Mini-Reviews: Books About History

History is the neurotic science. It constantly questions itself, asking whether it has a meaning, purpose, or method. Historians write long, scholarly books arguing that long, scholarly books are useless. History also suffers an inferiority complex; it longs to have the respect given to “hard” sciences like physics, mathematics, even economics. Sometimes it all becomes too much. You want to shout “Enough! Stop the bellyaching! Get back to the archives!”

Two books—one short and casual, the other long and densely-argued—offer historians a way out of their mental bind. The first, Marc Bloch’s “The Historian’s Craft,” is as notable for its own history as for its argument. Bloch was a prominent French historian who served in the Resistance during World War II. Captured, tortured, and executed by the Nazis, Bloch made “The Historian’s Craft” his last testament. At the outset, he apologizes for his unscholarly style—his books and notes were lost during the invasion.

Bloch dismisses the notion of “history as science.” Nothing could be more ridiculous, he scoffs. His definition of history is simple: “It is the appearance of the human element.” Having defined history, he then seeks to explain its method. The historian might be compared to a big game hunter. His quarry is “the human element.” Its tracks are the documents left behind by past generations: government records, bills of sale, diaries, the junk of human existence. The historian follows these tracks and, with a bit of imagination, tries to summon up the humans who left them behind.

There are dangers in this hunt. Bloch warns that “a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time.” Context is everything. The historian should also take care not to explain a thing by that which came immediately before it. History, according to Bloch, is less a chain than a web, every event connected to every other event. The firing on Fort Sumter might have triggered the Civil War, for instance, but it is absurd to think the war might have been averted if the guns of Charleston had stayed silent. Most of all, Bloch believes that the historian should be accepting of ignorance. There are some thing that can never be known.

Written in a spare and elegant style, “The Hstorian’s Craft” clocks in at 197 pages. Compare that to Hayden White’s “Metahistory.” Open it and random and you stumble across a sentence like “A history might have an explanatory component, like the ‘legend’ of a map, but this component had to be relegated to a place on the periphery of the narrative itself, in the same way that the legend of the map was.” And so on for 400+ pages.

You might expect me to hate “Metahistory.” But I don’t. It core idea is so radical that it earns my respect in spite of the wordy prose that surrounds it. To summarize, White erases the line between fiction and nonfiction. We do not come by our “historical consciousness” through the careful collection of evidence. Instead, our vision of history is a “moral and aesthetic” choice. There is no “right” way to see history. There are only different ways of describing it.

Specifically, there are four ways to see history, each corresponding to a type of fiction. You can regard history as a Romance, in which mankind struggles against—but finally overcomes—its challenges. Or you can see it as a Comedy. In the Comic mode of history, everything happens for the best, and everything has a happy ending. Then there is Tragedy—the notion that man is doomed by the very forces and institutions he creates in order to survive in this world. Lastly, the Satirical view of history holds that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Why bother with anything? No matter what we do, in the end it comes to nothing.

Each mode has an associated ideology: Anarchist, Conservative, Radical, Liberal. And each ideology has a trope: Metonym, Synecdoche, Metaphor, and Irony. And each trope has a…you get the idea. If it seems overdeveloped, that’s because it is. White is too eager to cram everything into his four-by-four box. Still, if you can overlook references to Satirical Comedies and Ironic Tragedies, you still have a fascinating study of four great European historians (Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt) and four great philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce).

I think White comes to the same conclusion as Bloch. Choose your style. Write your history. Let the philosophers worry about the meaning of it all.