Theory of Knowledge: History

Sections:

1. Particular Facts and General Statements
2. Covering Laws or Understanding?
3. Objective or Subjective?
4. Case Study: Karl Marx
    

When people first start learning history at school, it is often taught to them as a collection of objective facts about the past -- such as that World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. And if history did consist of nothing other than statements about what events happened when in the past, then there would be few questions to be asked concerning historical knowledge; but then history would also not be very interesting and hardly worth doing.

There is of course another side to history -- concerned for instance with the causes of World War I, or the reasons for which the US entered that war. Thus historians, as well as trying to discover what events happened when in the past, also try to explain or understand the events, and it is this that makes history interesting and worth doing; but it also gives rise to questions concerning the nature of historical explanation and understanding.

Unlike science, say, history is often criticized for serving no purpose, (especially by those, probably, who have not got further in its study than learning long lists of dates and the lineages of royal houses.) We are unable to learn from history, it is argued, either because precisely the same circumstances as in the past cannot arise again in future, or because if sufficiently similar circumstances did arise, we would not be able to act differently.

What purpose, if any, we attribute to history, and what role we give it in the life of society and in our individual thinking, will of course have a bearing on any discussion of the nature of historical explanation and understanding. So instead of raising the question of the purpose of history at the end of this section, as a conclusion, I shall put forward here the answer I have found most persuasive, as an introduction.

What is history for? My answer is that history is 'for' human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the man YOU are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

R. G. Collingwood.

In this section we shall discuss what historical knowledge consists of; the nature of historical explanations; and whether history can be, or should be, objective.

1. Particular Facts and General Statements

In the natural sciences we have both statements of immediate observations, reporting for instance the outcome of an experiment, and general laws from which we can derive predictions. These two kinds of statements are justified in quite different ways: observational statements by perception, together perhaps with facts about some measuring apparatus; and general laws, by having been tested but not having been falsified (yet) by any experiments.

Those general laws, then, can have different degrees of generality. Thus, the law of gravitation is more general than the statement that all apples fall to earth, which is a special case of the law of gravitation.

While historical evidence is quite different from scientific observations, and historical understanding is not the same as scientific explanation, it is worth bearing in mind the distinctions of the previous two paragraphs as we consider the realm of historical knowledge.

The evidence, not necessarily written, which historical research is based on are the 'sources'. Sources need not be items that go back to the time in history which is being studied, but can be texts written since then about that time: the former are called primary, and the latter secondary sources.

There are two main questions that must be asked regarding primary sources.

1. The first of these concerns their authenticity, or genuineness. Suppose that we have, for instance, a painting of a particular historical event; then
2. the painter may have added or omitted certain details to please his customer, or to make it a better painting,
3. he may not have been there himself and have used incomplete accounts,
4. the painting could even be a later forgery, and so on.
5. The other question concerns their completeness. We must bear in mind that the material available to us has already been systematically selected, in a variety of ways:
6. we tend to know more about the upper classes of the societies we study, because it is largely their doings that were recorded,
7. while we find many ruins in some parts of the world, little remains of the wooden structures that were more common elsewhere, and so on.

2. Covering Laws or Understanding?

History would not be of interest, and would hardly be worth doing, if all that it consisted of was collecting facts: ''A mere collector of supposed facts is as useful as a collector of matchboxes'' (Febvre.) So the other thing historians do, apart from gathering factual information about past events, is to try and explain these events.

There is no general agreement on the form these explanations should take: in fact, this is the main topic of discussion in the philosophy of history today.

On one side there are those who hold that historical explanation must be like the scientific explanation of an event: to understand an historical event, we must have a general, or 'covering' law, so that from this law and a description of the historical situation we can deduce that the event would happen.

... general laws have quite analogous functions in history and in the natural sciences, ... they form an indispensable instrument of historical research, and... they even constitute the common basis of various procedures which are often considered as characteristic of the social in contradistinction to the natural sciences. ...

Consider, for example, the statement that Dust Bowl farmers migrate to California 'because' continual drought and sandstorms render their existence increasingly precarious and because California seems to them to offer so much better living conditions. This explanation rests on some such universal hypothesis as that populations will tend to migrate to regions which offer better living conditions [-- though it would be difficult to state this as a general law.]

Carl Hempel, ''The Function of General Laws in History'', 1942.

According to the extreme version of this view, the laws of history are quite independent of the actions of individuals or other particular influences.

These great changes seem to have come about with a certain inevitableness; there seems to have been an independent trend of events, some inexorable necessity controlling the progress of human affairs. ... Examined closely, weighed and measured carefully, set in true perspective, the personal, the casual, the individual influences in history sink into insignificance and the great cyclical forces loom up. Events come of themselves, so to speak; that is, they come so consistently and unavoidably as to rule out as causes not only physical phenomena but voluntary human action. So arises the conception of law in history. History, the great course of human affairs, has not been the result of voluntary efforts on the parts of individuals or groups of individuals, much less chance; but has been subject to law.

Edward P. Cheney, 1927.

This kind of extreme view was taken by Karl Marx (1818 - 93.) What is essential about particular historical situations, according to Marx, are the socio-economic conditions, and the development of these follows a necessary course, which he believed to have plotted, towards a particular kind of society.

Intrinsically it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

Capital I, Preface to the First German Edition, 1867.

Although, then, the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and although the separate elements of this movement derive from the conscious will and specific aims of individuals, the totality of the process nevertheless appears as an objective relationship which comes into being naturally: emerging from the clash between conscious individuals, but being neither contained within their consciousness nor subsumed as a whole under them.

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, 1844.

Underlying Marx's view of history is a belief that we can see in history some spirit moving forward, and that history is the unfolding of mankind's progress. This 'hopeful' outlook goes back to earlier idealist philosophers, like Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770 -1831):

One can take the history of mankind, on the large scale, as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to produce an internally, and therefore also externally, perfect constitution, as the only condition in which she can fully develop all her dispositions in mankind.

Kant, 1784.

On the other side there are those who hold that the historical explanation of an event consists of understanding it in its uniqueness, of 'making sense of it' and turning it into a coherent account or story, in the same way we make sense of the actions of others in every-day life.

History, then, is not, as it has so often been misdescribed, a story of successive events or an account of change. Unlike the natural scientist, the historian is not concerned with events as such at all. He is only concerned with those events which are the outward expression of thoughts. ...

Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the redoing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the present. To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his own mind; ...

But historical knowledge is not concerned only with the remote past. If it is by historical thinking that we rethink and so rediscover the thought of Hammurabi or Solon, it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who writes us a letter. Nor is it necessary that the historian should be one person and the subject of his enquiry another. ... In this sense all knowledge of mind is historical.

R. G. Collingwood, 1936.

3. Objective or Subjective?

It may be helpful, not only for this section, to start with some definitions :

objective

adj. 1. existing independently of perception or an individual's conceptions: are there objective moral values? 2. undistorted by emotion or personal bias. 3. of or relating to actual and external phenomena as opposed to thoughts, feelings, etc. ...

subjective

adj. 1. belonging to, proceeding from, or relating to the mind of the thinking subject and not the nature of the object being considered. 2. of, or relating to, or emanating from a person's emotions, prejudices, etc.: subjective views. ... 4. existing only as perceived and not as a thing in itself.

bias

n. 1. mental tendency or inclination, esp. an irrational preference or prejudice. ...
vb. 9. (usually passive) to cause to have a bias; prejudice; influence. -- biased or biassed adj.

Collins English Dictionary.

For much of the time that history has been written, the work of the historian was not thought to be particularly problematic -- as long as he had the right intentions, he would just try to discover the truth, and ''tell how it really was.''

The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 - 43 BC,) De Oratore, II, 62.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

Leopold von Ranke (1795 -1886,) 1824.

In recent times, though, history has been recognized to be subjective -- or accused of being 'merely' subjective, in the sense of saying something, or even more, about the person and times of the historian than about the reality of the historical event being studied. After a war, for instance, are not all the history books (re-) written by the victors, to present their view of events, rather than that of the losers?

Historians seek to be detached, impassionate, impartial. In fact, however, no historian starts with his mind a blank, to be gradually filled by the evidence.

A. J. P. Taylor, in The Times Literary Supplement, 06.01.1956.

Sometimes the subjective aspect of history has been denied altogether; consider for example the following programme for a collective historical work:

Our scheme requires that nothing shall reveal the country, the religion, or the party to which the writers belong. -- It is essential not only on the ground that impartiality is the character of legitimate history, but because the work is carried on by men acting together for no other object than the increase of accurate knowledge. -- The disclosure of personal views would lead to such confusion that all unity of design would disappear. ...

But usually the subjectiveness of their subject is readily admitted by historians themselves, and accepted as necessary -- or even embraced as essential.

The function of the historian is akin to that of the painter and not of the photographic camera; to discover and set forth, to single out and stress that which is the nature of the thing and not to reproduce indiscriminately all that meets the eye. ... History is therefore necessarily subjective and individual, conditioned by the interest and the vision of the historian.

L. B. Namier, Avenues of History.

Thus, even though history is concerned with the past, with things that can no longer change, history too, like all the other areas of knowledge that we have considered, even science, cannot give us absolute certainty, for various reasons -- and it would be misguided to demand it.

For even where history is capable of being objective, there are problems with the 'evidence' it is based on, as we have seen: the sources available may not be authentic, and they will certainly be incomplete. And to the extent that history is (necessarily) subjective, i.e. a matter of the position from which it is written, historical accounts or explanations are liable to the problem of bias, i.e. partiality, tendentiousness or even prejudice.

SOME MARXIAN CONCEPTS:

What is the historical background?

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; ...

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones.

Manifesto of the Communist Party.

What are the different classes in capitalist society?

The owners merely of labour-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent, in other words wage-labourers, capitalists and land-owners, constitute the three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production.

Capital III.

How is a class defined?

The separate individuals form a class only in so far as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it.

The German Ideology.

Who determines the ideas in a society at any time?

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time of the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

The German Ideology.

What is the characteristic of capitalist production?

Capitalist production is in itself indifferent to the particular use-value and distinctive features of any commodity it produces. In every sphere of production it is only concerned with producing surplus-value, and appropriating a certain quantity of unpaid labour incorporated in the product of labour.

Capital III.

What, in general, is the value of a commodity? And what is the surplus value produced in capitalist production?

The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour-time. ...

The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction of this special article. ... in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer. ...

Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power ...

Capital I.

What does the commodity character of labour mean for the labourer?

Commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners. ... The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and, therefore, as owners of commodities.

Capital I.

We have now considered the act of alienation of practical human activity, labour, from two aspects: (1) the relationship of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object, which dominates him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world; (2) the relationship of the worker to the act of production within labour. This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), ... his personal life ... as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation as against the above-mentioned alienation of the thing. ...

What is true of man's relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labour and to the objects of their labour.''

Economic and Political Manuscripts.

Marx valued communism above all because it would abolish alienation, in several senses of that term.

... Alienation can be described, very broadly, as the lack of a sense of meaning.

Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx.

What is the life of the workers under capitalism?

Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist. ...

This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances ...

It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.

Capital I.

What is the role of religion in a capitalist society?

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Contribution to Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction.

How then should one view capitalism?

Surplus-labour in general, as labour performed over and above the given requirement, must always remain. ... It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it enforces this surplus-labour in a manner and under conditions which are more advantageous to the development of the productive forces, social relations, and the creation of the elements for a new and higher form than under the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc. Thus it gives rise to a stage, on the one hand, in which coercion and monopolization of a social development (including its material and intellectual advantages) by one portion of society at the expense of the other are eliminated; on the other hand, it creates the material means and embryonic conditions, making it possible in a higher form of society to combine this surplus-labour with a greater reduction of time devoted to material labour in general.

Capital III.

Dialectical processes in the world have similar stages. The most important example ... is probably the following three-step sequence .... . Society ... begins as a primitive, undifferentiated community. Persons are essentially similar to one another, without distinctive character traits or different productive functions. The community dominates the individual, who is left with little scope for free choice or individual self-realization. The next stage, the negation of the first one, occurs with the emergence of alienation ... of class societies ... . It is characterized by an extreme development of individuality and by an equally extreme disintegration of community. The third stage, the negation of the negation, restores community without, however, destroying individuality. It is in this respect the synthesis of the two previous stages.

Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM:

So what is the future development of the present class-system?

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Manifesto of the Communist Party.

What kind of society will there be after the revolution ?

The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.

The Poverty of Philosophy.

What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

Letter to Josef Weydemeyer, dated March 5, 1852.

Why will the proletarian revolution come about? We can read this question in different ways:

(a) What are the contradictions within capitalism ?

Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital ... grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united organized by the very mechanisms of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of production becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. ... The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Capital I.

The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.

Capital III.

(b) What are the underlying causes?

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the ways of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The Poverty of Philosophy.

In the social production of their life men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression of the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Preface.

(c) What kind of necessity does it have?

Intrinsically it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

Capital I. Preface to the First German Edition.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on the co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production.

Capital I.

(d) What is the role of individual action in it?

Although, then, the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and although the separate elements of this movement derive from the conscious will and specific aims of individuals, the totality of the process nevertheless appears as an objective relationship which comes into being naturally: emerging from the clash between conscious individuals, but being neither contained within their consciousness nor subsumed as a whole under them.

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

History does nothing, it 'possesses no immense wealth,' it 'wages no battles.' It is man, real living man, that does all that, that possesses and fights: 'History' is not a person apart, using man as means for its own particular aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.

The Holy Family.

Methodological Criticisms

Main criticisms of Marx's thinking are that

1. because of his methodological holism (despite his ethical individualism) -- esp. as regards the collective entity 'Capital' and the collective subject 'Humanity' --, he fails to search for micro foundations of the processes and relations in his theories.
2. because of his distinction between a deep- and a surface-structure -- the essence and mere appearance, in terms of values and prices, respectively --, he denies at times the central element of choice in economics, (which is, in fact, not incompatible with the notion of force;) the behaviour of economic agents may have to be analyzed in game-theoretical terms, such as varieties of the prisoner's dilemma and the free-rider problem.
3. by applying it to particular events, and by failing to specify appropriate feedback-mechanisms, he tends to misuse functional explanation, i.e. of patterns of behaviour by their consequences; (in an important mode of Marxist explanation the behaviour of a class is explained by its beneficial consequences for the class members: here the 1st and the 3rd criticism apply.)
4. although Marx's (Hegelian) dialectic approach -- both as: progressing by the negation of the negation, and as: analyzing social contradictions -- is methodologically important, there is no 'dialectical law' independently of actions which men undertake for purposes of their own.

These criticisms are derived from Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx, 1986: rather abstract, but highly recommended, with a companion volume of readings.

Other introductory texts: uncritical but useful is Ernst Fischer (ed.), Marx in His Own Words, 1968; for a short introduction consider Peter Singer, Marx, 1980.