The Politics of History. Howard Boone's Zinn
Читать онлайн книгу.
Novick says, and points out that von Ranke was far from “objective,” as in his statement: “God dwells, lives, and can be known in all of history.”)
For instance, the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in “The Faith of a Historian,” published around 1940, said he did not aim to instruct the present but “to simply explain the event exactly as it happened.” Yet, in the same essay, he criticizes the post-World War I historians for creating disillusionment with war, saying they “rendered the generation of youth which came to maturity around 1940 spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight.… Historians… are the ones who should have pointed out that war does accomplish something, that war is better than servitude.”13
Peter Novick, after years of intensive exploration of the issue, concludes: “it seems to me to say of a work of history that it is or isn’t objective is to make an empty observation; to say something neither interesting nor useful.”14 I trust that my comments on the writing of history and my historical essays themselves in the pages to follow, while remaining indifferent to the question of “objectivity,” will be both interesting and useful.
Notes
1. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 11.
2. New York Review of Books, March 8, 1973. Lasch mistakenly read my emphasis on conflict in history as a criticism of Richard Hofstadter’s “consensus” approach (in his book The American Political Tradition) to the American past. In fact, I agreed totally with the existence of a consensus between the competing dominant groups in our society, but insisted that outside that consensus there was an opposition not given proper attention by historians.
3. New York Times, April 2, 1982.
4. Boston Globe, May 24, 1984.
5. New York Times, March 26, 1981.
6. New York Times, November 12, 1987.
7. New York Times, March 22, 1989.
8. See Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (New York: Quadrangle, 1970).
9. Ibid.
10. Washington Post, October 30, 1988.
11. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions (New York: Norton, 1983).
12. F. Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 195; quoted in M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 65.
13. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 315–16.
14. Novick, p. 6.
Introduction to the First Edition
Sometime in 1968, newspapers recorded the death of America’s leading entrepreneur of political buttons. He had always worn his own button which said: “I don’t care who wins. My business is buttons.”
The historian, by habit, is a passive reporter, studying the combatants of yesterday, while those of today clash outside his window. His preferences are usually private. His business is history.
He may ask philosophical questions about the past: do we find certain sequential patterns in history? or are historical events unique, disorderly? But he rarely sees himself as helpful in changing the pattern or affecting the disorder. He may believe that people through history have been caught in the grip of extrahuman forces. Or he may see them as free agents shaping the world. But whether they are free or not, he himself is bound—by professional commitment—to tally but not to vote, to touch but not to feel. Or to feel, but not to act. At most, to act after hours, but not through his writing, in his job as a historian.
Out of this sense of the situation comes the question which underlies this book: in a world where children are still not safe from starvation or bombs, should not the historian thrust himself and his writing into history, on behalf of goals in which he deeply believes? Are we historians not humans first, and scholars because of that?
Recall Rousseau’s accusation: “We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians and painters in plenty, but we have no longer a citizen among us.” Since the eighteenth century, that list of specialists has grown, to include sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians. The scholars multiply diligently, but with little passion. The passion I speak of is the urgent desire for a better world. I will contend that it should overcome those professional rules which call, impossibly and callously, for neutrality.
My argument can be easily exaggerated (by me as well as by others), so let me say now what this book does and does not intend:
1. It does not aim to disengage history from the classical effort to be scientific, but rather to reaffirm the ancient humanist aims of the scientists (before military needs began to command so much of their talent), and to catch up with the new understanding in science about what “scientific” means. The physicist Werner Heisenberg put it this way: “Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature.*
2. It does not argue for a uniform approach—mine or anyone’s—to the writing of history, and certainly not for the banning of any kind of historical work, bland or controversial, pernicious or humane, whether written for pleasure or profit or social objectives. Its aim is, by encouragement and example, to stimulate a higher proportion of socially relevant, value-motivated, action-inducing historical work.
3. It certainly does not call for tampering with the facts—by distortion or concealment or invention. My point is not to approach historical data with preconceived answers, but with preconceived questions.** I assume accuracy is a prerequisite, but that history is not praiseworthy for having merely achieved that. Freud once said some people are always polishing their spectacles and never putting them on.
The Politics of History has two kinds of essays. The essays in the first and third sections are about the writing of history. They proceed from a discussion of the uses of knowledge in general to historical consciousness in particular. In them, I try to argue for the notion of the historian as an actor, and this requires discussing many of the problems which fall, professionally speaking, within “the philosophy of history.” Is history “determined” or are we free to make our own? Can the historian justifiably write as a participant-observer in the social struggles of our time? Does “history as an act” lead to distorting the truth? What is the role of causality in history, of explanation? Should we be “present-minded”