My approach to reading Weber this week is a bit different than the one that I’ve used in the previous weeks, since I was more focused on trying to take good notes for a presentation than to come at the ideas from a perspective of how his historiography could be of use to me. That said, I found Weber’s ideas about political authority and how changes in politics come about to be very interesting, and possibly even a useful tool for understanding some of the dynamics involved when political structures change. Then again, the tools he gives of bureaucracy, charisma, and tradition, are only really applicable when discussing political changes on a more broad scale, that cover a very long time span, and require a large amount of generalization, since it becomes less and less accurate to describe events in those terms the more finely a history is focused. After all, if you wanted to describe Napoleon’s role in the French revolution you might consider Weber’s categories, but if you wished to perhaps explore one particular battle, then these sorts of considerations would matter only distantly. Perhaps, to borrow an idea from physics, there is a sort of Uncertainty Principle at work with this, where the descriptions of any individual actors are less accurate the more you are able to describe the broader implications of events, but the ability to relate to any broad implication is hampered the more accurately the individual factors of an event are described; with the limiting factors of all of this being the amount of information available at our disposal, and the biases of the authors. This is a consideration that leads me to wonder if it might be possible to actually create a system within which Historians, or at least I, can place the evidence of an historical situation and come out with an analysis of the level at which I am capable of talking with certainty about the subject.

Marx’s history of the rise and rule of Louis Napoleon is a passionate description full of powerful imagery and implicit invectives against those men that he believes are so wholly caught up in the mindset of their class that they cannot see the truth of the world before them. But as powerful as his history is, the discerning reader cannot help but find the text to be a biased rhetoric against the bourgeoisie, consisting of such strangely fictional descriptions as “the royalists smiled at this ” as well as Marx’s unfailing ability to ascribe uniform voluntary actions to an entire group of disparate peoples. There are a few lessons in this, the most obvious one being that historians should be more careful in how they write history so that they do not do so in a manner that unsympathetically assigns individuals to historian-imposed groups or classes. However, another more subtle lesson can be drawn from the text, that in order to achieve surety in writing history, as well as a clear vision of how the past occurred, one must already have developed or adopted a view of the world that grants at least some sure footing from which to report it. Perhaps this is the more important of the two lessons, it is at least the one that requires more thought. Being able to confidently conceive of the past can allow an historian to write with passion, clarity, and conviction; but at what cost? It appears to me that Marx may fall into the trap that many (if not all) historians share, namely that he has pre-conceived notions about the world that he seeks to impose on the evidence that remains of the past. I might leave it at that but for the nagging notion that if only he or some other historian were capable of knowing something True about the nature of human history, that it might be possible to write with the passion of Marx, but with greater objectivity.

History as literature seems to be the idea behind this book, or at least that’s the overall meaning that I’ve managed to glean from the preface, introduction, and first chapter of Hayden White’s “Metahistory.” Formulating historical analysis as a literary analysis, White separates the methods that historians use into two general categories, chronicle and story, before summarily dismissing chronicle from his analysis and concentrating solely on the narrative portion. Personally I think that chronicles are and could be a lot more useful than White is giving them credit for, but since the book is obviously about the literary aspect of History, it is understandable why he would choose to skip over it. I will certainly concede that White’s ideas about applying literary analysis to historical narratives has merit to them since my own intuition also leads me to view History as more of a way for an author to tell ‘his story’ about how he views the past than as something objective. Despite this feeling, I don’t feel comfortable enough to begin to put labels on the types of literature that those stories fall into, perhaps it is merely my ignorance regarding literary analysis that is holding me back, or maybe I simply wish to refrain from placing such sweepingly applied labels to anything that deals with how individuals view the world, but I am not willing to label any particular history that I have read as being either ‘Comedic,’ ‘Romantic,’ ‘Tragic,’ or ‘Satirical.’ I feel there is a tension in my reading of this book, where on one side it appears that it is possible to gain insight into the stories that historians tell through analyzing them like any other literature, but the other side is telling me that the individuals that write history view the stories that they tell as true in some real sense – and it is, to them. Why would I want to dismiss their insights into the story of the past by explaining their narratives away with a label?

It’s been a little while, but since I’m finally at school I thought I would share some of the things that I’m working on. The author and the book title that is post is about is in the title line:

I don’t quite recall what my thoughts were when I first began to read Iggers’ Historiography book, but I do believe that there was an expectation that I would quickly find myself bored to tears at reading a history of History. I was quickly drawn in to it, despite these reservations, and have spent the majority of my time since reading it being pummeled by existential questions about what the Historian’s craft is, what my place in it should be, and how I should even go about it. In some of his earlier chapters, when Iggers discusses the creation of the modern form of History, it struck me that at its very inception History was used as a tool by Nationalist individuals to promote their own views on how the people around them ‘were’ in the past and how they ‘are’ in the present. Something of that mentality seemed to be echoed in Iggers’ own statements about how the German historians didn’t switch their allegiance away from royalist to democratic nationalist histories until later than their colleagues; perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I couldn’t help but feel a sense of bias from the author towards his own favored form of government. Further on in the book, when Iggers discusses the postmodernists’ critiques of History as a method for uncovering Truth, I feel that he didn’t get to the heart of the dilemma, giving an answer but neither an analysis nor a plan of action. He merely states that the Historian’s craft is one that will only approximate some small facet of the Truth and leaves it at that. But this creates within me with only more questions about the relationship between History and Nationalism, how to keep bias from my own Histories, and what could be the best way to move my own approximations of History closer to the truth. Perhaps I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’m hoping that they will lead me to a better understanding of History.