History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 105-118
© Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.10698
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
L’HISTORIOGRAPHIE.
By Nicolas Offenstadt. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2011. Pp. 109. L’HISTORIOGRAPHIE.
By Charles-Olivier Carbonell. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1981. Pp. 128. ABSTRACT
This essay reviews two books in the French Que Sais-je? series by Charles-Olivier Carbonell in 1981 and by Nicolas Offenstadt in 2011 on the topic of historiography. Offenstadt‘s volume is intended to bring Carbonell‘s up to date, but goes in very different directions. There is general agreement among historians that a fundamental reorientation has taken place in historical thought and writing in the past half century, about which quite a bit has been written in recent years in the West, including in Latin America, East Asia, and India. But this is not the theme of either of these volumes. Carbonell tells the history of history from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth-century Annales; Offenstadt is not interested in examining major trends in historiography as much of the historiographical literature has done, but in analyzing the changes that the key concepts that guide contemporary historical studies have undergone. For Carbonell‘s chronological narrative of the history of historical writing, theory has no place; for Offenstadt, who proceeds analytically, history and theory are inseparable. He deals specifically with changes in conceptions of historical time, of the role of documents, of the place of history within the social sciences, of the centrality of narrative, and finally of historical memory.
Keywords: Annales school, Begriffsgeschichte, Fernand Braudel, global history, discourse, narrative, Marxism, history and literature I
For over seventy years the Presses Universitaires de France have published a series of inexpensive paperbacks, Que sais-je? (What Do I Know?), intended for broad circulation to inform the French reading public about the status of knowledge in fields ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences. In 1981 a volume on historiography was published, followed thirty years later by a second volume intended to bring the first up to date. The first was authored by CharlesOlivier Carbonell (1930–2013), who had written an important book, Histoire et historiens, une mutation idéologique des historiens français: 1865–18851 on the reorientation of historical studies in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Carbonell had been the moving spirit in the foundation in 1980 of the 1. Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historiens, une mutation idéologique des historiens français: 1865–1885 (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1976).
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International Commission for the History of Historiography and the launching of the international journal Storia della Storiografia, published in Italy with articles in English, French, German, and Italian. Nicolas Offenstadt (b. 1967) had published extensively on medieval studies and on the First World War. Offenstadt’s book opens with a reference to Carbonell’s 1981 volume; he sees his own as a replacement (relève) of Carbonell’s. In a way the two books are intended to be read together. Yet they are totally different in their conception of what constitutes history and their approach to writing a history of historiography. Carbonell makes his position very clear in the preface. He stipulates a sharp division between history and theory. He sees his task as dealing with historians in their function as historians, reporting on the past as they see and reconstruct it. He is not interested in literary and aesthetic aspects of historical writing, but most of all rejects the introduction of philosophical considerations into history. As he writes in the preface, his presentation will give more consideration to “Herodotus than to Plato, to Suetonius than to Cicero [whom he considers a literary figure rather than a historian], to Mabillon than to Rousseau, to Momm sen than to Dilthey, to Lucien Febvre than to Raymond Aron” (4). It was only after Carbonell distanced himself from the international historiographical commission that the commission changed its name to International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography. Although he was writing this book at the beginning of the 1980s, he failed to reflect on the profound reorientations that had taken place since the 1960s; he even seems to have been unaware of them. Whereas Offenstadt focuses on this reorientation, Carbonell devotes only one relatively brief chapter to the twentieth century, which he identifies almost exclusively with the “New History” ( Nouvelle Histoire) of the Annales school, largely ignoring the discussions that took place outside of France. His chapter on the nineteenth century, however, gives major attention to the Ranke school and the professionalization of historical studies, first in Germany and then leading to Charles Seignobos (1854–1942) and Charles-Victor Langlois (1863–1929) in France and their manual L’Introduction aux études historiques (1898).2 Within the short space of 128 pages, he attempts a history of history from its early, preliterate, mythological beginnings to the present, stressing, however, that history only began with writing and that unwritten oral history based on memory gives a distorted picture of the past. Herodotus thus appears as the “father of history,” but he still writes “histories”—a large variety of narratives—rather than “history.” It is with Thucydides that history first becomes a science. Interestingly, like Offenstadt, Carbonell sees “discourse” at the center of history, but for both it is a discourse that has little to do with the “linguistic turn,” which Carbonell does not mention. He makes the obvious observation that history needs language to transmit historical reality, and is firmly convinced that such a reality exists. The book itself tells the story of the evolution of history from its Greek antecedents to a “science” of history. In a sense, the Roman and particularly the theologically oriented Middle Ages constitute regressions, but with Lorenzo Valla and the Italian humanists a return to a more scientific, that is, realistic approach to history, takes place, lead2. Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois, L’Introduction aux études historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1898).
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ing to its apex in the nineteenth century with the professionalization of historical studies and finally to the expansion of the historical perspective in the Annales. There is little new in this presentation. Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) in his article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas in 19743 had undertaken something similar only a few years before the publication of Carbonell’s book. Yet the interesting section of Carbonell’s book is the one in which, ironically, he deals with the theoretical assumptions that are to guide his presentation. He considers the existing histories of history to be elitist, concentrating on “geniuses” ( génies) and “master works” (chefs-d’oeuvre) (3). Instead he wants to write a history focusing on “collective representations” (3) and place historical works and historians in their temporal and spatial environment (4). To an extent he does this. But his historiographical narrative still proceeds around leading historians and their works. He is interested in history primarily as a form of scholarship. In a way he comes much closer to what he says he intends to do in his earlier Histoire et historiens on how historical studies were carried on in France in this twenty-year period. He deals here much more extensively with historians outside the academy, with “amateurs” if you wish, and with settings such as historical associations, many of them Catholic, in which normal citizens devoted themselves to their local past at a time that coincided with the foundation of the Revue historique in 1876 and the professionalization of historical studies, accompanied by the breakthrough of a secular, republican outlook. All of this is missing in his L’Historiographie volume, which tells a story about great historians and their works, although placing them in the context of their time. Carbonell in the Preface rejects an outlook “dedicated to the progress of historical knowledge as a science of the past” (3), yet the story he tells about the course of historical thought and writing in the past two and half thousand years points in the direction of such progress. He operates with a norm of what constitutes historical science. Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun foreshadow it before their time. The humanists, in freeing their writing of theological presumptions, point in the direction of history as a scientific enterprise, yet are still too closely attached to archaic notions from the ancient world. And this norm is essentially Western, as becomes very apparent in two chapters that deal with historical writing outside the West, in China and in the Arab world. Carbonell recognizes that both have long traditions of historical scholarship, in China going back to Sima Qian (145–87 BCE), whom, rather than Confucius (c. 571–479 BCE), he considers the first authentic Chinese historian, but who in his eyes is nevertheless not comparable to Greek historians, least of all Thucydides. Chinese historians, he argues, have nothing to offer except imperial biographies and dynastic histories. They fail to go beyond chronological compilations. Moreover, although they work with sources, they accept them at face value without examining their validity. He is unaware of the tradition of critical examination of sources in Chinese scholarship, which was well developed by the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, 4 a development in some ways similar to, although separate from, the transforma3. Herbert Butterfield, “Historiography,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner, 1974), II, 464-499. 4. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology; Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
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tion of European erudition in that period. Carbonell’s account of Arab historical writing ends early with Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), whom he rightly considers an outstanding historian, who alone in his time rose to an authentic philosophy of history joining a methodological reflection with a global explanation that already possessed modern features. But he overlooks that Islamic historiography did not end in the fourteenth century. This inclusion of ancient, but only ancient, Chinese historiography together with a focus on Ibn Khaldun parallels Butterfield’s “Historiography” article, but Butterfield, unlike Carbonell, recognizes the Chinese commitment to “textual criticism.” 5 Yet Carbonell’s best chapter, in my opinion, deals with the nineteenth century. Here he deals not only with professionalization in Germany and throughout Europe with its stress on source criticism, but also on the impact that romanticism had on historical studies and the close relation of literature and scholarship. The century was not only the age of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) but also of Jules Michelet (1798–1874). Carbonell introduces a very important note, the extent to which the faith in science was met by increasing doubt, and ideas of progress with pessimism (100-101), a note that he did not pursue in his chapter on the twentieth century. After a separate chapter on the impact of Marxism on the reorientation of historical writing, he turns to the twentieth century in which he deals almost exclusively with the French Nouvelle Histoire initiated by the Annales school. Although he distances himself from Marxist dogmatism, he gives Marx and the Marxist tradition credit for having paved the way for the Nouvelle Histoire by moving history away from its traditional focus on events and politics and laying the foundations for a social and economic approach to history, and most importantly for opening the field to “material culture” (114), all central elements of the Nouvelle Histoire. What Germany was for historical scholarship in the nineteenth century, France was in the twentieth century. And for Carbonell, this history is the history of the Annales. The Nouvelle Histoire for him is ultimately identified with quantification, which finds its high point in the histoire sérielle—including the application of computerized, quantitative methods to the study of mentalities, such as changing attitudes about death reflected in the computerized analysis of wills over a given period. He virtually ignores historians outside of France, except for a brief mention of the Cambridge demographic school in Great Britain and the counterfactual economic history of Robert Fogel (1926–2013) in the United States as representatives of this new quantitative orientation, mentioning Fogel’s work on the construction of the railroads, 6 but not his much more important and controversial study on the profitability of American slavery.7 Offenstadt’s book could be seen as a continuation of Carbonell’s. Carbonell had brought the history of historiography up from the Greeks to 1981; Offenstadt deals with the period since then. But in fact their books are very different, not only in terms of the content with which each deals, but also in their overall 5. Butterfield, “Historiography,” 480. 6. Robert Fogel snd Douglas North, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). 7. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974).
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approach. For Offenstadt, history and theory are inseparable. In his view, the new edition of the Que sais-je? volume is needed because of the fundamental changes that have marked historical thinking and writing since the 1981 edition, changes that go back beyond 1981 to the 1960s. His book is about these changes. This is a period marked by tremendous increases in the number of students and teaching staff, accompanied by technological innovations, including not only the computer but, most important, the internet and the digitalization of sources. But the scope of history has also changed radically. New areas of study have been opened, reflecting the changed social context in which history is written. The important changes had already occurred in the 1960s with the emergence of feminism, the movement for racial equality, the inclusion into history of segments of the population previously marginalized, and the turn away from the concentration on the highly developed Western nations to the rest of the world. He is fully aware of these changes, as are several books on contemporary historical writing with which I shall deal later in this essay. But his book is different from all these books. They all offer an overview of main trends in contemporary historiography. Offenstadt avoids this. His approach is much more analytical. Without losing awareness of these trends, he analyzes various concepts and methods that are common to them and examines how they underwent change. One limitation of the book is that Offenstadt restricts himself to professional historians. Here he does not differ from the other histories of contemporary history with which we shall compare his contributions. One theme that Offenstadt discusses throughout the book is the relation of history to literature. He is fully aware that a strict separation between the two cannot be drawn, that historiography ever since its Greek origins had a literary function. Yet at the same time, he does not agree with Hayden White that history is pure literature and that there is thus no distinction between historical imagination and historical realism. In the nineteenth century, he sees a great deal of history that is inseparable from literature; the prime example is Michelet. Nevertheless, he decides to deal only with historians who are a part of the historical discipline as it emerged in the nineteenth century with the professionalization of historical studies. Since then history has been practiced primarily in universities and research institutions such as the Conseil National de Recherches in France. Martin Nissen in a r ecent book8 has shown how, side by side with professional scholarship in the nineteenth century, even in Germany where professionalization was most advanced, a great deal of serious history was written by nonprofessional, so-called amateur historians. Despite the trend toward specialization, which became greater as the century progressed, professional historians too from Ranke and Michelet to Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902 the second time it was given, wrote for a broad, nonprofessional public. After touching on these problems in the Introduction, Offenstadt then devotes seven of the eight chapters to basic concepts and methods that guide professional historical writing, stressing the changes they undergo in time. Unlike all other histories of recent historiography, he does not outline major new trends in his8. Martin Nissen, Populäre Geschichtsschreibung: Historiker, Verleger und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit (1848–1900) (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009).
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torical writing but instead examines the basic concepts they have in common and the changes that these concepts have undergone in recent years. Offenstadt relies heavily on Reinhard Koselleck’s (1923–2006) Begriffsgeschichte.9 It rests on language but sees language very differently from the advocates of the linguistic turn. Whereas the latter deny any autonomous historical reality, the history of concepts as seen by Koselleck or Offenstadt reflects real social changes best understood by examining the concepts that they reflect. After this Introduction, Offenstadt proceeds to examine changing concepts of time that are fundamental to the writing of history. Well into the twentieth century, historians worked with a single, linear conception of time, as did physicists and even the writers of literature, for example, novelists. In the twentieth century the conception of unitary time was increasingly replaced by what Offenstadt calls “multiple temporalities” (21). In the field of history the best known example of the replacement of a chronological narrative by an analytical history that takes place on several distinct temporal levels is, of course, Fernand Braudel in his well known
The Mediterranean and the World of the Mediterrannean in the Age of Philip II. 10 There Braudel divides his subject matter into three separate parts, each operating with a different conception of time, the almost immovable time ( longue durée) of the geographical setting of the Mediterranean, the cyclical conjunctures of economic activities and social structures of long duration ( conjonctures), and finally the history of short-term political events. Historians are keenly aware that time is not an abstract universal but is conceived differently in different cultural contexts. 11 Two examples not mentioned directly by Offenstadt immediately come to mind, Jacques Le Goff’s (b. 1924) classic essay “Merchants’ Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages.”12 from within the Annales school, and E. P. Thompson’s (1924–1993) “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” 13 from a Marxist perspective. Offenstadt does not endorse any specific conception of time or methodology but indicates that the concept of time has become increasingly complex in the twentieth century; he sees not only the continuities in history but also the ruptures. He next proceeds to the changing role that documents play in historical study. For Langlois and Seignobos in their Introduction aux études historiques, history as a field of knowledge (connaisssance) rested on documents. Without documents there was no history. But the question remained what constituted documents. For Langlois and Seignobos, the answer was as simple as it had been for Ranke and his school. For the most part, the documents were to be found in the archives and consisted largely of written records deposited by governmental authorities. But as a good deal of historiography in the twentieth century turned away from narrative 9. Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972–1997); Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 10. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the World of the Mediterrannean in the Age of Philip II [1949] (Paris: Hachette, 1966). 11. See Time and History: The Variety of Cultures, ed. Jörn Rüsen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 12. In Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 13. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967), 56-97.
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accounts of political and diplomatic events to social, and ultimately cultural, history, historians had to turn elsewhere. Social-science-oriented historians employing impersonal statistics worked with very different sources and documents and were ultimately replaced by cultural anthropologists and by small-scale histories, the latter (microstoria) relying at times on personal testimonies. And finally Offenstadt suggests that false testimonies and forgeries should not be totally discounted; they too may offer glimpses into historical realities (33). This leads to the changing conceptions of science that have guided historical study. A variety of historical theorists, including the whole spectrum from Comtean positivists to Marx and Engels, wanted to transform history into a science committed to laws resembling those of the natural sciences. None of these historians and theorists of history were located in academic institutions. The professionalization of historical studies initiated by Ranke operated with a different conception of what constitutes historical science. For Langlois and Seignobos history’s scientific character rests not in the search for laws and generalized explanations but in “rigorous methodology“ ( rigoeur de méthode) (43). Seignobos frankly stated that “history is not a science but only a procedure for gaining knowledge” (l’histoire n’est pas une science, elle n’est qu’un procédé de connaissance ”) (36). Yet this focus on method and written sources was questioned by thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who viewed history very differently, neither as a science comparable to the natural sciences nor as a social science defined by its methodology, but as a humanistic science ( Geisteswissenschaft ), the core of which consisted in the “understanding” ( compréhension, Verstehen) of social and cultural complexes, a position that Henri-Irénée Marrou (1904–1977) embraced more than half a century later in his De la connaissance historique (1954) (36), and which ultimately became important for cultural studies. This contrasts with a position espoused by Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Marxism, or rather varieties of Marxism, which sought broad explanations of social phenomena and which in different ways affected historical writing in the twentieth century. Marxism, which began as a form of economic determinism, was fundamentally transformed when, in the crucial 1960s, it recognized the cultural complexities of all modern societies. Offenstadt completes the chapter by stressing that although professional historians were committed to value-neutrality, in practice they permitted their ideological and political biases to influence their research findings. Thus the emergence of history as a scholarly discipline in the nineteenth century was closely linked to nationalist causes, so that much scholarship that considered itself strictly objective in fact created national myths, or in Offenstadt’s terms, “national novels” (roman national) (40-42). Offenstadt then examines the changing role of narratives ( récits) (56-58). From antiquity until well into the twentieth century, style and rhetoric have played a central role in historical writing ( écriture). For most of this time, history was considered a form of belles lettres. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen two developments away from this. The professionalization of historical studies carried with it the conscious attempt to draw a line between history and belles lettres and with it the liberation of history from rhetoric. Yet this
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separation was never complete. Even Ranke recognized that history was both a science (Wissenschaft ) and an art (Kunst ).14 But a much more radical effort to purge history of literary aspects was represented by the quantification that was at the core of a great deal of social-science-oriented history in the years between 1945 and 1970. The last forty years have seen increasing criticism of this supposedly scientific historiography and of what Lawrence Stone (1919–1999) in 1979 termed a “return to narrative.” 15 An extreme reaction against any attempt at historical objectivity was Hayden White’s (b. 1928) argument that history was purely a work of the poetic imagination, denying that there is any distinction between history and fiction. Offenstadt then follows the French discussions on this theme. Although thinkers like Roland Barthes (1950–1918), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) held views similar to those of White, distinguished French thinkers like Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) and Paul Veyne (b. 1930) recognized that narrative is at the core of history—for Veyne, “history is narrative, un vrai roman” (57)—without denying reality all together as White did. For Roger Chartier (b. 1945) history cannot be reduced purely to literature as White has done (59). 16 Elsewhere, Saul Friedländer (b. 1930) has pointed to the dilemma of White’s position, who is forced to recognize that there was indeed a Holocaust, an admission that contradicts his theoretical denial of a real historical past. 17 Offenstadt concludes that throughout history the historian, while committed to establishing truthful accounts of the past, must nevertheless, to cite Marrou, aspire to be a “great writer” ( grand écrivain) (53). This leads to the question of the role of history among the social sciences. For the past century history has been closely related to the other human and social sciences. The question now arises whether its difference from these sciences involves primarily the occupation of history with the past or its methods. As for methods, with the increasing economic, social, and cultural orientation of history they have essentially become similar to those of other human sciences. Durkheim early raised the question about the relation of history and sociology. Insofar as history rejects abstractions, it is in his view no science at all. Nevertheless, he writes, “it [history] is the science of social facts” and “thus becomes indistinct from sociology” (64, 65). This is also the position of the Annales, except that the relation between sociology, or rather the human sciences, and history is reversed. History is an all-encompassing human science, but the human sciences are in fact seen in terms of historical change. Offenstadt recognizes the influence of Marxist ideas in the turn of the Annales to economics and sociology without accepting the “systematic character” of Marxist ideology. Beginning in the 1970s the Annales increasingly turned away from a concentration on economics and sociology to historical 14. Ranke, “Idee der Universalhistorie,” in Historische Zeitschrift 178, ed. Eberhard Kessel (Munich: Cotta Oldenbourg, 1954), 290 . 15. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 85 (November 1979), 3-24. 16. See Roger Chartier, “Quatre questions à Hayden White,” Storia della Storiografia 24 (1993), 133-142. 17. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37-53.
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anthropology. This turn to anthropology and away from the impersonal structures that the Annales had inherited from Marxism and Durkheimian sociology marked the new interest in everyday life ( Alltagsgeschichte) in Germany (77-78) and the concentration on individuals ( Microstoria) in Italy (90-92), which opened new perspectives for the writing of social history. Offenstadt then considers how the scope ( échelle) of history has both expanded and contracted in recent historiography. There is the extension of history to global history (85-87), but at the same time new subjects enter into history that, in Foucault’s words, have no existence of their own ( en soi), but “are the products of the discourses held about them” (86), and it is these discourses that “produce ( fabriquent ) truths” (87). Sentiments now enter historical discourse. Offenstadt once more turns to microstoria and the Italian journal Quaderni storici. These concerns are also central to the Indian Subaltern Studies group (95-97) , deeply influenced by a Marxism given a cultural perspective by the work of Antonio Gramsci and E. P. Thompson. Finally, Offenstadt turns to the role of memory in history. The idea of collective memory was initiated by Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), a student of Durkheim, in the 1920s. It gained a major place in the French historiographical scene with Pierre Nora’s (b.1930) project Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984–1992) involving large numbers of historians and seeking to reconstruct French national history through collective memory. The bicentennial of the French Revolution shows how politicized memories reflect the ideological divisions in contemporary France. Offenstadt approaches with a great deal of skepticism the use of memory as a historical tool. He again goes back to showing how professional, supposedly value-neutral, scholarship from the very beginnings in the nineteenth century created memories and myths that served the national cause instead of contributing to an honest, truly scholarly, reconstruction of the past. II
The question arises whether, thirty years apart, these two books represent a different historiographical climate or reflect the personal peculiarities of their authors. Carbonell’s contribution in particular must be seen in the latter light. This leads us to reflect on the question of where historiographical studies stood at the time Carbonell and Offenstadt wrote their respective volumes. Undoubtedly, a fundamental historical reorientation took place worldwide in the 1960s, a reorientation of which Offenstadt was very much aware and which Carbonell largely ignored. The year 1968 has become symbolic of these changes with the May riots in Paris, the unrest in American universities from Berkeley to the rest of the country, the massacre of students in Mexico City, and the Prague Spring, not to mention the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which does not fit easily into what happened in the cultural revolutions that occurred elsewhere. These upheavals in the long run largely failed on the political level, except for the success of the civil rights movement in the United States, which had begun earlier in the 1950s. But there were important changes in attitudes that persisted. And there were changes in the universities, of which Offenstadt is very much aware, which affected the
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way history was conceived and written, most of all in the United States, but also elsewhere. There was a considerable expansion of the size and number of universities, and changes in the social and ethnic recruitment of students and faculty, especially women. It is important, however, that we do not restrict ourselves to historiographical works written in the Anglophone world and Western and Central Europe, but include important studies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Russia, not to forget China, both the People’s Republic and Taiwan, few of which have been translated into English, French, or German. 18 The last few years have seen considerable historiographical interest in Spain and Latin America. A new international journal, Historiografía: Revista de história y teoria with contributions in Spanish, French, and English began publication in Spain. Among important Spanish-language works, Fernando Sánchez Marcos (b. 1943), Las huellas del futuro: Historiografía y cultura histórica en el siglo XX (2012) 19 and Jaume Aurell et al., Comprender el pasado: Una historia de la escritura y el pensamiento histórico (2013),20 with articles by Peter Burke (b. 1937), about modern and contemporary historiography, and the first comprehensive history of Latin American historiography, by Felipe Soza, should be mentioned. In comparing Carbonell and Offenstadt I am particularly interested in how Carbonell’s treatment of twentieth-century historiography compares with other studies that were available at the time. In his bibliography he lists the French edition of Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (1979) and Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (1975); otherwise, books listed include only works that deal with contemporary French historiography, foremost, as is to be expected, La Nouvelle Histoire (1978), edited by Jacques Le Goff, R. Chartier, and Jacques Revel (b. 1942). There are similarities between Carbonell’s volume and Butterfield’s article. Both are organized chronologically and cover largely the same material. Even the inclusion of classical Chinese and Arabic historiographies is similar, the latter centering on Ibn Khaldun and not going beyond. Although Butterfield’s article appeared in 1974, it seems that it was written earlier. There is nothing about historical writing or thinking after Durkheim and Max Weber (1864–1920). Barraclough’s just cited Main Trends in History does deal with main currents in twentieth-century historiography, focusing on the impact of the social sciences with little awareness of counter-currents that led Lawrence Stone in 1979 to write of the “Revival of Narrative.” “The search for quantity,” Barraclough wrote also in 1979, “is beyond all doubt the most powerful of the new trends in history, the factor above all others which distinguishes historical attitudes in the 1970s from historical attitudes in the 1930s.” 21 He lists Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s (b. 1929) highly quantitative Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966) and Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (1967) but not his fully 18. Dominic Sachsenmaier, in Global Perspectives on Global History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 42, notes that during in the 1990s thirteen times as many books in the social sciences and the humanities were translated from English into Chinese than vice versa. 19. Fernando Sánchez Marcos, Las huellas del futuro: Historiografía y cultura histórica en el siglo XX (Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 2012). 20. Jaume Aurell et al., Comprender el pasado: Una historia de la escritura y el pensamiento histórico (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2013). 21. Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 89.
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nonquantitative, anthropologically oriented Montaillou: Village occitan (1975). There is no mention of the innovative work of Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939), which appeared in the 1970s, and no reference to the beginnings of feminist and gender historiography. Guy Bourdé and Hervé Martin, Les écoles historiques (1983), contains all the shortcomings of the works that preceded Carbonell’s 1981 volume. It is narrowly focused on French discussions. It contains a valuable part in its concluding chapters on the theoretical discussions on the nature of historical knowledge between Veyne, Michel de Certeau (1925–1986), and Marrou, but interestingly not including Ricoeur, who does not even appear in their index. It is striking that Carbonell, Butterfield, and Barraclough all stress the importance of Marxist conceptions of history for historiography in the twentieth century, and Carbonell and Barraclough emphasize the influence Marxist ideas had on the Annales. Butterfield’s essay stops before the Annales were founded. None of the three could be considered a Marxist in a political sense. Nevertheless, Butterfield, easily the most conservative of the three, wrote “the system that Marx produced—however much it owed to antecedent writers—must be regarded as one of the most remarkable and powerful contributions ever made to the interpretation of the past . . . which came to have an important influence even on historians who were not themselves Marxists.” 22 And Barraclough noted: “Though non-Marxists and anti-Marxists may be reluctant to accept the fact, it would be difficult to deny that Marxism is the only coherent philosophy of the evolution of human history in society, which exercises a demonstrable influence on the minds of historians today.” 23 Carbonell dedicates a separate chapter to Marxist historiography between his chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the latter devoted almost exclusively to the Annales. But all three see Marxism as an essentially intellectual orientation overlooking its revolutionary aspects. At the core of Marxism for all three is its doctrine of historical materialism. The fact that the Annales originally called its journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale speaks to this for Carbonell (112). He identifies Marxist historiography with what he has labeled as the Nouvelle Histoire. For Barraclough, Marxism affected the thinking of historians in its “investigation of complex and long-term social and economic processes,” its awareness “of the material conditions of people’s lives . . . in the context of industrial relations,” and most important “because it aroused new interest in the theoretical premises of historical study.” 24 The last observation may be true, but the Annales showed little interest in the context of industrial relations and instead focused on the premodern, pre-industrial period. There is little indication in Carbonell’s or Barraclough’s discussions of Marxist historiography of the transition of Marxist thought toward emphasis on the role of culture. Carbonell mentions Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) stress on the autonomy of the superstructure, and Barraclough includes E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, in his bibliography without at any point discussing it and instead dedicating undue space to the official historiography
22. Butterfield, “Historiography,” 495. 23. Barraclough, Main Trends in History , 164. 24. Ibid ., 17-18.
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of the Soviet Union. 25 Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas (b. 1955), from an openly Marxist perspective, seeks to establish the close connection between various Marxist orientations and the Annales in Itinerarios de la historiografía del siglo XX: De los differentes marxismos a los varios Annales, published simultaneously in 1999 in Mexico City and Havana, Cuba. 26 All of the new trends are covered extensively in a number of histories of historiography that have appeared in the last fifteen years. 27 It is striking how much attention has been devoted in recent years to historiographical topics. The International Commission for the History of Historiography—now the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography—which began as a small association mostly of European historians, now involves active participants in Latin America and East Asia. Its next international conference will be held in China. As I mentioned, in addition to History and Theory and Storia della Storiografia there is the trilingual journal Historiografía Revista de historia y teoría, located in Spain. A large number of books on contemporary historiography have been published in the last fifteen years. I shall list the most important East Asian ones in the footnotes. 28 Yet the most comprehensive survey of modern historiography is found in volume 5, “Historical Writing Since 1945” of The Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011).29 Offenstadt’s book is unique among these books in not presenting a survey of main orientations of historical thought in the last 25. Ibid ., 17-28. 26. Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, Itinerarios de la historiografía del siglo XX: De los differentes marxismos a los varios Annales (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Havana, Cuba: Centro de Investigación y Desarollo de la Cultura Cubana, 1999). 27. I shall list the most important Western-oriented surveys of contemporary historiography here and those with a global perspective in a separate footnote. Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999); Anne Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History: Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), updated Spanish edition, La historiografía del siglo XX: Desde la objetividad científica al desafío posmoderno (Santiago, Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012); Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis? Recent Directions in Historiography, 2d ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005); Donald R. Kelley, Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources, ed. Adam Budd (New York: Routledge, 2008); Caroline Hoefferle, The Essential Historiography Reader (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011). 28. Among recent Chinese publications on global historiography the following titles should be mentioned, none of which have been translated into English (I have provided English translations of the titles): Huang Chin-hsing, Postmodernism and Historiography (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 2006); Ku Wei-ying, Postmodernism and Historiography: A Chinese and Western Comparison (Ji‘nan: Shandong University Press, 2003); Postwar New Developments in Euro-American Historiography , ed. Chen Qineng (Ji’nan: Shandong University Press, 2005). Recent Japanese publications include: Narita Ryuichi, Positions of Historiography (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo, 2006); Kaneko Taku, Historiography and Memory (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2011); Kinbara Samon, Modernity and Historiography (Tokyo: Chuo University Press, 2000); Historical Understanding across Borders, ed. Sugahara Kenji (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2002); Sato Masayuki, Historiographical Time and Space (Tokyo: Chisen Shokan, 2004); Sato Masayuki, History of Chronologies in World Historiography (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2010) There is a special Indian edition of Iggers, Wang, and Mukherjee, A Global History Of Modern Historiography (New Delhi: Dorling Kinderley India Pvt. Ltd., 2010). 29. The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010– 2012).
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half-century. He is fully aware of the literature of this period and cites it, but cuts across the various orientations to find what they have in common in terms of basic conceptions and methods. It is the only truly analytical book within this literature. Nevertheless, he shares with the other histories that I have just listed (except the five volumes of the Oxford History of Historical Writing) a Euro-, or better said, Western-centric orientation. He does have a section on global and postcolonial history, as do the other works I have cited. But the only non-Western historiographical group he mentions is that of Indian Subaltern Studies . One may ask whether the Subaltern Studies group does not really belong to the West, The concept “subaltern” being derived from Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism. The proponents of the group, although born in India, are predominantly located at Western institutions, and with English being their sole language of scholarly communication, participate in Western postmodernist discussions. Almost all the books I have cited above deal primarily with Western historical literature and at most very marginally with non-Western historiography. The past decade has, however, seen a turn to global approaches to historiography, a serious attempt to deal with historical thought and writing across national borders. This first took the form of anthologies that contained individual chapters on historiography in non-Western countries. This was the case with International Handbook of Historical Studies (1979), edited by Harold Parker (1907–2002) and Georg G. Iggers (b. 1926), with an important contribution by two leading Nigerian historians, J. F. Ade Ajavi (b.1929) and E. J. Alagoa. In the course of the late 1990s and the early 2000s several important anthologies appeared that went beyond the West to deal with non-Western historical outlooks. 30 Still lacking were comprehensive histories of historical writing from a comparative perspective. The first important book to attempt this was Markus Völker’s Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Einführung in globaler Perspektive (2006),31 which includes sections on the Islamic world, China, Japan, India, and sub-Saharan Africa, which, however, treats these in isolation from one another and says very little about the interaction among these historiographical traditions. The interaction between Western and non-Western historiographies in the modern period is the central concern of Georg G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography (2008).32
30. Die Vielfalt der Kulturen, ed. Jörn Rüsen, Achim Mittag, and Wolfgang Küttler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Historiography, ed. Rolf Torstendahl (Stockholm: The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, 2000); Western Historical Thought , ed. Jörn Rüsen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002 ); Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross Cultural Perspective, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002) ; Eckardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchthey, Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Latham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); very briefly in Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Historiography: An Introductory Guide (London: Continuum, 2012). 31. Markus Völker, Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Einführung in globaler Perspektive (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). 32. Georg G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2005). It has since been translated into Chinese (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011); into Russian (Moscow: Kanon Publ. House, 2012); and German (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013).
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A comparative approach also marks Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History (2011).33 Thus there has been a clear shift in historiographical interest. More attention is being paid to non-Western historiography. As we noted, there is also considerable interest in global, including Western, history in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Here Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History (2011) 34 should be mentioned, which compares the work being done in global history in the United States, Germany, and China. Where do the two books under review fit into the changed historiographical context of their time? There certainly was a turn in historiography between 1981, when Carbonell’s book appeared in the Que Sais-je? series, and 2011, when Offenstadt’s book was published—as a matter of fact, more than one turn. One turn that is reflected in almost every work on historiography in the last decade and a half, but that began much earlier, in the 1960s, well before Carbonell wrote, and of which neither he nor Barraclough were fully aware, was the turn away from the empirical, quantitative social sciences to cultural and linguistic approaches, from male orientation to feminist and gender history, from nation-oriented, Westerncentered history to intercultural history; the other, which came more slowly, was the turn to global history. Both reflected the fundamental changes that had taken place socially, culturally, economically, and politically since the 1960s, but particularly since the 1990s. Offenstadt’s work very much reflected the first turn, much less the second. The Annales and the Nouvelle Histoire, which for Carbonell represented the international high point of historical studies, had made an important contribution to the move away from the traditional politics-centered history to an interdisciplinary “science of man.” For Peter Burke it represented a “historical revolution.” 35 This suggests that it had a major impact on the development of historiography outside of France. This may overstate the influence of the Annales, which was immense in Latin America, but limited elsewhere. In fact the cultural turn that marked much historical writing internationally after the 1960s was not born with the Annales. Rather the Annales followed the general worldwide trend of historical thought and writing in this period. To sum it up, as I already suggested, Offenstadt’s contribution does not consist in his presentation of a history of contemporary historiography in the years since the publication of Carbonell’s volume—that was done by others—but rather in his analysis of the changing basic conceptions and methods that have guided historical studies in this period. In this way his small volume is unique and deserves to be translated into English. GEORG G. I GGERS
Williamsville, NY
33. Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 34. Cited in note 18. 35. Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990).
