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“History and Theory”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

J. G. A. Pocock
J. G. A. Pocock
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, N.Z.
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Extract

This occasional but substantial joumal, devoted by its title to the philosophy of history, will publish, we are told in an editorial note, material “principally in four areas: theories of history, cause, law, explanation, generalisation, determinism; historiography, studies of historians, historical figures and events which illuminate general historiographical problems; method of history, interpretation, selection of facts, objectivity, social and cultural implications of the historian's method; related disciplines, relationship of problems in historical theory and method to those of economic, psychological and other social sciences.” The distinctions here drawn seem, on the whole, to be indicative rather than analytical: “determinism” is grouped a little oddly with its neighbours, and it is not quite clear how the third area (“method of history”) is related either to the first or to the second; but all in all, there is little doubt what the province of a journal of philosophy of history is here taken to he be.To borrow words from the opening lines of the first contribution, an article entitled “History and Theory” by Sir Isaiah Berlin (a member of the editorial committee), “history is what historians do”; and philosophy of history is a mode of enquiry into what it is and how they do it. This philosophy is concerned with the explanation rather than the explicandum; its tools are analytical and its statements second-order statements. Some exceptions to this view can be found in the issues so far published and there may be more to come.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , July 1962 , pp. 525 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1962

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References

1 History and Theory: studies in the philosophy of history. Edited by George H. Nadel and published by Mouton and Co., The Hague. Volume I, numbers I and II (1960–1961).

2 I, pp. 90–97; here pp. 95–6.

3 Carey B. Joynt and Nicholas Rescher, “The Problem of Uniqueness in History”, II, pp. 150–162; here p. 154.

4 Burns, “International Theory and Historical Explanation”, I, pp. 55–74; here pp. 62–3.

5 Raymond Aron, “Thucydide et le récit des événements”, II, pp. 103–128; Cushing Strout, “Causation and the American Civil War: II”, II, pp. 175–185. P. 185: “narration is a form of explanation, which aims not at logical rigour of implication but at dramatic comprehensibility, appropriate to the untidy, passionate and value-charged activies of men”.

6 “History and Theory: the concept of scientific history”, I, pp. 1–31.

7 I, p. 18.

8 I, pp. 20–21.

9 I, p. 96.

10 I, pp. 75–85.

11 Curtis, Lewis P., “Gibbon's Paradise Lost”, in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker, Hilles, F. W., ed. (New Haven, 1949), pp. 73–90.Google Scholar

12 The strictures above apply rather to the use Gruman has made of this article than to Curtis's interpretation, which differs considerably from the impression Gruman gives of it.

13 I, p. 76.

14 Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945)Google Scholar; Robbins, , The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).Google Scholar