Written History as an Act of Faith
Charles A. Beard
[Annual address of the president of the American
Historical Association, delivered at Urbana. 28 December 1933.
Reprinted from the American Historical Review, Volume 39,
Issue 2, p. 219-231.]
"Charles A. Beard (Nov. 27,
1874 to Sept. 1, 1948) was one of the most daring and innovative
historians of his day. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1904,
and taught there until 1917, before helping to establish the New
School for Social Research. In works such as An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and
Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), he stressed the
part played by economic forces in the development of American
institutions. With his wife, Mary Ritter Beard, he also co-authored
the classic text book, The Rise of American Civilization (1927)."
History has been called a science, an art, an illustration of
theology, a phase of philosophy, a branch of literature. It is none of
these things, nor all of them combined. On the contrary, science, art,
theology, and literature are themselves merely phases of history as
past actuality and their particular forms at given periods and places
are to be explained, if explained at all, by history as knowledge and
thought. The philosopher, possessing little or no acquaintance with
history, sometimes pretends to expound the inner secret of history,1
but the historian turns upon him and expounds the secret of the
philosopher, as far as it may be expounded at all, by placing him in
relation to the movement of ideas and interests in which he stands or
floats, by giving to his scheme of thought its appropriate relativity.
So it is with systems of science, art, theology, and literature. All
the light on these subjects that can be discovered by the human mind
comes from history as past actuality.
What, then, is this manifestation of omniscience called history? It
is, as Croce says, contemporary thought about the past. History as
past actuality includes, to be sure, all that has been done, felt, and
thought by human beings on this planet since humanity began its long
career. History as record embraces the monuments, documents, and
symbols which provide such knowledge as we have or can find respecting
past actuality. But it is history as thought, not as actuality,
record, or specific knowledge, that is really meant when the term
history is used m its widest and most general significance. It is
thought about past actuality, instructed and delimited by history as
record and knowledge -- record and knowledge authenticated by
criticism and ordered with the help of the scientific method. This is
the final, positive, inescapable definition. It contains all the
exactness that is possible and all the bewildering problems inherent
in the nature of thought and the relation of the thinker to the thing
thought about.
Although this definition of history may appear, at first glance,
distressing to those who have been writing lightly about "the
science of history" and "the scientific method" in
historical research and construction, it is in fact in accordance with
the most profound contemporary thought about history, represented by
Croce, Riezler, Karl Mannheim, Mueller-Armack, and Heussi, for
example. It is in keeping also with the obvious and commonplace. Has
it not been said for a century or more that each historian who writes
history is a product of his age, and that his work reflects the spirit
of the times, of a nation, race, group, class, or section? No
contemporary student of history really believes that Bossuet, Gibbon,
Mommsen, or Bancroft could be duplicated to-day. Every student of
history knows that his colleagues have been influenced in their
selection and ordering of materials by their biases, prejudices,
beliefs, affections, general upbringing, and experience, particularly
social and economic; and if he has a sense of propriety, to say
nothing of humor, he applies the canon to himself, leaving no
exceptions to the rule. The pallor of waning time, if not of death,
rests upon the latest volume of history, fresh from the roaring press.
Why do we believe this to be true? The answer is that every written
history -- of a village, town, county, state, nation, race, group,
class, idea, or the wide world--is a selection and arrangement of
facts, of recorded fragments of past actuality. And the selection and
arrangement of facts -- a combined and complex intellectual operation
-- is an act of choice, conviction, and interpretation respecting
values, is an act of thought. Facts, multitudinous and beyond
calculation, are known, but they do not select themselves or force
themselves automatically into any fixed scheme of arrangement in the
mind of the historian. They are selected and ordered by him as he
thinks. True enough, where the records pertaining to a small segment
of history are few and presumably all known, the historian may produce
a fragment having an aspect of completeness as, for example, some
pieces by Fustel de Coulanges; but the completeness is one of
documentation, not of history. True enough also, many historians are
pleased to say of their writings that their facts are selected and
ordered only with reference to inner necessities, but none who takes
this position will allow the same exactitude and certainty to the
works of others except when the predilections of the latter conform to
his own pattern.
Contemporary thought about history, therefore, repudiates the
conception dominant among the schoolmen during the latter part of the
nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth century --
the conception that it is possible to describe the past as it actually
was, somewhat as the engineer describes a single machine. The formula
itself was a passing phase of thought about the past. Its author,
Ranke, a German conservative, writing after the storm and stress of
the French Revolution, was weary of history written for, or permeated
by, the purposes of revolutionary propaganda. He wanted peace. The
ruling classes in Germany, with which he was affiliated, having
secured a breathing spell in the settlement of 1815, wanted peace to
consolidate their position. Written history that was cold, factual,
and apparently undisturbed by the passions of the time served best the
cause of those who did not want to be disturbed. Later the formula
was fitted into the great conception of natural science -- cold
neutrality over against the materials and forces of the physical
world. Truths of nature, ran the theory, are to be discovered by
maintaining the most severe objectivity; therefore the truth of
history may be revealed by the same spirit and method. The reasoning
seemed perfect to those for whom it was satisfactory. But the movement
of ideas and interests continued, and bondage to conservative and
scientific thought was broken by criticism and events. As Croce and
Heussi have demonstrated, so-called neutral or scientific history
reached a crisis in its thought before the twentieth century had
advanced far on the way.
This crisis in historical thought sprang from internal criticism --
from conflicts of thought within historiography itself -- and from the
movement of history as actuality; for historians are always engaged,
more or less, in thinking about their own work and are disturbed, like
their fellow citizens, by crises and revolutions occurring in the
world about them. As an outcome of this crisis in historiography, the
assumption that the actuality of history is identical with or closely
akin to that of the physical world, and the assumption that any
historian can be a disembodied spirit as coldly neutral to human
affairs as the engineer to an automobile have both been challenged and
rejected. Thus, owing to internal criticism and the movement of
external events, the Ranke formula of history has been discarded and
laid away in the museum of antiquities. It has ceased to satisfy the
human spirit in its historical needs. Once more, historians recognize
formally the obvious, long known informally, namely, that any written
history inevitably reflects the thought of the author in his time and
cultural setting.
That this crisis in thought presents a digressing dilemma to many
historians is beyond question. It is almost a confession of inexpiable
sin to admit in academic circles that one is not a man of science
working in a scientific manner with things open to deterministic and
inexorable treatment, to admit that one is more or less a guesser in
this vale of tears. But the only escape from the dust and storm of the
present conflict, and from the hazards of taking thought, now before
the historian, is silence or refuge in some minute particularity of
history as actuality. He may edit documents, although there are perils
in the choice of documents to be edited, and in any case the choice of
documents will bear some reference to an interpretation of values and
importance -- subjective considerations. To avoid this difficulty, the
historian may confine his attention to some very remote and
microscopic area of time and place, such as the price of cotton in
Alabama between 1850 and 1860, or the length of wigs in the reign of
Charles II., on the pleasing but false assumption that he is really
describing an isolated particularity as it actually was, an isolated
area having no wide-reaching ramifications of relations. But even then
the historian would be a strange creature if he never asked himself
why he regarded these matters as worthy of his labor and love, or why
society provides a living for him during his excursions and
explorations.
The other alternative before the student of history as immense
actuality is to face boldly, in the spirit of Cato's soliloquy, the
wreck of matter and the crush of worlds -- the dissolution of that
solid assurance which rested on the formula bequeathed by Ranke and
embroidered by a thousand hands during the intervening years. And when
he confronts without avoidance contemporary thought about the nature
of written history, what commands does he hear?
The supreme command is that he must cast off his servitude to the
assumptions of natural science and return to his own subject matter.
to history as actuality. The hour for this final declaration of
independence has arrived: the contingency is here and thought resolves
it. Natural science is only one small subdivision of history as
actuality with which history as thought is concerned. Its dominance in
the thought of the Western World for a brief period can be explained,
if at all, by history; perhaps in part by reference to the great
conflict that raged between the theologians and scientists after the
dawn of the sixteenth century--an intellectual conflict associated
with the economic conflict between landed aristocracies, lay and
clerical, on the one side, and the rising bourgeois on the other.
The intellectual formulas borrowed from natural science, which have
cramped and distorted the operations of history as thought, have taken
two forms: physical and biological. The first of these rests upon what
may be called, for convenience, the assumption of causation:
everything that happens in the world of human affairs is determined by
antecedent occurrences, and events of history are the illustrations or
data of laws to be discovered, laws such as are found in hydraulics.
It is true that no historian has ever been able to array the fullness
of history as actuality in any such deterministic order; Karl Marx has
gone further than any other. But under the hypothesis that it is
possible, historians have been arranging events in neat little chains
of causation which explain, to their satisfaction, why succeeding
events happen; and they have attributed any shortcomings in result to
the inadequacy of their known data, not to the falsity of the
assumption on which they have been operating. Undiscouraged by their
inability to bring all history within a single law, such as the law of
gravitation, they have gone on working in the belief that the
Newtonian trick will be turned some time, if the scientific method is
applied long and rigorously enough and facts are heaped up high
enough, as the succeeding grists of doctors of philosophy arc ground
out by the universities, turned loose on "research projects",
and amply supplied by funds.
Growing rightly suspicious of this procedure in
physico-historiography, a number of historians, still bent on
servitude to natural science, turned from physics to biology. The
difficulties and failures involved in all efforts to arrange the
occurrences of history in a neat system of historical mechanics were
evident to them. But on the other side, the achievements of the
Darwinians were impressive. If the totality of history could not be
brought into a deterministic system without doing violence to
historical knowledge, perhaps the biological analogy of the organism
could be applied. And this was done, apparently without any
realization of the fact that thinking by analogy is a form of
primitive animism. So under the biological analogy, history was
conceived as a succession of cultural organisms rising, growing,
competing, and declining. To this fantastic morphological assumption
Spengler chained his powerful mind. Thus freed from self-imposed
slavery to physics, the historian passed to self-imposed subservience
to biology. Painfully aware of the perplexities encountered as long as
he stuck to his own business, the historian sought escape by employing
the method and thought of others whose operations he did not
understand and could not control, on the simple, almost childlike,
faith that the biologic, if not the physicist, really knew what he was
about and could furnish the clue to the mystery.
But the shadow of the organismic conception of history had scarcely
fallen on the turbulent actuality of history when it was scrutinized
by historians who were thinking in terms of their own subject as
distinguished from the terms of a mere subdivision of history. By an
inescapable demonstration Kurt Riezler has made it clear that the
organismic theory of history is really the old determinism of physics
covered with murky words. The rise, growth, competition, and decline
of cultural organisms is meaningless unless fitted into some
overarching hypothesis--either the hypothesis of the divine drama or
the hypothesis of causation in the deterministic sense. Is each
cultural organism in history, each national or racial culture, an
isolated particularity governed by its own mystical or physical laws?
Knowledge of history as actuality forbids any such conclusion. If, in
sheer desperation, the historian clings to the biological analogy,
which school is he to follow -- the mechanistic or the vitalistic? In
either case he is caught in the deterministic sequence, if he thinks
long enough and hard enough.
Hence the fate of the scientific school of historiography turns
finally upon the applicability of the deterministic sequence to the
totality of history as actuality. Natural science in a strict sense,
as distinguished from mere knowledge of facts, can discover system and
law only where occurrences are in reality arranged objectively in
deterministic sequences. It can describe these sequences and draw from
them laws, so-called. From a given number of the occurrences in any
such sequence, science can predict what will happen when the remainder
appear.
With respect to certain areas of human occurrences, something akin to
deterministic sequences is found by the historian, but the perdurance
of any sequence depends upon the perdurance in time of surrounding
circumstances which cannot be brought within any scheme of
deterministic relevancies. Certainly all the occurrences of history as
actuality cannot be so ordered; most of them are unknown and owing to
the paucity of records must forever remain unknown.
If a science of history were achieved, it would, like the science of
celestial mechanics, make possible the calculable prediction of the
future in history. It would bring the totally of historical
occurrences within a single field and reveal the unfolding future to
its last end, including all the apparent choices made and to be made.
It would be omniscience. The creator of it would possess the
attributes ascribed by the theologians to God. The future once
revealed, humanity would have nothing to do except to await its doom.
To state the case is to dispose of it. The occurrences of
history--the unfolding of ideas and interests in time-motion -- are
not identical in nature with the data of physics, and hence in their
totality they are beyond the reach of that necessary instrument of
natural science--mathematics--which cannot assign meaningful values to
the imponderables, immeasurables, and contingencies of history as
actuality.
Having broken the tyranny of physics and biology, contemporary
thought in historiography turns its engines of verification upon the
formula of historical relativity -- the formula that makes all written
history merely relative to time and circumstance, a passing shadow, an
illusion. Contemporary criticism shows that the apostle of relativity
is destined to be destroyed by the child of his own brain. If all
historical conceptions are merely relative to passing events, to
transitory phases of ideas and interests, then the conception of
relativity is itself relative. When absolutes in history are rejected
the absolutism of relativity is also rejected. So we must inquire: To
what spirit of the times, to the ideas and interests of what class,
group, nation, race, or region does the conception of relativity
correspond? As the actuality of history moves forward into the future,
the conception of relativity will also pass, as previous conceptions
and interpretations of events have passed. Hence, according to the
very doctrine of relativity, the skeptic of relativity will disappear
in due course, beneath the ever-tossing waves of changing
relativities. If he does not suffer this fate soon, the apostle of
relativity will surely be executed by his own logic. Every conception
of history, he says, is relative to time and circumstances. But by his
own reasoning he is then compelled to ask: To what are these
particular times and circumstances relative? And he must go on with
receding sets of times and circumstances until he confronts an
absolute: the totality of history as actuality which embraces all
times and circumstances and all relativities.
Contemporary historical thought is, accordingly, returning upon
itself and its subject matter. The historian is casting off his
servitude to physics and biology, as he formerly cast off the shackles
of theology and its metaphysics. He likewise sees the doctrine of
relativity crumble in the cold light of historical knowledge. When he
accepts none of the assumptions made by theology, physics, and
biology, as applied to history, when he passes out from under the
fleeting shadow of relativity, he confronts the absolute in his field
-- the absolute totality of all historical occurrences past, present,
and becoming to the end of all things. Then he finds it necessary to
bring the occurrences of history as actuality under one or another of
three broad conceptions.
The first is that history as total actuality is chaos, perhaps with
little islands of congruous relativities floating on the surface, and
that the human mind cannot bring them objectively into any
all-embracing order or subjectively into any consistent system. The
second is that history as actuality is a part of some order of nature
and revolves in cycles eternally -- spring, summer, autumn, and
winter, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, or their variants, as
imagined by Spengler. The third is that history as actuality is moving
in some direction away from the low level of primitive beginnings, on
an upward gradient toward a more ideal order -- as imagined by
Condorcet, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Herbert Spencer.
Abundant evidence can be marshaled, has been marshaled, in support of
each of these conceptions of history as actuality, but all the
available evidence will not fit any one of them. The hypothesis of
chaos admits of no ordering at all; hence those who operate under it
cannot write history, although they may comment on history. The second
admits of an ordering of events only by arbitrarily leaving out of
account all the contradictions in the evidence. The third admits of an
ordering of events, also by leaving contradictions out of
consideration. The historian who writes history, therefore,
consciously or unconsciously performs an act of faith, as to order and
movement, for certainty as to order and movement is denied to him by
knowledge of the actuality with which he is concerned. He is thus in
the position of a statesman dealing with public affairs; in writing he
acts and in acting he makes choices, large or small, timid or bold,
with respect to some conception of the nature of things. And the
degree of his influence and immortality will depend upon the length
and correctness of his forecast -- upon the verdict of history yet to
come. His faith is at bottom a conviction that something true can be
known about the movement of history and his conviction is a subjective
decision, not a purely objective discovery.
But members of the passing generation will ask: Has our work done in
the scientific spirit been useless? Must we abandon the scientific
method? The answer is an emphatic negative. During the past fifty
years historical scholarship, carried on with judicial calm, has
wrought achievements of value beyond calculation. Particular phases of
history once dark and confused have been illuminated by research,
authentication, scrutiny, and the ordering of immediate relevancies.
Nor is the empirical or scientific method to be abandoned. It is the
only method that can be employed in obtaining accurate knowledge of
historical facts, personalities, situations, and movements. It alone
can disclose conditions that made possible what happened. It has a
value in itself -- a value high in the hierarchy of values
indispensable to the life of a democracy. The inquiring spirit of
science, using the scientific method, is the chief safeguard against
the tyranny of authority, bureaucracy, and brute power. It can reveal
by investigation necessities and possibilities in any social scene and
also offerings with respect to desirabilities to be achieved within
the limits of the possible.
The scientific method is, therefore, a precious and indispensable
instrument of the human mind; without it society would sink down into
primitive animism and barbarism. It is when this method, a child of
the human brain, is exalted into a master and a tyrant that historical
thought must enter a caveat. So the historian is bound by his craft to
recognize the nature and limitations of the scientific method and to
dispel the illusion that it can produce a science of history embracing
the fullness of history, or of any large phase, as past actuality.
This means no abandonment of the tireless inquiry into objective
realities, especially economic realities and relations; not enough
emphasis has been laid upon the conditioning and determining
influences of biological and economic necessities or upon researches
designed to disclose them in their deepest and widest ramifications.
This means no abandonment of the inquiry into the forms and
development of ideas as conditioning and determining influences; not
enough emphasis has been laid on this phase of history by American
scholars.
But the upshot to which this argument is directed is more fundamental
than any aspect of historical method.
It is that any selection and arrangement of facts pertaining to any
large area of history, either local or world, race or class, is
controlled inexorably by the frame of reference in the mind of the
selector and arranger. This frame of reference includes things deemed
necessary, things deemed possible, and things deemed desirable. It may
be large, informed by deep knowledge, and illuminated by wide
experience; or it may be small, uninformed, and unilluminated. It may
be a grand conception of history or a mere aggregation of confusions.
But it is there in the mind, inexorably. To borrow from Croce, when
grand philosophy is ostentatiously put out at the front door of the
mind, then narrow, class, provincial, and regional prejudices come in
at the back door and dominate, perhaps only half-consciously, the
thinking of the historian.
The supreme issue before the historian now is the determination of
his attitude to the disclosures of contemporary thought. He may
deliberately evade them for reasons pertaining to personal, economic,
and intellectual comfort, thus joining the innumerable throng of those
who might have been but were not. Or he may proceed to examine his own
frame of reference, clarify it, enlarge it by acquiring knowledge of
greater areas of thought and events, and give it consistency of
structure by a deliberate conjecture respecting the nature or
direction of the vast movements of ideas and interests called world
history.
This operation will cause discomfort to individual historians but
all, according to the vows of their office, are under obligation to
perform it, as Henry Adams warned the members of this Association in
his letter of 1894. And as Adams then said, it will have to be carried
out under the scrutiny of four great tribunals for the suppression of
unwelcome knowledge and opinion: the church, the state, property, and
labor. Does the world move and, if so, in what direction? If he
believes that the world does not move, the historian must offer the
pessimism of chaos to the inquiring spirit of mankind. If it does
move, does it move backward toward some old arrangement, let us say,
of 1928, 1896, 1815, 1789, or 1295? Or does it move forward to some
other arrangement which can be only dimly divined--a capitalist
dictatorship, a proletarian dictatorship, or a collectivist democracy?
The last of these is my own guess, founded on a study of long trends
and on a faith in the indomitable spirit of mankind. In any case, if
the historian cannot know or explain history as actuality, he helps to
make history, petty or grand.
To sum up contemporary thought in historiography, any written history
involves the selection of a topic and an arbitrary delimitation of its
borders -- cutting off connections with the universal. Within the
borders arbitrarily established, there is a selection and organization
of facts by the processes of thought. This selection and organization
-- a single act -- will be controlled by the historian's frame of
reference composed of things deemed necessary and of things deemed
desirable. The frame may be a narrow class, sectional, national, or
group conception of history, clear and frank or confused and half
conscious, or it may be a large, generous conception, clarified by
association with the great spirits of all ages. Whatever its nature
the frame is inexorably there, in the mind. And in the frame only
three broad conceptions of all history as actuality are possible.
History is chaos and every attempt to interpret it otherwise is an
illusion. History moves around in a kind of cycle. History moves in a
line, straight or spiral, and in some direction. The historian may
seek to escape these issues by silence or by a confession of avoidance
or he may face them boldly, aware of the intellectual and moral perils
inherent in any decision--in his act of faith.
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