Tag: academia

Bestowing Infinite Pains on Discovering What Actually Happened

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In his much quoted critique of medieval historiography, R.J. Collingwood noted that historians,

… in their anxiety to detect the general plan of history, and their belief that this plan was God’s and not man’s, they tended to look for the essence of history outside history itself, by looking away from man’s actions in order to detect the plan of God; and consequently the actual detail of human actions became for them relatively unimportant, and they neglected that prime duty of the historian, a willingness to bestow infinite pains on discovering what actually happened.*

Set aside for now the more or less obvious irony of selectively pulling eminent quotes on historiography without reference to their own historiographical context. I want to highlight it here for the way that it frames the forensic basis of what historians do. “Telling it like it was” or “showing it the way that it happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist) is a standard refrain of modern historical practice (as a professionalised research discipline). The work is oriented toward sources: who and what those sources are; the information they convey about people, places and events; and their credibility as conveyers of information (and by extension, the credibility of the information they convey).

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*R.J. Collingwood, The Idea of History: With Lectures, 1926-1928 Rev. Ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 55. Originally published in 1944, after Collingwood’s death.

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Omnivore 13/01/2010

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to be heads down for the next few weeks, preparing lectures and writing chapters. Any posting I do will be necessarily brief; I’ll be back in full swing after the hump.

    Omnivore 08/01/2010

    ~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

    Drezner Picks on Historians

    ~ Michael A. Innes ~ 6 Comments

    Thanks to Dan Drezner for exposing Tom Coburn’s ridiculous initiative to cut National Science Foundation money to political science… except in Drezner’s nightmare vision of a world without political science funding, historians would be one of the few remaining sources, along with (parodying Coburn) “CNN, pollsters, pundits…candidates, and political parties”, of knowledge about political behavior.

    Horrors.

    As an academic discipline, history is sometimes considered an art, sometimes a “science”, which says more about the intended readability of the discipline’s output than anything else. In terms of philosophies and practice of history, there’s a disciplinary truism, wie es eigentlich gewesen – telling it like it is – that many would argue is more “empirical” (not quantitative, which is something else) in its reading of evidence and “scientific” in its rigorous adherence to scholarly method, than a lot of the political “science” that gets pushed out. Lumping historians in with the media and punditocracy  is just as silly as Coburn’s argument that knowledge of political behavior should be limited to those fields.