| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Donald R. Kelley. Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 426. $50.00.
With this culminating work, Donald R. Kelley has established his preeminence as the most discerning, trenchant, and catholic expositor of Western historical writing over its long, twisting course. Kelley's richly erudite but forthright style of exegesis deserves to be deemed a one-man tradition in its own distinctive right, with its own sage and briskly fluent voice. The present work is a worthy, even crowning successor to Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (1998) and The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (2002). It is an even-handed but deeply engaged account of the major figures and movements shaping modern historiography. No one matches Kelley's deft proficiency over such vast reaches of historical endeavor: his artfully authoritative, carefully contoured survey of the historical landscape maps the critical intellectual battle zones, remoter outlying provinces of auxiliary disciplines, and more familiar areas of presentday habitation.	1
The main development traced in these pages is the emergence of synthetic cultural or civilizational history, which gradually constituted itself from disparate strands of political, economic, legal, ecclesiastical, social, and literary history. Kelley has a keen, mobile eye for recurrent patterns and novel departures in historical inquiry, which are explicated without strain or numbing jargon. Probably the chief achievement of the present work is its cogent manner of treating the polar "big questions" of historiography (meaning and causality, art and science, presentism and antiquarianism, individuality and universality) through probing exposition of specific works of history rather than by applying blanket schematisms. Working historians (including those disinclined to "culturalist" or postmodern assumptions) will find much to ponder in Kelley's latest achievement.	2
Moving from the later Enlightenment through the labyrinthine nineteenth century to the historically haunted interwar period of the twentieth century, Kelley's present work has an orderly, fugue-like structure, with national historiographical traditions (French, German, British, Italian, and American) taking pride of place. In the first major division of the book, these skein-like traditions and their master figures (including Adam Ferguson, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Johann Gottfried Herder, Justus Möser, Johann Gustav Droysen, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Leopold von Ranke, François Guizot, Jules Michelet, and others) emerge, contest, and interweave with each other. Then, in the second main division, their disciples and revisionist heirs (Jakob Burckhardt, Hippolyte Taine, William Stubbs, Thomas Carlyle, J. A. Froude, Lord Acton, Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry Adams, Johan Huizinga, and others) reappear—but in reverse national order. Iberian, Eastern European, Northern European, Swiss, and U.S. currents are integrated into the emerging pattern of a convincingly "dialogic" account of the past. Kelley's neatly apposite focus on thematic issues such as language, nation, law, literature, science, myth, and "orientalism" helps conduce toward the emerging core of culture.	3
As does most "history proper" in skilled hands, Kelley's kaleidoscopic history of history illuminates the complex conjunction of continuity and change in historiography itself. As he previously built on the classic Janus visage of Herodotus and Thucydides, Kelley here summons the grand patterns of historical meaning in their own terms (the Four Monarchies, translatio imperii, the march of reason and progress, the course of humanization and civilization, the upsurge of liberty, science, or the nation-state) to issue forth into public attention and then to retreat as artifacts of history's own advance, but all with appreciative insight rather than retrospective "now-we-know-better" condescension. History may often serve as glorification, legitimation, and edification, but such boosterish "upward and onward" function has long been balanced by its countervailing capacity for debunking, unmasking, and relativization.	. . .

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