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Book Review
Methods/Theory
| John Lewis Gaddis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 192. $23.00.
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| On May 10, 1941, the French historian Marc Bloch wrote a letter to his friend Lucien Febvre, in which he informed him that, amid the "sorrows and anxieties" of life under German occupation, he resolved to write a book on what both of them had long been working for: "a wider and more human history." He believed that the new critical methodology, which he and Febvre had devised in order to determine more objectively, even scientifically, what happened in the past, would enable his readers to come to terms with what was happening in the present. The book, which Bloch did not live to complete, was edited from manuscripts and eventually published by Febvre under the title Apologie pour l'histoire; Ou, Métier d'historien (1949). When an English translation appeared four years later, it retained only the latter part of the title, The Historian's Craft, as if to indicate that victory in the war had vindicated history and relieved its scholars from the need to defend their vocation. |
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John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished historian of the Cold War, tries to shake off this complacency. "Like J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbits," he writes of his fellow historians, "they're for the most part content to remain where they are, and are not much interested in what goes on around them" (p. 92). The audience at Oxford University, to whom Gaddis presented the lectures that comprise this book, must have gotten the message, recalling, no doubt, that Tolkien modeled his imaginary creatures on his academic colleagues. Historians and other readers of this book should likewise be alert to the acute contentions in its many cute allusions (to Harry Potter and such like popular novels and films). Whether it was the apparent failure of fellow historians and other scholars in the related disciplines of political science and international relations to anticipate the end of the Cold War, or, more generally, the attacks of both hard social scientists and soft postmodernists on the viability of historical truth, Gaddis is adamant that historians "might better justify their own existence. Historians ought to be as adept as the practitioners of other disciplines are at defending their methods—but they aren't" (p. 50). Hence his new apology for history, which he offers as an updating of Bloch's old book, as well as of another classic of modern historiography, E. H. Carr's What is History? (1961). |
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According to Gaddis, modern historians have largely ignored what these two venerable "methodologists," and some contemporary scholars—chiefly William McNeill, who is repeatedly cited—have argued: that the study of history is, or at least ought to be, as sturdy in its theoretical and practical procedures as are the so-called "hard" physical and biological sciences. Although this claim may seem fairly old—after all, that ancient historian of war, Thucydides, saw fit to model his historiography on the hardest science of his time, Hippocratic medicine—Gaddis revises its basic assumption by arguing that historians must not so much imitate what natural scientists are doing as recognize and rationalize what they are doing in their own practice, which, as Gaddis would have it, is remarkably similar, and may even be superior, to what is happening in the new evolutionary and non-laboratory sciences of cosmology, geology, paleontology, zoology, and biology. For, much like the practitioners of these new elastic sciences, and in contrast to the champions of social science whom Gaddis dismisses rather summarily as mired in the static and statistical models of the old sciences, what historians are actually looking for when they "trace the rise and fall of empires, the beginnings and the endings of war, the diffusion of ideas and technologies, the outbreaks of plagues and famines" (p. 86) are certain dynamic patterns that, however differently they seem to recur in historical reality, are nevertheless systematic enough to reveal its basic structure and processes. And to those wary historians who might doubt whether the diversities, irregularities, and singularities they detect in human affairs defy all generalizations about them, Gaddis replies that "without generalization historians would have nothing whatever to say" (p. 62). He duly acknowledges that free agency and contingency in human affairs are liable to invalidate any attempt at a scientific theory of history replete with accurate calculations and predictions, but he adds, so also are the scientific theories that now prevail in modern natural sciences. |
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