A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

For example, history is unusual as a discipline in that it brings with it no special vocabulary and no body of theory that is peculiar to it (which is not to say, of course, that it may not appropriate the theories of other disciplines such as economics). It purports to deal with the world directly, asking such questions as: What exactly happened, and why? 

To answer such questions there must be some agreement as to what is to count as a cause in history. Here, Stanford does not attempt to argue that history is a science (as, for example, the French Annales school would). He allows that in the writing of history there is a degree of subjectivity and that it can never be entirely value-free. This doesn't mean, however, that it is arbitrary: historical events may not be predictable, but it is possible to make estimates of historical probability which, though not mathematically based, are yet soundly based on our understanding of human affairs. 

In attempting to judge historical causation, there is no way of testing by finding equivalent situations. This is because historical situations are unique: each will have its own peculiar congeries of causal factors. We do not expect the causes of the French Revolution to be identical to those of the American or Russian Revolution. We can, however, attempt to argue counterfactually: we can ask, for example, how would the history of Russia have differed if there had been no Lenin? It may be that there would still have been a revolution, but how might it differ from what actually occurred? Stanford stresses that history is very largely about the purpose and meaning of human agents; he is clearly sympathetic with the position of Collingwood that the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind. History is a matter of guessing at motives, trying to understand the intentions of individuals. 

Here he distinguishes it from social science as conceived by Durkheim. In the 'Durkheimian' sociological tradition, you concentrate on the external, the observable, not on ideas. In history, the ideas of people count as much as the social and economic reality in which those ideas are brewed. Any discipline which aspires to be a science looks for regular patterns, laws, statistical correlations. Science in general studies the norm, the general, the 'eternal'. 

History by contrast is supremely uninterested in generalities. Its concern is with the particular event, especially when it is it abnormal or unexpected; above all, history is a matter of accounting for change. For Stanford, historical understanding can never be single, objective and complete but, as historians are themselves situated in history, historical understanding must inevitably be partial and 'perspectival'. It should be noted that this argument does not apply to science. It doesn't matter in respect of our understanding of physics that we are historically situated, because the truth of a law of physics is irrelevant to the circumstances of its discovery, and moreover is in principle capable of being objectively tested. It matters to history, however, because a final view of history is only possible at the end of history, that is, when we are all dead. 

A definitive history of the human race, it follows, is something that will always elude us. Stanford's introduction is wide-ranging, dealing in a dispassionate way with an immense range of theories and theorists. And there can be few areas of relevance which he doesn't touch on. Indeed, for me he casts his net a little too wide, and would have been better to deal in depth with a few key issues. For example, he is tempted by the advent of chaos theory to think that science may no longer be a matter of immutable laws any more than history itself is. This, however, is to confuse predictability with determinism; chaos theory, rather than being probabilistic, is if anything, super-deterministic. 

It might also be said that he rather dismisses the possibility of a science-based history - one thinks for example of the recent attempt by Jared Diamond to explain the dominance of Western civilisation over Eastern by analysis of such factors as natural resources, diseases, and endogenous fauna. This said, Standford's book is unlikely to be surpassed in comprehensiveness, and is an invaluable guide to anyone who would wish to grapple with the problems of history. His own stance is a moderate one, somewhere between those who would see history as a science and those who, like the postmodernists, who would see it as a piece of fiction. 

He has, I think, pretty persuasive arguments against both these extremes. 

Reviewed by Roger Caldwell
 

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