Scribd
Upload
60 views

Historical Methodology Midterm Preparation Notes: Levent Elpen

The document discusses the historical methodology and construction of social sciences from the 18th century to 1945. It covers several key points: 1) Social sciences developed as an empirical attempt to systematically study reality since the 16th century. This was influenced by Newtonian and Cartesian dualism models. 2) By the 19th century, science became equated with natural science. History also aimed to be more empirical and explanatory of the present/future, joining social science and rejecting speculation. 3) Popular social memory of the past often serves present needs but distorts history, whereas professional historians aim to understand each era in its own context/values without imposing modern views.

Uploaded by

Levent Elpen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
60 views

Historical Methodology Midterm Preparation Notes: Levent Elpen

The document discusses the historical methodology and construction of social sciences from the 18th century to 1945. It covers several key points: 1) Social sciences developed as an empirical attempt to systematically study reality since the 16th century. This was influenced by Newtonian and Cartesian dualism models. 2) By the 19th century, science became equated with natural science. History also aimed to be more empirical and explanatory of the present/future, joining social science and rejecting speculation. 3) Popular social memory of the past often serves present needs but distorts history, whereas professional historians aim to understand each era in its own context/values without imposing modern views.

Uploaded by

Levent Elpen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 5

HISTORICAL METHODOLOGY

Midterm Preparation notes


We actually learn about historical philosophy or philosophy of the history and its
relations of the social sciences in this lesson. Please consider of this.
Levent Elpen

1-THE HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, FROM


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY TO 1945
Social science is an enterprise of the modern world. It roots lie an attempt,
full-blown since the sixteenth century, and part and parcel of the construction of our
modern world, to develop systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is
somehow validated emperically.
The so-called classical view of science, predominant for several centuries
now, was built on two premises. One was the Newtonian model, in which there exists
a symmetry between past and future, since everything coexists in an eternal present.
The second premise was Cartesian dualism the assumption that there is a fundamental
distinction between nature and humans, between matter and mind, between the
physical world and the social/spiritual world.
Since the sixteenth century, progressing in the sciences and separated them
into two domains as the “natural” sciences and the philosophy or art or lettres or
culture or Geisteswissenschaften in German.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, science or term “science” came to
be equated primarily with natural science.
The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is marked above all by this
disciplinarization and professionalization of knowledge, that is to say, by the creation
of permament institutional structures designed both produce new knowledge and to
reproduce the producers of knowledge.
The reformulation of “history” as geschichte –what happened, what really
happened- was thought to give it impeccable credentials.
History would cease to be a hagiography justifying monarchs and become the
true story of the past, explaining the present, offering the basis of wise choice for the
future.
This kind of history (based on empirical archival research) joined social
science and natural science in rejecting “speculation” and “deduction” (practices
which were said to be mere “philosophy”.
August Comte revived the term of “social physics”.
For Comte, social physics would permit the reconciliation of order and
progress by turning over the solution of social questions to “a small number of elite
intelligences” with the appropriate education.
And in between the humanities and the natural sciences, thus defined, lay the
study of social realities, with history (idiographic) closer to, often part of, faculties of
arts and letters, and “social science” (nomothetic) closer to the natural sciences.
(Wallerstein, 1996)
Definiton of Idiographic and Nomotethic
Idiographic and nomotethic methods represent two different approaches to
understanding social life. An idiographic method focuses on individual cases or
events. A nomotethic method, on the other hand, seeks to produce general
statetements that account for larger social patterns, which form the context of single
events, individual behaviors, and experience.
(thoughtco.com)

2- HISTORICAL AWARENESS
The term “social memory” accurately reflects the rationale of popular
knowledge about the past. Social groupings need a record of prior experience, but
they also require a picture of the past which serves to explain or justify the present,
often at the cost of historical accuracy.
All societies look to their collective memories for consolation or inspiration,
and literate societies are in principle no different.
Social memory continues to be an essential means of sustaining a politically
active identity.
Sometimes social memory is based on consensus and inclusion, and this is
often the function of explicitly national narratives.
While social memory has continued to open up interpretations that satisfy new
forms of political and social need, the dominant approach in historical scholarship has
been to value the past for its own sake and, as far as possible, to rise above political
expediency.
There were certainly important precursors –in the ancient world, in Islam, in
dynastic China, and in the West from the Renaissance onwards. But it was not until
the first half of the nineteenth century that all the elements of historical awareness
were brought together in a historical practice which was widely recognized as the
proper way to study the past. This was the achievement of the intellectual movement
known as “historicism”, which began in Germany and soon spread all over the
Western world (the word comes from the German “Historismus”).
The fundamental premise of the historicists was that the autonomy of the past
must be respected.
They held that each age is a unique manifestation of the human spirit, with its
own culture and values. For one age to understand another, there must be a
recognition that the passage of time has profoundly altered both the conditions of life
and the mentality of men and women –even perhaps human nature itself. Historians
are not the guardians of universal values, nor can they deliver “the verdict of history”;
they must strive to understand each age in its own values and priorities, instead of
imposing ours.
Historicists three principles to understand historical awareness in a sense:
i- Difference (most fundamental) is recognition of the “gulf” which separates
our own age from all previous ages. Because nothing in history stands still, the
passage of time has profoundly altered the way we live. The first responsibility of the
historian is to take the measure of the difference of the past; conversely one of the
worst sins is anachronism –the unthinking assumption that people in the past behaved
and thought as we do.
Anachronism: A historical inaccuracy in which elements from
one historical period (usually the present) are inserted into an
earlier one, such as the use of modern language or attitudes in
historical films and dramas.
More importantly, the difference is one of mentality: earlier generations had different
values, priorities, fears and hopes from our own.
ii- Context:The underlying principle all historical work is that the subject of
our enquiry must not be wrenched from its setting. We must place everything we
know about the past in its contemporary context.
iii- Process:Historical awareness is the recognition of historical process –the
relationship between events over time which endows them with more significance
than if they were viewed in isolation.
Are professional historical awareness and popular social memory in
opposition?
In the sense understood by the historicists, then, historical awareness means
respecting the autonomy of the past, and attempting to reconstruct it in all its
strangeness before applying its insights to the present.
Popular historical knowledge, on the other hand, tends to highly selective
interest in the remains of the past, is shot through with present-day assumptions, and
is only incidentally concerned to understand the past on its own terms.
Three recurrent features of social memory have particularly significant
distorting effects:
i- Respect for tradition:An assumption that what was done in the past is an
authoritative guide to what should be done in the present.
ii- The invented traditions of nationalism:Nations are of course the product
of history, and the same national designation has usually meant different things at
different times. Unfortunately historians have not always kept this truth at the
forefront of their minds. For all their scholarly principle, the nineteenth-century
historicists found it hard to resist the demand for one-dimensional, nation-building
history, and many did not even try.
Historians were caught up in popular nationalism like everyone else, and
many saw no contradiction between the tenets of their profession and the writing of
self- serving national histories.
Nationalism... rests on the assertion of tradition, rather than an interpretation
of history. It suppresses difference and change in order to uphold identity.
iii- Nostalgia: Like tradition, nostalgia is backward-looking, but instead of
denying the fact of historical change, it interprets it in one direction only-as change
for the worse.
It works most strongly as as reaction to a sense of loss in the recent past, and it
is therefore particularly characteristic of societies undergoing rapid change.
Anticipation and optimism are never the only –or even the main- social responses to
progress.
iv-Progress: Like process, progress is about change over time, but with the
crucial difference that a positive value is placed on the change, endowing it with
moral content. The concept of progress is fundamental to modernity, because for two
hundred years it was the defining myth of the West, a source of cultural self-assurance
and of outright superiority in its dealings with the rest of the world. In this sense
progress was essentially the invention of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
Tradition, nostalgia and progress provide the basic constituents of social
memory.

3- THE USES OF HISTORY


...one cannot get vary far in understanding how historians set about their work,
or in evaluating its outcome, without first considering the rationale of historical
enquiry.
i- Metahistory:History tells us most of what we need to know about the
future. Our destiny is disclosed in the grand trajectory of human history, which
reveals the world today as it really is, and the future course of events. This belief
requires a highly schematic interpretation of the course of human development,
usually known as metahistory.
But the most influential metahistory of modern times has been Marxism.
The driving force of history became the struggle by human societies to meet
their material needs (which is why the Marxist theory is known as “historical
materialism”). Marx interpreted human history as a progression from lower to higher
forms of production; the highest form was currently industrial capitalism, but this was
destined to give way to socialism, at which point human need would be satisfied
abundantly and equitably.
ii- The rejection of history: Nothing can be learned from history: not that
history is beyond our reach, but that is offers no guidance.
Takes two forms:
a- Essentially a defence against totalitarianism: because the practical
consequences of invoking the past legitimate communist ideology.
b-If one is committed to the new, why bother with the past? Rejecting history
is a commitment to modernity.

You might also like