry Osborn Taylor Frederick J. Teggart William Makepeace Thackeray Augustin Thierry Arthur J. Todd Leo Tolstoy Arnold J. Toynbee George M. Trevelyan H. R. Trevor-Roper Ernst Troeltsch Leon Trotsky Barbara Tuchman A. R. Jacques Turgot Frederick Jackson Turner Ralph E. Turner Mark Twain Edward B. Tylor John Tyndall Thorstein Veblen Paul Veyne Giambattista Vico Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire William Walsh Lester Ward Walter Prescott Webb Max Weber C.V.Wedgwood Julius Wellhausen H. G. Wells Edward Westermarck Andrew D. White Leslie A. White Lynn T. White Morton G. White Oscar Wilde William B. Willcox WoodrowWilson Wilhelm Windelband Justin Winsor

Dates 1499–1557 1880–1962 1906–1990 1856–1941 1870–1946 1811–1863 1795–1856 1878–1948 1828–1910 1877–1962 1876–1962 1914– 1865–1923 1879–1940 1912–1989 1727–1781 1861–1932 1893–1964 1835–1910 1832–1917 1820–1893 1857–1929 1857–1929 1688–1744 1694–1778 1913–1986 1841–1913 1888–1963 1864–1920 1910–1997 1844–1918 1866–1946 1862–1939 1832–1918 1900–1975 1907– 1917– 1856–1900 1907–1985 1856–1924 1848–1915 1831–1897

Nationality Italian English English American American English French American Russian English English English German Russian American French American American American English Irish American French Italian French English American American German English German English Finnish American American American American Irish American American German American

Selected List of Historians

Historians Harvey Wish Wilhelm Wundt Alexandru Xénopol Edgar Zilsel Howard Zinn

265

Dates 1909–1968 1832–1920 1847–1920 1891–1944 1922–

Nationality American German Romanian American American

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Index

Abbott, Wilbur C., 257 Abundance, relationship to magnitude, 254–255 Achilles, 109 Acoma Pueblo, 241 Actium, Battle of, 212 Acton, John Emerich Edward (Lord), 7,9, 257 criticism of Leopold von Ranke, 28 on ideas in history, 132 on moral judgments by historians, 61,62 on universal history, 33 Adams, Brooks, 257 The Law of Civilization and Decay, 212 Adams, Charles Francis, 212,257 Adams, George Burton, 8,257 on economics, 193 on facts as focus of history, 83 on history as science, 146 on laws of history, 208 on Spencer‘s influence on history, 162 Adams, Henry, 257 Democracy, 6 on evolutionary theory, 170,207 on laws of history, 207, 210,211,212– 213 on religious determinants of history, 105 “Rule of Phase Applied to History, The,” 212-213 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 85 Addresses to the German Nation (Fichte), 87

Adenauer, Konrad, 67,257 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon),17,142–143, 199 Age of Louis XXV, The (Volatire), 37, 38– 39 Agriculture development of, 183 in pre-Columbian Peru, 113 Ajax, 109 Aldrovandus, 26 Alexander the Great, 65,124–125,127 Alfonso I, 94 Alfonso VIII of Castile, 69 Alison, Archibald, 3–4, 257 on the French Revolution, 96–97 on generalization in history, 169 on Gibbon’s writing style, 19, 83 as Great Man theory exponent, 111 on historians of antiquity, 221 on historical writing, 17, 19,20 on laws of history, 204 on Michelet’s Histoire de France, 17 on racial determinism, 88 Allen, Grant, 117, 257, 260 Alternating-phase law, of history, 204– 205 America in Midpassage (Beard and Beard), 141 American Anthropological Association, 69 American frontier, 173 American Historical Association, 7, 8, 29, 83,105,146, 193,207,208,209 American Historical Review, 75–76

289

290 American historiography, 7, 8–9 economic determinism interpretation of, 194–197 Amyot, Jacques, 57,257 Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians, The (Rollin), 98–99 Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 42–43,63,222 Anne, Queen of England, 73 Anthropology antievolutionism of, 233 comparative method of, 156-158, 163, 174–175,229 contribution to evolutionary theory, 174–175 cultural, moral neutrality of, 65–66 cultural relativism of, 81 Great Man theory of history perspective of, 113–121,129–130 historical relativism of, 81–82 interpretation of racial and cultural differences by, 92–93 investigational techniques of, 228–229 philosophy of history perspective of, 10, 12 postmodernism of, 81 scientific generalization by, 150–151 Antiphon the Sophist, 181 Antiquarianism, 8 Aragon, 94 Archaeology, comparative method of, 163, 165 Archimedes, 181,200 Aristotle, 114–115, 157-158, 166, 257 Politics, 196 Armada, Spanish, 67 Arnold, Matthew, 13,99 Arnold, Thomas, 99,257 Art, as human developmental stage, 5 Artists, free will of, 51, 74 Art of History, The (Black), 11 Assassinations, failed, 67, 68 Astronomy, 200, 253 Athens, 119_120 Atkinson, William C., 257 History of Spain and Portugal, 90 Attacotti, 19–20 Auden, W. H., 122,257

Index Augustine Augustus, Ausubel, Axarquia,

(saint), 95, 257 Emperor, 65 Herman, 257 Battle of, 94

Bacon, Francis, 60,99, 257 The Advancement of Learning, 17,142– 143,199 Novum Organum, 199 Bagby, Philip, 152, 257 Bagehot, Walter, 206,257 Bain, Alexander, 134 Balzac, Honoré 18 Bancroft, George, 16,207,257 History of the United States, 104–105 Baquero, Eduardo Gómez de, 43 Barbarossa, Frederick, 72–73 Barnes, Harry Elmer, 257 on Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 4 description of Henry Osborn Taylor, 105 on evolutionary theory, 166 on German Idealism, 133 on laws of history, 209 on philosophy of history, 3 racial determinism of, 89 on scientific method in history, 10–11 on Toynbee, 107 on truth in history, 8–9 on world history, 34 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 84, 151, 168, 173, 216-217,257 Barrow, Isaac, 180 Barth, Paul, 211,257 Barzun, Jacques, 29,37,86,257 Bastian, Adolf, 133 Battles Actium, 212 Axarquia, 94 Crécy, 81 Fraga, 94 Nájera, 19 Rossbach, 70 Beard, Charles A., 196198,258 America in Midpassage, 141 on Bancroft’s History of the United States, 105 on determinism, 48 The Economic Basis of Politics, 195 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 141, 194–195

Index Beard, Charles A. (cont.) The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, 195 historical relativism of, 81 as New History proponent, 43 The Rise of American Civilization, 195 “That Noble Dream,” 76–77, 78 “Written History as an Act of Faith,” 78–79 Beard, Mary R., 141,195,258 Becker, Carl L., 258 “Detachment in the Writing of History,” 76 on facts of history, 84, 161–162 The Heavenly City of the EighteenthCentury Philosophers, 76 historical relativism of, 81 on history as science, 143, 147 on philosophy of history,11 on religious determinism, 99, 102–103, 107 on Universal History, 34 Becker, Howard, 258 Beesley, Edward S., 51-52, 116, 128,258 Benson, Lee, 258 Berlin, Isaiah, 52, 65, 139, 258 Bernheim, Ernst, 211,258 Lehrbuch der Historischen, 146 Bernier, Olivier, 223, 258 Bernoulli, Jacques, 181 Bernoulli, Jean, 181 Berr-, Henri, 12,34–35,135–136,209,258 Bible, 94, 95,96, 166,206 Binomial theorem, 182 Biography of ancient Greeks and Romans, 109 history as, 221 Bismarck, Otto von, 122, 258 Black, John. B., 9, 19,258 The Art of History, 11 Blanca/Blanche (wife of Louis VIII of France), 69–70, 71 Bloch, Marc, 42, 63, 222,258 Bloomsbury Group, 27 Boas, Franz, 113,164,252,258 Bock, Kenneth E., 80–81,258 Bodin, Jean, 3,31, 167, 212, 258 Method for Easily Understanding History, 3 Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, 101

291 Bonaparte: see Napoleon Bonaparte Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne de, 97-98, 101, 258 Discourse on Universal History, 32, 97, 98, 109 Boswell, James, 1,49, 258 Life of Johnson, 26 Boyle’s law, 251–252 Braudel, Fernand, 17,38,42,43,258 Breisach, Ernst, 148 Breysig, Kurt, 258 Der Stufenbau und die Gesetze der Weltgeschichte, 211 Briggs, Henry, 182 Brinton, Crane, 77,230–231,258 Bryce, James, 34,161,258 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 163,258 on history as science, 158-159 Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, 98, 159, 206 on laws of history, 131,224–225 on philosophy of history, 39 on universal history, 32 Bullitt, William, C., 138,258 Buoyancy, law of, 200 Burckhardt, Jacob, 258 Burgess, Ernest W., 217, 258 Burgess, John W., 258 Buridan, Jean, 99,258 Burke, Edmund, 122,258 Burney, Fanny, 22 Bury, John B., 43,258 on contingency in history, 73 on evolutionary theory, 173–174 on history as literature, 18 on history as science, 146, 161 on ideas as historical determinants, 131-132 on individuals’ role in history, 222 on philosophy of history, 1, 5, 6, 9-10 on static nature of history, 166 “The Science of History,” 28 on Universal History, 31, 32 Butterfield, Herbert, 258 on causation, 86 on facts in history, 4 on Great Man theory of history, 121, 222 on ideas as historical determinants, 132,143 on laws of history, 219

292 Butterfield, Herbert (cont.) on religious determinism, 104 The Whig Interpretation of History, 2– 3,63, 171 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 69 Calculus, 236 Calculus, invention of, 120–121,179–182 Cambridge Modern History, 33 Cambridge University, 6, 8, 132 Idealism movement at, 133, 134 Professor of Modern History, 207 Regius Professor of Modern History, 28, 53, 61, 146 Campanella, Tomasso, 37, 60,258 Capitalists, 194 Capital (Marx), 206 Captain Stormfield‘s Visit to Heaven (Twain), 117-118 Cardano, Geronimo, De substilitate rerum. 169 Carlyle, Thomas, 16, 36, 212,258 definition of history, 13 on determinism, 49 evolutionism of, 169 French Revolution, 24,26 as Great Man theory exponent, 110 Heroes and Hero-Worship, 110 on history as science, 161 on individuals in history, 220 on Scott’s novels, 20 Carneiro, Robert L., 242,245–247,248– 249,250-251 Carr, Edward Hallett, 14-15, 79,258 What Is History? 214 Casanova, 26 Catherine the Great, 22 Catholic Church, 98, 120 Causation, time lag in, 239–240 Causation, 85–107,133,147,159 environmental determinants of, 92 evolutionary, 171 racial determinants of, 86-93 religous determinants of, 93–107 as scientific principle, 199 Cellini, Benvenuto, 26 Celts, 90,91,93 Cerfbeer, T., 59 Challener, Richard D., 209,215 Challenge-and-response principle, 187 Chang, Kwang-chih, 164,258

Index Charlemagne, 65,219–220 Charles VIII, King of France, 96 Chateaubriand, Francois, 258 Chesterfield, Lord, 258 Chesterton, G.K., 67, 113 Cheyney, Edward P., 258 on contingency in history, 73–74 on evolutionary theory, 173 on Great Man theory, 117,118,127, 128-129 Law in History and Other Essays, 53 on laws of history, 208–209,213–214 on medieval social movements, 164–165 on moral judgment by historians, 62– 63 on philosophy of history, 9 on religion, 107 remarks about Joan of Arc, 127 A Short History of England, 44–45 on Trevelyan’s literary style, 25–26 Chiefdoms, 153, 157, 158, 163–164, 183, 184–185 prediction of development of, 243–248 Childe, V. Gordon, 163,236,258 China, development of civilization in, 187,188-190 Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña (anonymous), 94 Chronicles of France, Flanders, England, Scotland and Spain (Froissart), 18,19 Chronology, history as, 1 Cicero, 26 Civil law, Montesquieu on, 57–58 Civil War, American, 231–232 Classical antiquity, see also Greece, ancient; Roman Empire Heroic Age of, 109–110 historians of, 220–221 Cleisthenes, 116 Cleopatra, 66 Clio, 94 Clive, John L., 20,41, 95, 258 Cobban, Alfred, 2 Cochran, Thomas C., 15–16,45,258 Cohen, Morris R., 125,258 Colby, Charles W., 1–2, 259 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 96, 259 Collective behavior, history as, 56 Collingwood, R. G., 93,211,259 Autobiography, 141

Index Columbia University, 165 Seth Low Professor of History, 17 Commager, Henry Steele, 17,64,85, 172, 173,210,259 Community size, relationship to social structure, 242–243 Comparative method, 151–156, 158 in anthropology, 156–158, 163, 174– 175,229 as cross-cultural comparison, 163 for cultural complexity estimation, 249 relationship to social psychology, 135– 136 sociological, 160–161 Comparative Politics (Freeman), 163 Comte, Auguste, 259 Cours de philosophie positive, 205 Henry Thomas Buckle as follower of, 131 John Stuart Mill as follower of, 205– 206 Law of the Three Stages of, 205 opposition to Universal History, 32 positivism of, 145 on religious determinism, 102 on social development, 168 Concentration camps, 65 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine, 3, 131, 168,203,259 Sketch of a Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind, 204 Conklin, Edwin Grant, 119,259 Conquest of Granada, The (Irving), 20 Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (Montesquieu, 203 Constitutions of Greek city-states, 157 U.S., 194, 195 Contingency, in history, 66–74 anthropology’s perspective on, 72–74 distinguished from determinism, 73–74 Continuity, law of, 213 Corday, Charlotte, 224 Cornell University, 6, Corveé, 250-251 Coulborn, Rushton, 153,259 Coursault, Jesse, 161 Cours de philosophie positive (Comte), 205 Creation, The (Haydn), 68

293 Creativity, artistic, 51 Crécy, Battle of, 81 Crete, 109 Minoan civilization of, 187–188 Croce, Benedetto, 141, 259 Cromwell, Oliver, 96, 97, 116, 138 Cross-cultural comparison, 163 Crowther, J. G., 202,259 Crusades, 72–73 Cultural History, 35–43 Macaulay’s contributions to, 39–41 Voltaire’s contributions to, 32, 37–39 Cultural relativism, 81 Culture anthropological analysis of, 174 laws of: see Law(s), of culture racial differences in, 93 science of, 148–150 Culture process, 177-198 definition of, 178,220 distinguished from history, 73–74 influence on individuals, 225–227 of invention, 179–182 of political development, 182–186 Culturologists, 179 Curate of Los Palacios, 94 Custom, 50 Cyclicity, in history, 167–168, 204–205 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 57–58,259 Danton, George Jacques, 138,224 Darwin, Charles, 100–101, 111, 112, 117, 142, 171, 182; see also Evolutionary theory, Darwinian The Origin of Species, 103, 166, 170, 205,206 Darwin, Erasmus, 169 da Vinci, Leonardo, 128,137,201,259 “Decay of Lying, The,” (Wilde), 26 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 1,3–4 16, 19–20,83 Deffand, Madame du, 37,39 Defoe, Daniel, History of the Plague Years, 26 Deists, 101–102 De Mause, Lloyd, 139,259 Democracy, law of, 213 Democracy (Adams), 6 Democratic National Committee, 106 Democrats, Jeffersonians, 194–195 Democritus, 200

294 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), 200 Descartes, René, 99, 100, 180, 199,259 Dioptrique, 202 Discours de la Méthode, 202 Descriptive histiorography, 152 De substilitate rerum (Cardano). 169 “Detachment in the Writing of History” (Becker),76 Determinism, 115 distinguished from contingency, 73–74 distinguished from fatalism, 49–50 distinguished from free will, 47–57, 203 ecological, 191 scientific, 148,200,201 social, 52 Development Aristotle’s theory of, 157–158 cultural, 158 laws of, 248–252 historical, 154 social laws of, 204–205 Developmental stages, of mankind, 5 Diamond, Stanley, 191 Diderot, Denis, 58, 131,259 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 133,148,259 Dioptrique (Descartes), 202 Discours de la Méthode (Descartes), 202 Discourse on Universal History (Bossuet), 32, 97,98, 109 Domesday Book, 79 Domitian, Emperor, 57 Dostoyevsky, Fëodor, 137 Drake, Francis, 67 Draper, John William, 259 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 259 Dryasdust, Rev. Dr. (fictional character), 21 Dryden, John, 113 Du Barry, Madame, 70,71 Dubos, Jean Baptiste, 38-39 Dunning, William A., 15, 16, 259 Duruy, Jean Victor, 66,259 École, Militaire, 69 Ecological determinism, 191 Economic Basis of Politics, The (Beard), 195 Economic determinism, 191 Economic factors, as historical determinants, 190–198

Index Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An (Beard), 141,194–195 Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (Beard), 195 Edinburgh Review, 39-49 Edward IV, King of England, 73 Edward VI, King of England, 73 Eggan, Fred, 238,259 Eighteenth Brumaire (Engels), 206 Einstein, Albert, 50,80,123,259 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 69–70,71 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 128 Elton, Geoffrey R., 82,259 on comparative method, 153 on cultural history, 45 on determinism, 171 on Erikson’s Young Man Luther ..., 139 on historical relativism, 79, 80 on history as literature, 2–28,29 on laws of history, 210,218,223 on objectivity of history, 14 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 24, 131,259 as Great Man theory exponent, 110– 111 ‘History,” 110_111 on history as biography, 221 on ideas as historical determinants, 131 Emerton, Ephraim, 7,259 Eminent Victorians (Strachey), 27, 136– 137 Empiricism, 115, 148, 199 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2, 126 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 126 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 34– 35,136,209 ‘Energy and the Evolution of Culture” (White), 233 Engels, Frederick, 53–55,56,123–124, 226,259; see also Marxist theory Eighteenth Brumaire, 206 on ideas as behavioral determinants, 142 Ludwig Feuerbach, 206 social determinism of, 206 England, cultural history in, 39–40,43, 45 English Social History (Trevelyan), 41 Enlightenment, 3,101–102 French, 131,168 ideological influences during, 130–131 universal history during, 32

Index Environmental determinism, 92 Erikson, E. H., Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, 139 Essay on the Manners and Customs of Nations, (Voltaire), 37 Essays, historical, 39–40 Ethics (Spinoza), 203 Ethnography comparative method of, 163–164 of 17th-century England, 41 Ethnology, German Idealism and, 133 Eudoxus, 181 Euler, Leonhard, 247,259 Euphrates Valley, 184 Events as focus of history, 1, 3–4, 8–9, 158 New Historians’ interpretation of, 44_45 Voltaire’s dissatisfaction with, 37–38 general classes of, 219 as historical forms, 174 historical laws based on, 216–217 narrative history of, 16 objective reality of, 79 order of, 12 Evolutionary distance, of traits, 248–252 Evolutionary Potential, Law of, 214–215, 235–237 Evolutionary theory of culture, 233–234 Darwinian, 100–101, 103, 111, 112, 117,166,180,205,206,207 simultaneous development of, 182 in history, 165–175 anthropology‘s contribution to, 174– 175 opposition to, 170–173 political, 166 pre-Darwinian, 167–170 in sociology and anthropology, 205 Experimentation, scientific, 201,228 Facts, see also Events; Particularism as focus of history, 8–9, 11,83–84 historians’ intrepretation of, 13, 14–15, 77,79 narrative recounting of, 15–18 Fanatics, 111–112 Fatalism, distinguished from determinism, 49–50

295 Febvre,

Lucien, 34–35,42,43,136,209, 259 Feder, Alfred, 218,259 Federalist Papers, 196 Federalist Party, 194 Fénelon, Francois de, 37,259 Fermi, Enrico, 123 Ferraro, Joseph, 55 Feudalism, 129,166,172,225,226 comparative study of, 153 Feudal Monarchy in France and England (Petit-Dutaillis), 139–140 Fichte, Johann Gottfried, 4, 5, 132 Addresses to the German Nation, 87 Finley, Moses I., 259 Fisher, H. A. L., 259 History of Europe, 72 Fiske, John, 50–51,259 on the Constitution, 194 on Great Man Theory, 111, 112, 221 on institutional history, 45 on laws of history, 206-207 on social development, 174 Fling, Fred Morrow, 217-219,259 Flint, Robert, 259 Folklore in the Old Testament (Frazer), 175 Fontenelle, Bernard De, 57, 259 Ford, Henry, 13 Forster, E. M., 27 Fouché, Joseph, 138 Founding Fathers, 194 Fraga, Battle of, 94 France, Anatole, 2627,259 France, cultural history in, 37–39, 42–43 Frank, Jerome, 14,67,259 Frank, Tenney, 259 Franklin, Benjamin, Poor Richard‘s Almanac, 66 Frazer, James G., 89, 132,259 Folklore in the Old Testament, 175 Psyche’s Task, 225 Free consent, law of necessity of, 213 Freedom of the Mind in History (Taylor), 105 Freeman, Edward A., 36, 161,259 Comparative Politics, 163 Free will, 159 determinism versus, 47-57, 74,203 French Enlightenment, 131, 168 French history, 59

296 French Revolution, 59,63–64, 71,73,96– 97, 168,222,223,224,229–230 French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 24 Freud, Sigmund, 136,259 Moses and Monotheism, 137–138 Froissart, Jean, 6, 161,260 Chronicles of France, Flanders, England, Scotland and Spain, 18, 19 Froude, James Anthony, 47,58,75,83, 208,260 History of England, 25 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa, 75, 145, 260 History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France, 61–62 Galileo, 99, 112, 180, 199 law of falling bodies, 201–202, 215– 216,218 Galton, Francis, 117,260 Gardiner, Patrick, 2, 11,85,260 Garner, John Nance, 67 Gay, Peter, 3,41, 79, 81,260 Geisteswissenschaft, 148–150 Generalization by anthropologists, 150–151 historians’ attitudes toward, 229 historical, 158, 170–171 statistical, 237, 238 “Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law, The” (Zilsel), 200 Genius, see also Great Man theory, of history of inventors, 120–121 Macaulay’s statement on, 113–114 unrecognized, 117–118 Germany, cultural history in, 42 Geyl, Pieter, 106, 172,260 Gibbon, Edward, 1,95, 118, 161, 167,260 conversion to Catholicism, 97 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1,3–4,16,19–20,83 literary style of, 19-20 Ginsberg, Morris, 118,260 Gladstone, William Ewarts, 122, 194, 260 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 260 The Inequalities of the Human Races, 87 God, German Idealists’ concept of, 134 God’s will, history as expression of: see Religious interpretations, of history

Index Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 208 Gould, Stephen J., 74,260 Gouldner, Alvin, 81,260 Gracchi, 138 Grant, Ulysses S., 118 Gravity, law of, 201–202,215–216,218 Great Cultural Traditions, The (Turner), 152–153 Great Man theory, of history, 109–143 anthropological perspective on, 113– 121,129–130 facilitators versus deflectors concept of, 124–127 opponents of, 115–119 “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment’’ (James), 112 Greatness, historical figures’ comments on, 121–130 Greece, ancient city-states of, constitutions of, 157 epics of, 109 Great Man theory applied to, 119–120 mathematics of, 181 philosophers of, 166; see also Names of individual philosophers Greek Political Thought (Toynbee), 154– 155 Green, J. R., 36, 58–59, 260 Green, Thomas Hill, 133–134,260 Gregory, James, 182 Grimm, Jacob, 5–6, 260 Grote, George, 260 History of Greece, 52 Guedalla, Philip, 30, 67, 260 Guest, M. J., 260 Handbook of English History, 88 Guizot, Francois, 63–64,260 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 61,128, 133,226, 260 Gunnery, principle of, 201 Guns of August, The (Tuchman),147 Gurevich, Aaron, 55 Guttman scale analysis, 248–249 Habit, 50 Hahn, Otto, 123 Hallam, Henry, 260 Handbook of English History (Guest), 88 Handlin, Oscar, 260 Hannibal, 66 Hanno, Pleriplus, 26

Index Haydn, Joseph, The Creation, 68 Hayes, Carlton J. H., 260 Heeren, Arnold Ludwig, 260 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 2,4–5,6, 10, 55, 102, 103, 132, 133, 193,260; see also Idealism, German evolutionism of, 169 Philosphy of Law, 192 remarks about Napoleon, 110 Heisenberg, Werner, 123,260 Henry Esmond (Thackeray), 36 Henry Prince of Wales, 73 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 4–5, 102, 260 evolutionism of, 168-169 laws of history of, 204 Thoughts Concerning the Philosophy of Man’s History, 168_169 Herodotus, 26,220–221 Heroes, see also Great Man theory, of history of classical antiquity, 109-110 Heroes and Hero-Worship (Carlyle), 110 Heyne, Christian Gottlieb, 236, 260 Higham, John, 7,16,41,45–46,133,194, 197 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 27, 81, 260 Histoire de France (Michelet), 17, 90-91, 167-168 Histoire de la Révolution Francaise (Mignet), 63-64,110 Historians, see also Names of individual historians American, religious determinism of, 104–105 birth and death dates of, 257–265 British, racial determinism of, 88–90 French as proponents of social psychology, 135–136 racial determinism of, 90–91 German, racial determinism of, 87– 88 moral judgments by, 57–66 Rationalist, 4 rejection of philosophy of history by, 1– 3 scientific, opposition to narrative history, 28–29 Historical materialism, 191 Historical relativism, 15, 74–82

297 History: Its Purpose and Method (Renier), 215 History, see also Cultural history; Narrative history; Universal history as chronology, 1 as collective behavior, 56 definitions of, 13–15,55,67,72, 76,77 practice of, 15–16 scope of, 13–15 “History,” (Emerson), 110–111 History of England From the Accession of James II, The (Macaulay), 16, 23–24,40–41,76 History of England (Froude), 25 History of England (Hume), 4 History of England (Lecky), 85–86 History of English Literature (Taine), 221 History of Europe (Fisher), 72 History of France (Michelet), 17, 90-91, 167–-168 History of Greece (Grote), 52 History of Scotland (Robertson), 154 History of Spain and Portugal (Atkinson), 90 History of the Crusades (Runciman), 84 History of the French Revolution (Mignet), 63-64, 110 History of the Plague Years (Defoe), 26 History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France (de Coulanges), 61– 62 History of the Sciences, A (Mason), 200 History of the United States (Bancroft), 104–105 History of the World (Raleigh), 75 Hitler, Adolf, 64-66 Hitti, Philip, 260 Hobbes, Thomas, 196 Hockett, Homer C., 29,260 Hofstadter, Richard, 17, 27, 260 Holt, W. Stull, 8, 209–210 Hook, Sidney, 117, 118–119, 196,226, 260 Houghton, Walter E., 169,260 House, Floyd, 101,260 Households, development of, 157 Howard, Michael, 63,17, 165, 260 Hughes, H. Stuart, 27,30,77,139,146, 260 Huizinga, Johan, 16–17,77,260

298 Hume, David, 1,58, 161, 167, 261 History of England, 4 Hundred Years' War, 18 Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, 253 Huxley, Julian, 112–113,261 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 50,54,261 Hypotheses testing, 228 Idealism French, 133 German, 4–5,6–7,102,132–135,148, 191 influence on British philosophers, 133-134 influence on twentieth-century history, 141–143 Ideas, as historical determinants, 130– 143 Ideology economic determinism versus, 197–198 Marxist theory of, 193 Idiographic approach, 149, 150,216–217 If, Or History Rewritten, 67 Ikhnaton, 116, 137 Iliad, 18 Imagination, literary, 26-27 Impermanence, law of, 213 Individuals, see also Great Man theory, of history historians' focus on, 220-227 influence of culture process on, 225– 227 role in historical events, 56–57 role in the origin of the state, 177–178 Induction, 199 Inertia, law of, 202 Inheritance, 154 Institutional history, 45–46 Interdependence, law of, 213 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,11,85 Interpretation, 79,83–84; see also Causation particularism versus, 83-85 scientific, 147 Introduction to the History of Civitization in England (Buckle), 98,159,206 Introduction to the History of Western Europe (Robinson), 44,63 Introduction to the Study of History (Langlois and Signobos), 145–146

Index Intuition, 148 Invention culture process of, 179–182 role of genius in, 120–121 simultaneous, 235–236 Irving, Washington, 261 The Conquest of Granada, 20 Islam, 127 Ivanhoe (Scott), 20–21 Jackson, Andrew, 121–122,261 Jackson, Gabriel, 45,72,196,223–224, 261 James, Arthur, 71 James, William, 49,89, 117,261 on Great Man theory, 112, 117 "Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment," 112 on laws of history, 208 Jevons, Stanley, 146, 261 Joan of Arc, 118–119,127 John, King of England, 58–59,60, 139– 140 psychosis of, 139-140 Johnson, Andrew, 16 Johnson, Samuel, 1,49,261 "The Vanity of Human Wishes," 165 Joliot, 123 Josephine Bonaparte, 68 Journal of Psychohistory, 139 Julius Caesar, 66 Kant,

Immanuel, 31–32,102,133–134, 261 Kaplan, Justin, 261 Keller, Albert G., 128, 162,261 Kepler, Johannes, 99, 100,199,261 laws of planetary motion, 100, 181, 201-202,255 ibn Khaldun, Abdal-Raman, 31, 261 King, Martin Luther Jr., 55–56,261 Kingsley, Charles, 88, 100–101, 103–104, 146,261 as Great Man theory exponent, 110– 111, 116,221 on individuals in history, 221 on laws of history, 207–208,211 racial determinism of, 88 "The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History," 53 Kinship, lineal, terminology of, 238–239

Index Kramer, Edna E., 69,261 The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, 181 Kroeber, A. L., 119, 152, 233,261 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 48–49, 51,261 Kubler, George, 261 Kuikuru, 241,242 Kulturgeschichte, 42, 133, 134 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 169 Lamprecht, Karl, 116–117,134–135,211, 261 Langlois, Charles V., 145–146,261 Laplace, Pierre Simon, 69 Mécanique Céleste, 116 Last Judgment, 96 Law(s) Boyle’s, 251–252 causal, 240 of culture, 224–225,233–255 anthropologists’ formulation of, 229 complexity as function of size, 241– 243 of cultural development, 248-252 predictive, 243–248 statistical, 237–255 of Evolutionary Potential, 214–215, 235-237 of gravity, 201–202,215–216,218 of history, 54,55, 199–232 development of, 203–207 historians’ denial of, 209–210 historians’ opposition to, 207–208, 218–219 historians’ support for, 208–209,219 proposed, 210–220 Montesquieu on, 57–58 natural, 53, 99–100, 101, 102,104, 107, 159,199 prescriptive, 199 proscriptive, 199 scientific, 206 Boyle’s law, 251–252 of buoyancy, 200 definition of, 199 elemental form of, 227–228 origin of, 199-202 of universal gravitation, 202,240– 24 1 of squares, 212–213 of the Three Stages, 205

299 Law in History and Other Essays, 53 Law of Civilization and Decay, The (Adams), 212 Law of Evolutionary Potential, 236–237 Lea, Henry C., 7,62,261 Leaders historians’ moral judgment about, 58– 59, 60, 62 of social movements, 55 Le Bon, Gustave, 91,111-112,261 Lecky, W. E. H., 27,125,261 History of England, 85–86 Lee, Lightfoot Mrs. (fictional character), 6 Lee, Maurice Jr. 209,215 Leff, Gordon, 72,210,261 Lehrbuch der Historischen (Bernheim), 146 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 120-121, 168, 180, 181–182,261 Lenin, Vladimir, 124 Leo III (Pope), 219–220 Leopold of Austria, 223 Lesser, Alexander, 239–240,261 Leszczynska, Maria, 70 Leucippus, 115,200 Lever, law of, 200 Lewis, A. H., 121-122 Life of Johnson (Boswell), 26 Lifton, Robert Jay,137–138,261 Lincoln, Abraham, 121, 261 Lincoln College, Oxford, 134 Linguistics, Grimm’s “law,” of, 214 Literature, narrative history as, 18–30 Carlyle’s influence on, 24–25 Macaulay’s influence on, 22–24, 25 Scott’s influence on, 20–23 Strachey’s influence on, 25–26, 29-30 Trevelyan’s influence on, 25–26,29–30 Lives of the Saints, 26 Lives (Plutarch), 57, 109 Livy, 220–221 Locke, John, 113,196 Logarithms, 182 London, 1685, Macaulay’s description of, 23–24 Lorentz, Konrad, 123 Louis XV of France, 70 Louis XVI, 224 Louis VIII, 69, 71 Low, Seth, 165

300 Lowie, Robert H., 113,261 Lucretius, 261 De Rerum Natura, 200 Ludwig, Emil, 221, 261 Ludwig Feuerbach (Engeld, 206 Lung-shan culture, 189 Luther, Martin, 117 Lycothenes, Conrad, 26 Lycurgus, 109–110 Mably, Gabriel Bonnet de, 109–110,261 MacArthur, Robert, 253 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 84,261 contribution to cultural history, 39–41 Dryden essay, 113–114 “History,” 22, 39–40 The History of England From the Accession of James II, 16,23–24,40–41 literary style of, 21–24 on Scott’s novels, 21, 22 Machiavelli, 60, 196 Madison, James, 195 Magdalenians, 236 Magnitude, relationship to abundance, 253–254 Mailly, Madame de, 70 Maistre, Joseph de, 261 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 179 Malory, Thomas, 26 Malta, 163–164 Marat, Jean Paul, 138,224 Margoliouth, D. S., 126, 261 Mark Antony, 66 Markham, Felix, 68,261 Martin, Bishop of Tours, 98 Martineau, James, 48, 261 Marx, Karl, 53–55,192–193,196,261 Capital, 206 on German Idealism, 132–133 on individuals in history, 221 social determinism of, 206 Marxist theory, 193, 194 American histography and, 195–197 of free will versus determinism, 53–55 Mason, Stephen, A History of the Sciences, 200 Masson, David, 134 Mass psychology, 135 Mastre, Joseph de, 97 Materialism, 115 historical, 191

Index Mathematics, see also Calculus culture process in, 179–182 Maurois, André 67 Maya, 191 Mayne, Richard, 42 McCombs, William F., 106 McGill University, Kingsford Professor of History, 1–2 McGrew, R. E., 152,223 McNeill, William H., 84–85, 151, 152, 219,261 Mécanique Céleste (Laplace), 116 Medieval Cities (Pirenne), 92 Meinecke, Friedrich, 49, 147,261 Method for Easily Understanding History (Bodin), 3 Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (Bodin), 101 Method of exhaustion, 181 Meyer, Eduard, 209,211,215,262 Michelangelo, 128 Michelet, Jules, 161, 262 History of France, 17, 90-91, 167–168 Middle Ages architectural achievement during, 120 concept of human progress during, 166 concept of ideas during, 130 historical writing during, 31,94,95–96 invention of stirrups during, 182 social development during, 164 Mignet, Francois Auguste, 262 Histoire de la Révolution Francaise, 63–64,110 Mill, John Stuart, 133–134,262 as Great Man theory exponent, 110– 111, 114–115 on ideas as historical determinants, 131 on laws of history, 159 on national character, 92 System of Logic, 4748,205-206 Millennium (1,0000 AD), 96 Milton, John, 113 Mind, 134 Minoan civilization, 187–188 Minos, King of Crete, 109 Mirabeau, Honoré, 224 Miracles, 95, 98, 101 Mohammed, 112,117,124 as “abnormal” historical figure, 124, 125–128 Mommsen, Theodor, 58,87,212,262

Index Monarchs, see also Names of individual kings and queens Montesquieu on, 57-58 Monarchy, 174 Monk of Croyden, 18 Monod, Gabriel, 262 Monotheism, 116,137 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 39,262 Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, 203 The Spirit of the Laws, 57–58,203 Moors, 94 Morality, social, 52 Moral judgments, in history, 57–66 Moral progress, law of, 213 Morgan, Lewis H., 170 Morrison, J. Cottee, 2 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 137–138 Motley, John L., The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 16, 59, 89 Murdock, George P., 262 Social Structure, 238–239 Murray, Gilbert, 18,262 Mythology, 92,227–228 Nájera, Battle of, 19 Namier, Lewis B., 15, 16, 77,84, 135, 139,262 Napier, John, 182 Napoleon Bonaparte, 26, 65, 73, 117, 121, 258 contingency in life of, 68–69 Engel’s statement about, 123–124 Hegel’s remarks about, 110 Wells’ on, 41–42 Narrative history, 15–18 focus of, 30–31 as literature, 18–30 Carlyle’s influence on, 24–25 Macaulay’s influence on, 22–24, 25 Scott’s influence on, 20–23 Strachey’s influence on, 25–26,29–30 Trevelyan’s influence on, 25–26,29– 30 National character, 90,91,92 Natural History (Pliny), 26 Natural law, 53,99–100,101, 102, 104, 107, 159,199 Natural science, 148–149, 172–173 objectivism as basis of, 80

301 Natural selection, 172-173, 182 Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, The (Kramer), 181 Naturwissenschaft, 148–149 Necessity, 54–55 Nelson, Lynn H., 94, 262 Neolithic period, 163–164, 183–184, 189, 236,244–245 Nevins, Allan, 28, 77, 173, 195,227, 262 New History, 10,43–46 historical relativism of, 77 moral neutrality of, 62-63 objectives of, 216 New History, The (Robinson), 193–194 Newman, John Henry (cardinal), 27 New Science, The (Vico), 101, 167–168 Newton, Isaac, 99, 100, 112, 113, 114, 118,122–123, 142,167,262 calculus of, 120–121, 179–182 on his contributions to science, 122– 123 intellect of, 114 law of universal gravitation, 202, 240– 241 Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, 202 New York Times, 195 Nichol, John P., 100 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 262 Nightingale, Florence, 136 Nile Valley, 184 Nomos, 200 Nomothetic approach, 149,150,216–217 Nordau, Max, 11,262 Nordic myth, 92 Northwestern University, 72 Novels, historical, 18, 20–22 Novum Organum (Bacon), 199 Oakeshott, Michael, 77, 217, 262 Objectivity, historical, 74-82 Odyssey, 18 Olaus Magnus, 26 Oman, Charles, 7, 15,72, 124, 125–126, 161,262 “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; Appled to Laws of Marriage and Descent” (Tylor), 238 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 103, 166, 170,205,206

302 Orloff, Count, 22-23 Otto I, Emperor of Germany, 96 Outline of History, The (Wells), 34,41– 42,89 Oxford University, 97, 165, 210 Idealism movement at, 133, 134 Lincoln College, 134 Professor of Modern History, 146 Regius Professor of History, 25, 77,208 Paleolithic period, 183 Parallelogram of forces, 56 Paris Academy, 247 Parkman, Francis, 20,262 Particularism historians’ dissatisfaction with, 169 historical interpretation versus, 83–85 Pascal, Blaise, 180,262 Pensées, 66 Pattison, Mark, 134,262 Payne, Edward John, 85,262 Pensées (Pascal), 66 Periplus (Hanno), 26 Perkin, Harold, 2,262 Peter the Hermit, 112 Petit-Dutaillis, C., 262 Feudal Monarchy in France and England, 139–140 Phenomena, 151,152,155,219-220 comparative study of, 164 uniqueness of, 229 Philip II, King of Spain, 59, 62, 65 Philip of Macedon, 124 Philosophers, see also Names of individual philosophers British, influence of German Idealism on, 133-134 German, historical philosophy of, 4–6 Philosophes, 131 Philosophy Great Man theory of, 114–115 of history, 1–12 application to universal history, 3 1– 32 definition of, 11 development of, 3–5 historians’ acceptance of, 9–12 historians’ opposition to, 1–3,5–9 metaphysical, 4, 6, 10 theological, 4–5 Southwest German School of, 148

Index Philosophy of History, The (Voltaire), 37 Philosophy of History (Schlegel), 5 Philosophy of Law (Hegel), 192 Physics classical, 150 Newtonian, 167 Pirenne, Henri, 33–34,84,217 Medieval Cities, 92 Planetary motion, Kepler’s law of, 100, 181,201–202,255 Planetary motion, laws of, 255 Plato, 114–115, 130 Plekhanov, George, 121, 128,262 Pleriplus (Hanno), 26 Pliny, Natural History, 26 Plumb, J ohn H., 8,262 Plutarch, 221,262 Lives, 57 Poetry, narrative history as, 24–25 Poincaré, Jules, 123 Pelitical development, culture process of, 182-186 Politics (Aristotle), 196 Polybius, 31, 60, 93–94, 166,262 Pompadour, Madame de, 70,71 Poor Richard‘s Almanac (Franklin), 66 Pope Leo 111,219–220 Population growth, 244–247 Population growth, influence on political development, 183–184 Positivism, 145, 222 Postmodernism, 81 Powell, Frederick York, 18,262 Powicke, Maurice, 262 Prehistory, 154 Prescott, William H., 161,262 Princeton University, 138 Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (Newton), 202 Principles of a New Science of the Nature of Nations (Vico), 31, 101, 167– 168,203 Principles of Sociology, The (Spencer), 116,160–161, 170,173 Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon (Lycothenes), 26 “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (Spencer), 170 Prolegomena to Universal History (Ibn Khaldun), 31 Protestant Ethic, The (Weber), 198

Index Providential theory, of history, 95 Psyche’s Task (Frazer), 225 Psychoanalytic interpretations, of history, 136–139 Psychohistory, 139 Psychological interpretations, of history, 134–141 Psychology, social, 134–135, 140 Punctuated equilibria theory, 74 Pyrrhus, 66 Rabelais, Francois, 191 Racial determinants, of history, 86– 93 as opposition to comparative history, 153-154 during sixteenth century, 167 Raleigh, Walter, 262 History of the World, 75 Ranke, Leopold von, 171–172,262 on goal of historians, 75 Hegelianism of, 6 on history as science, 147, 150 on human freedom, 48 Lord Acton’s criticism of, 28 on particularism in history, 16 on the practice of history, 15 religious determinism of, 102–103 on universal history, 33 Raphael, 117,128 Rationalis Philosophiae (Campanella), 37 Rationality, 148 Ratzel, Friedrich, 14, 88, 262 Reflection, optical law of, 200 Reform Bill of 1832,220 Refraction, law of, 202,226 Reichenbach, Hans, 240, 262 Relativism, historical, 15, 74-82 Religion, Montesquieu on, 57-58 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawney), 198 Religious determinants, of history, 93– 107,155 German Idealism and, 133 laws of history and, 211 Renaissance historical writing during, 31 Italian, artistic achievement during, 120,128 Renan, Ernest, 145,262

303 Renfrew, Colin, 163, 262 Before Civilization m, 163–164 Renier, G. J., 14, 129, 138, 217,262 History: Its Purpose and Method, 215 Rerum Natura, De (Lucretius), 200 Retrogressive theory, of history, 167 Revolutionaries, psychoanalysis of, 138– 139 Revolutions historical parallels of, 229–231 Marxist theory of, 192–193 Revue de synthése historique, 135–136 Richard II of England, 73 Richard the Lionhearted, 223 Rickert, Heinrich, 133, 262 Rise of American Civilization, The (Beard and Beard), 195 Rise of the Dutch Republic, The (Motley), 16,59, 89 Robertson, William, 263 History of Scotland, 154 Robespierre, Maximilien, 68, 138 Robinson, James Harvey, 6, 7, 39,46, 77, 216,263 concept of history, 14 on the Deists, 102 on historians’ moral neutrality, 62 Introduction to the History of Western Europe, 44, 63 on laws of history, 209 The New History, 193–194 as New History founder, 10, 43–44, 193–194 on prehistory, 154 on the relationship of history and literature, 28–29 on religious determinism, 93–94, 107 Roman History, 87 on social psychology, 135 Rollin, Charles, 263 The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians, 98– 99 Roman Empire, 66–67 German tribes’ attacks on, 104,214 Gibbon’s history of, 1,3–4, 16, 19–20, 83 historians of, 18, 31 history of, contingency in, 66–67

304 Roman History (Robinson), 87 Rome and China, A Study of Correlations in Historical Events (Teggart), 214 Roosevelt, Franklin D., attempted assassination of, 67 Ross, Edward A., 263 Rossbach, Battle of, 70 Rowse, A. L., 25, 143,263 on causation in history, 85,86 on contingency in history, 73–74 on economic determinism, 194 on evolution, 173–174 on the French Revoluiton, 59 on historical writing as literature, 30 on history as social science, 146 on laws of history, 226 on Marxist economic theory, 194 racial determinism of, 90 on Raleigh’s History of the World, 19 on religious determinism, 107 The Use of History, 237–238 “Rule of Phase Applied to History, The” (Adams), 212–213 Runciman, Steven, 263 History of the Crusades, 84 Runciman, W.G., 215,263 Russell, Bertrand, 7, 52, 151, 263 Russian Revolution, 229–230 Said, 92 St. Augustine, 95,257 St. Martin, 98 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 110, 263 Saint Louis Exposition, Congress of Arts and Science, 9 Saints, 95 Saint-Simon, Comte de, 204–205,263 Saliceti, Antoine Cristophe, 68 Sallust, 220–221 Saveth, Edward N., 263 Savonarola, 96 Scalogram, 249-250 Schapiro, J. Salwyn, 204,263 Schelling, Friedrich von, 4, 5, 102, 132, 263 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 4,263 Philosophy of History, 5 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 227,263

Index Science of culture, 148–150 of history, 145–175 comparative method of, 151–153, 162–165 historians’ opposition to, 145–147 historians’ support for, 145 influence on historical interpretation, 99-100, 101, 103, 105 Science of Culture, The (White), 233–234 235 “Science of History, The” (Bury), 28 Scientific method, 228 Scienza nuova, La (The New Science) (Vico), 203 Scott, Walter, 18, 167, 263 History of the World, 19 Ivanhoe, 20–21 Waverly novels of, 21 Secular interpretation, of history, 93–94, 99–102, 103,104,105, 107 Sée, Henri, 263 Seeley, John R., 28,263 Seignobos, Charles, 145–146,263 Seligman, E. R. A., 197, 263 Service, Elman R., 236-237,263 Law of Evolutionary Potential, 214– 215 Seven Years’ War, 70 Shakespeare, William, 12, 115, 117, 118 Shang civilization, 189–190 Shaw, George Bernard, 127 Short History of England, A (Cheyney), 44–45 Shotwell, James T., 14, 43, 263 Simmel, Georg, 242, 263 Sismondi, Jean de, 57 Sketch of a Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet), 204 Slavery, 64 Sloane, William Milligan, 6, 17, 39, 165, 263 Smith, Goldwin, 69, 263 on the Great Man theory of history, 117 on moral judgments by historians, 62 on the philosophy of history, 11–12,48 on prediction, 243 Smith, Lacey Baldwin, 72,263 Smith, Preserved, 36–37,99,263

Index Social History: see Cultural History Social institutions, historical study of, 45-46 Socialism, scientific, 54 “Social Organism, The,” (Spencer), 103, 115 Social science, history as, 158–162 Social Statics (Spencer), 115 Social structure, relationship to community size, 242-243 Social Structure (Murdock), 238–239 Sociocultural determinism, 124 Sociology comparative, 152, 160–161 general theory of, 2 influence on institutional history, 45– 46 perspective on laws of history, 217–218 philosophy of history perspective of, 10–11 Spencer’s contributions to, 159–161, 162 subjectivism of, 81 Socrates, 114–115 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 95–96,263 Soubise, General, 70 Spartacus, 138 Spartans, 109-110 Specialists, full-time craft, 250–251 Specialization, of historians, 9 Species, size relationship of, 253 Spencer, Herbert, 133–134, 171, 174, 263 comparative method of, 162-163 contributions to sociology, 159–161, 162 on the development of science, 252–253 evolutionism of, 170 First Principles, 205 as Great Man theory critic, 115–116 on the Greek epics, 109 on historical change, 225 on history as science, 159 The Principles of Sociology, 116, 160– 161, 170,173 “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” 170 Social Statics, 115 The Study of Sociology, 115–116 “The Social Organism,” 103, 115 Spinning wheel, invention of, 182 Spinoza, Benedict de (Baruch), 263 Ethics, 203

305 Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 198 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 57–58,203 Sprenger, Aloys, 126 Stages, historical, duration of, mathematical laws of, 212–213 Starr, Chester G., 92, 146–147,263 Stasis, of history, 166, 167 State definition of, 186 origin of, 156–158 anthroplogical concept of, 158 in China, 164 culture process in, 177–178, 185– 186,190 role of individuals in, 177–178 Statistical laws, of culture, 237–255 Stefan-Boltzmann Law, 241–242 Stephen, Leslie, 206, 263 Stern, Fritz, 38, 153, 263 Stirrups, invention of, 182 Strachey, Lytton, 27,263 Eminent Victorians, 136–137 Stubbs, William, 263 Study of History, A (Toynbee), 35,106– 107,155–156,186-189 Study of Sociology, The (Spencer), 115– 116 Stufenbau und die Gesetze der Weltgeschichte, Der (Breysig), 211 Subjectivism, 81, 135, 141 Substilitate rerum, De (Cardano),169 Suetonius, 26 Swain, J. W., 161,263 Swanton, John R., 113,263 Symonds, John Addington, 111,263 System of Logic, A (Mill), 47-48, 115, 205–206 Tacitus, 26,57,93–94,161,220–221,263 Taine, Hippolyte, 145,263 History of English Literature, 221 Tarde, Gabriel, 263 Tartaglia, Niccolò, 201, 264 Tasmanian aborigines, 241 Tawney, R. H., 264 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 198 Taylor, Henry Osborn, 58,105,264 Freedom of the Mind in History, 105

306 Technology, during seventeenth century, 202 Teggart, Frederick J., 7,171,221–222, 264 Rome and China, A Study of Correlations in Historical Events, 214 Tennessee Gas Transmission Company, 67 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 264 Henry Esmond, 36 “That Noble Dream,” (Beard), 76–77, 78 The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Becker), 76 The Inequalities of the Human Races (de Gobineua), 87 Themistocles, 111 Theologians, 4–5, 133 Theory, 7 Thierry, Augustin, 63–64, 264 Thoughts Concerning the Philosophy of Man’s History (Herder), 168-169 Thucydides, 93–94,220–221 Time lag, in causation, 239–240 Todd, Arthur J., 135,264 Tolstoy, Leo, 264 War and Peace, 50 Toynbee, Arnold J., 11, 93, 96, 154–155, 219,264 comparative metehod of, 154–156 Greek Political Thought, 154–155 on history as science, 146 A Study of History, 35, 106–107, 155– 156,186–189 Tradition, 50 Traits, evolutionary distance of, 248–252 Trevelyan, George M., 28, 197,264 English Social History, 41 on facts in history, 83 on Gibbon, 167 on history as literature, 29-30 on history as science, 146, 147 ‘If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo,” 69 on laws of history, 216 literary style of, 25 on narrative history, 15 racial determinism of, 88 on Scott’s Ivanhoe, 20 Trevor-Roper, H. R., 153–154,264 Trobriand Islands, 179 Troeltsch, Ernst, 6, 133,264

Index Trotsky, Leon, 236,264 Tuchman, Barbara, 3,79,137,147,264 The Guns of August, 147 Turgot, A. R. Jacques, 3,39, 131, 168, 205,264 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 14,43,79, 173,264 Turner, Ralph E., 264 The Great Cultural Traditions, 152–153 Twain, Mark, 13,22, 127, 264 biography of, 112 Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 117–118 Tylor, Edward B., 170,225, 264 “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions; Appled to Laws of Marriage and Descent,” 238 Tyndall, John, 264 Ulysses, 109 U.S. Congress, legislative process of, 56– 57 U.S. News and World Report, 67 Universal history, 30–35, 151, 158–159, 167 application of philosophy of history to, 31–32 Voltaire’s contributions to, 32 University College, London, 2 University of Berlin, 6 University of California, San Diego, 45, 72,196 University of Manchester, 72,210 University of Pennsylvania, 45, 208-209 University of Strassburg, 42, 149 University of Texas, 29 Urraca (daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine), 69-70, 71 Use of History, The (Rowse), 237-238 Valley of Mexico, 184 “Vanity of Human Wishes, The” (Johnson), 165 Veblen, Thorstein, 236,264 Verification, 228, 229 Veyne, Paul, 217,264 Vico, Giambattista, 3, 31, 264 Principles of a New Science of the Nature of Nations (La scienza nuova...), 31, 101, 167–168, 203

Index Vietnam War, 81 Villages development of, 157, 183, 184 frissioning of, 254–255 Vinci, Leonardo da, 128, 137,201,259 Vinsauff, Geoffrey de, 18 Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet, 26–27, 32, 75, 98, 117, 131, 264 The Age of Louis XIV, 37,38–39 contributions to cultural history, 32, 37-39 contributions to universal history, 32 definition of history by, 76 Essay on the Manners and Customs of Nations, 37 The Philosophy of History, 37 Wagner, Richard, 87 Wallace, Alfred, 182 Wallis, John, 180 Walsh, W. H., 155,210,264 War influence on political development, 183–184,185,244–247 psychoanalytical interpretation of, 139 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 50 Ward, Lester, 119–120,264 Watt, James, 115–116 Waverly novels, of Sir Walter Scott, 21 Webb, Walter Prescott, 29, 264 Weber, Max, 264 The Protestant Ethic, 198 The Spirit of Capitalism, 198 Webster, Daniel, 196 Wei River, 189 Wellhausen, Julius, 126,264 Wells, H.G., 88-89 The Outline of History, 34,4142, 89, 209 Westermarck, Edward, 152, 264 What Is History? (Carr), 214

307 Whig Interpretation of History, The (Butterfield), 2–3, 63, 171 White, Andrew D., 6, 161,264 White, Leslie A., 69, 170–171, 178–179, 191,233,264 “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” 233 on Great Man theory, 118 The Science of Culture, 233–234,235 White, Lynn T., 182, 264 White, Morton, G., 43, 133, 218,264 Wilde, Oscar, 30,60,264 “The Decay of Lying,” 26 Willcox, William B., 142,153,155–156,264 Wilson, Woodrow, 105–106 psychoanalytical studies of, 137, 138 Windelband, Wilhelm, 133,148-150,264 Winsor, Justin, 264 Wish, Harvey, 265 Woolf, Virginia, 27 “Written History as an Act of Faith” (Beard), 78–79 Wundt, Wilhelm, 133, 265 Wycliffe, John, 117 Xenophon, 220–221 Xénopol, Alexandru, 218,265 Yale University, 79, 165,208 Yang-shao culture, 189 Yangtze Valley, China, 188 Yellow River, China, 188, 189 Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (Erikson), 139 Zermak, Mayor, 67 Zilsel, Edgar, 214, 265 ’The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law, ” 200,201,202 Zinn, Howard, 265