More thoughts relating to my last post on Glenn Burgess on revisionism. I was making what might look like esoteric theoretical points there, and it might not always be immediately obvious how that applies to the existing historiography in practice. Anti-theory polemic often constructs a false dichotomy between all points of view being equally valid on the one hand and only one objective truth being valid on the other. I think things are more complicated than that. Although I reject objectivity I do think that there are many interpretations of history which are invalid for various reasons, including being internally inconsistent, not being very well supported by their own evidence, or even contradicting the laws of physics. But once we’ve dismissed all these interpretations as being impossible, we could potentially be left with many interpretations which are possible. This is where we get the theoretical issues that I wrote about before. It might not be possible, or even necessary, to choose between all these possible interpretations and choose a single correct one.

Applying this to English/British Civil War/Revolution historiography can illustrate the point, but it’s not necessarily obvious because other, more obvious, factors get in the way. For a start, many histories of this period (particularly, but not only, from Whigs and Marxists) have fallen at the first fence because they are internally inconsistent and/or not well supported by their own evidence (these are arguably the same thing, because poor evidence is an inconsistency for any empirical work but possibly irrelevant to non-empirical work). More have fallen at the second fence because other historians have produced evidence which contradicts them. Most, if not all, of the histories written from Gardiner onwards have shared certain basic empirical assumptions, so it’s perhaps surprising that these works have often not lived up to empirical standards of proof. Pointing that out should be alarming, but it might also be misleadingly comforting. Surely if everyone genuinely adhered to proper empirical standards we’d be able to find the one true story, wouldn’t we? I don’t think so. The fact that in practice so many historians have tried to argue for interpretations which are impossible doesn’t do anything to diminish the theoretical possibilities for an abundance of interpretations which can’t be dismissed as wrong but which can’t be chosen between. In practice we’re only just starting to see this.

Following Glenn Burgess’s example, I’ll take two different works and compare them: John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt and John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence. Both books are meticulously researched to the highest standards (or at least higher than most other books I’ve seen). Their descriptions of what happened would be difficult to challenge on empirical grounds. Both relate to the causes and outbreak of the First Civil War but each has a very narrow focus rather than offering an overarching model which claims to explain everything. It is perhaps this focus that allows the authors to be so meticulous, and therefore avoid falling at the early empirical fences. This is not to say that they are less ambitious than Lawrence Stone or David Underdown (examples of historians who did attempt overarching explanatory models), just that their ambitions might be pointing in a different direction. Neither Adamson nor Walter explicitly claims to be telling the whole story. They have omitted many things and made arbitrary decisions about what to include, as any historian must when writing any history, but they have not attempted to close down other possibilities outside their chosen scope. This is not to say that they think anything goes. Within their chosen scope, both have demolished previous interpretations which now look impossible or at least highly improbable. The most important thing is that these books do not contradict each other much, if at all. It would be quite easy to see them as dealing with different parts of the same thing. Therefore we have two interpretations which differ because their focus and end points differ, but which are not mutually exclusive. However, I suspect that it would be difficult to synthesize both works into a single overarching thesis in the style of Lawrence Stone. They’re just different. Taken together they suggest that the civil war might be too big and complicated to ever be distilled into a single work. I think that this will become increasingly obvious in the future as we see more books like these.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
2. Glenn Burgess, ‘On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 609-27.
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).

‘On Revisionism’ is an important article from 1990 (you can download it free from Historical Journal) in which Glenn Burgess sets out a fair appraisal of what revisionism is (or was) and defends it from some unfair criticisms, then makes some more sophisticated criticisms. It’s possibly unfair to beat Burgess with a stick that hadn’t been published at the time he was writing and which was (and perhaps still is) considered extremely radical, but I’d like to compare this article with the work of Keith Jenkins, and some of the theorists who inform his work, because there are some surprising similarities. Ultimately Burgess and Jenkins draw different conclusions, but they are tackling some of the same problems and at times use similar arguments. For the purposes of this post I’m not going to question empirical epistemological foundations at all, but if we accept that the past really happened, and that we can know facts about what really happened, there are still many practical and theoretical problems concerning what to do with those facts.

Burgess starts by pointing out that revisionists in the 1970s saw a need to study politics on its own terms because they recognized that politics could not be reduced to anything else. He also points out that even Christopher Hill accepted that the cultural superstructure could not be entirely reduced to the economic base. Brian Manning seems to implicitly support this despite his attempts to defend the base/superstructure model.

I find Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 critique of Whig history interesting because he seems so close to Lyotard, and yet so far away. Butterfield recognized that the entirety of what really happened in the past was too vast too fit into a single book, and that therefore writing a general history involves a great deal of omission. He was critical of the Whigs because he believed that their decisions about what to include and what to omit distorted the truth. The problem which Burgess points out with this view, and where it diverges from Lyotard, is that Butterfield believed that it was possible to write an abridged history which didn’t distort the truth and maintained the one true meaning of history. I agree that this is not possible, and that it invalidates the particular argument which Butterfield tried to make, but he was still onto something with his suspicion that there was a problem with the way Whigs constructed their narrative. Lyotard’s problem with Whig and Marxist grand narratives was not that they distort the truth, but that they present only one truth and claim that this is the only truth. Therefore they suffer from exactly the same fallacy as Butterfield. Arbitrary selection and omission of facts is unavoidable when writing historical narratives, but what can and should be avoided is closing down other possibilities by claiming to have written the only possible narrative. As Burgess points out later in the article, there are many different ways of writing the story of the English Civil War.

Perhaps the most well-known point that Burgess makes is about teleology. He makes a crucial distinction between strong and weak teleology. Strong teleology, which claims that the outcome of a narrative was always inevitable, is obviously wrong. This was a weakness of Whig narratives of progress towards democracy, and Marxist narratives of class struggle. However, Burgess criticizes revisionists for conflating both kinds teleology and trying to get rid of the whole thing. This is an impossible and counterproductive task. Not only is weak teleology not a problem, Burgess shows that it’s absolutely necessary for writing any kind of history. In order to write a historical narrative you have to give it some kind of structure. You have to know where the story is going to end up in order to decide which facts to include and which to omit. There is no objective way of deciding which facts are important because the importance of facts is relative to the story you want to tell. Again this isn’t so very different from Lyotard or Hayden White.

The concept of anachronism is also related to teleology. As Burgess says, strong teleology is anachronistic, which it obviously is. However his definition of anachronism also includes “the use of present day categories to organize our accounts of the past”, and this is described as “reprehensible”. I’m not convinced by this part of the argument as I’m not sure that it’s possible to write about the past without using any present day concepts. Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, and Keith Jenkins would all say that everything in history above the level of very basic facts is metaphorical. In what way can concepts in present day minds not be present day concepts? Maybe it would be possible to write a historical narrative which uses only contemporary language and concepts but that would be a pastiche of contemporary writing. That would be an interesting possibility, and I hear that Ariel Hessayon has attempted something like it, but I don’t think it’s what Glenn Burgess was calling for. In fact his critique of Clarendon implies that he would not consider such an approach to be “proper” history.

Burgess insists that Clarendon “is not in any modern sense an historian at all” because “his purposes are consequently (in our terms) moral rather than historical” (p. 622). Keith Jenkins deconstructs the concept of “bias” showing how the dismissal of some sources and historians as biased allows the historians doing the dismissing to believe that they are not biased themselves and have achieved objectivity. Burgess is clearly falling into this trap by identifying Clarendon as the Other who is not-history, against whom “proper” historians can define themselves. It’s not clear to me that having a moral purpose stops writing from being history (I dare anyone to try telling me that feminist history isn’t proper history), or that it’s possible to write without a moral purpose. Even trying to exclude other people’s morals from history could be seen as a moral purpose of sorts.

His other problem with Clarendon is that “human wickedness and incompetence, without providence will produce only chaos. And chaos has no story, no history” (p. 623). First of all I think that history could well be chaos in the scientific sense of chaos theory, but I don’t think that this is what Burgess was getting at. He probably meant it in the more common sense of randomness or lack of order. But perhaps history is random and disordered, in that the body of knowable facts about the past is so vast and unintelligible that it might as well be random until we impose some kind of order on it by structuring it into a coherent narrative (with all the arbitrary decisions which that entails). It is entirely possible to construct a narrative which tells a story of random things which don’t happen for any apparent good reason. Burgess more or less concedes this by characterizing Clarendon’s work in pretty much these terms (and for even more extreme examples of narratives of chaos see Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka). For Burgess Clarendon fails to be proper historian again because he fails to explain things properly, but this is all down to a difference of opinion between Burgess and Clarendon about what counts as a proper explanation.

This is not to say that Burgess has a narrow view of what historical explanation should be. He’s against determinism, strong teleology, and randomness but he acknowledges that many different explanations are possible and that choosing between them might not be possible. As an example, he takes a model of the civil war as baronial revolt, based on Conrad Russell and John Adamson, and contrasts it with a model of the civil war as war of religion, based on John Morrill. He points out that these two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive and could just be different ways of constructing a narrative about the same events. Both might be true but incomplete, describing different parts of the same problem. This suggests that many more narratives of the same events might be possible. I suspect that, as Michael Braddick has recently suggested, the story of the English Civil War will never be complete because there will always be more aspects of the story which could be told, or aspects which could be told differently. Historiography has traditionally been much more adversarial than this, consisting of knocking down old interpretations and replacing them with something else, which in its turn gets knocked down and replaced. Perhaps revisionism was the beginning of the end of that process. Whig and Marxist narratives clearly needed to be cleared away because they claimed to explain everything and denied opportunities for different views. If revisionism hasn’t put anything similar in their place that could be seen as a success rather than a failure (although there are many ways in which revisionists have tried to close down potentially valid possibilities, such as Conrad Russell’s refusal to engage with the question of revolution).

There are still traces of the adversarial approach in the article, as Burgess went on to look for ways of choosing between explanations. He points out that explanations of the same thing might not be about the same thing if you look closer. The relative strengths and weaknesses of an explanation depend on what it’s trying to explain. If you choose a different end point you get a different narrative with a different explanation. Therefore how you explain the civil war depends heavily on how you define it. This is all good. At this point it seems to me that the logical conclusion should be that because different people choose to write different narratives with different end points their explanations are always going to be different and that there might not be any way of choosing between them (or any need to choose between them). And above all there’s no objective way of deciding what you should try to explain, or deciding how to define the problem. It’s an arbitrary decision which depends on things like personal taste, audience expectations, and yes, moral purpose.

Surprisingly, the final section doesn’t go where the rest of the article seems to be pointing. Burgess ends up trying to find an objective way of choosing between explanations by looking for an objective way of choosing between end points. Against all the odds, he seems to think he’s found it. He concludes that what we should try to explain is what most needs explaining, and that what most needs explaining is what was most unusual or unique. I think there are lots of problems with this. First there’s the problem of defining the problem. Burgess earlier argued that historians find different explanations of the Civil War because they have different definitions of what the Civil War was (and up til now he implicitly accepts that there is no objective way of choosing between these definitions). At the beginning of section V he suddenly jumps from using the term “Civil War” to using “the English revolution”. This is highly significant, because from this point on he maintains (without explaining exactly why) that we can objectively know exactly what the English revolution was, and can objectively compare it with other historical events to see what the similarities and differences were. I don’t see how this follows at all. If we can’t define the civil war, how can we define the revolution? Don’t the same problems apply to both concepts, or neither? To me “revolution” looks like an abstract/analytic concept which can be (and in practice has been) defined in many different ways. There can’t be an empirical test for a revolution without a definition to test against. If you don’t define a revolution you can’t find one, which is possibly why Conrad Russell was so reluctant to even discuss the question.

Even if we could agree on what the English revolution was and determine which bits of it were most unusual (tricky, since Burgess himself says earlier in the article that things which appear the same might not be the same when you look closer), would this mean that we had to focus only on the unusual things and ignore what was usual? I disagree for three reasons.

First, because we don’t need to limit ourselves to writing about things which are generally agreed to be important. There might be many interesting works to be written about “usual” things, and there are more than enough historians to go around. We don’t all have to write about the same thing.

Second, because this line of argument seems to assume that some things, such as baronial coups, are just conditions of a certain period. Steve Rigby convincingly argued (although a few years after this article) that causes and conditions can’t be distinguished objectively, because it depends on what historians and their audiences are prepared to take for granted, which might vary a lot. Although Burgess means a slightly different thing by conditions I think Rigby’s argument is still applicable here, because it ultimately concerns what to take for granted and what to explain. Some people might not think that baronial coups need explaining because they were just endemic in pre-modern England, but other people might want to know why they kept happening, and why they didn’t stop earlier, or carry on later. When Burgess says “There is nothing particularly unusual about either baronial revolts or religious wars” he seems to be saying the same thing that he earlier criticized Peter Laslett for saying.

And third, because accepting something as “just how it was” makes it appear natural and puts it beyond criticism. Unequal distribution of resources and oppression of women are basic facts of history, and not particularly unusual. At what point do they stop being “just how it was” and start being contemporary problems that we have to deal with in our own lives? (The discussion over at Smashing the Window about the tension between history and contemporary history is particularly relevant here.)

Every historical narrative necessarily has to take many things for granted, but I don’t think it’s healthy if we all take the same things for granted.

Finally, one of the biggest problems of causation is hinted at, but not dealt with in any detail. Burgess rightly points out that when Conrad Russell found the outbreak of civil war in 1642 to be a peculiarity of Charles I’s reign which was unlikely to have happened to Henry VIII, he needed to explain what was different. “The account is incomplete, dependent on something else which is itself in need of explanation” (p. 623). Or, as Keith Jenkins asked “how far back and how far afield” do you need to go? Only you can decide, and your decision will be arbitrary.

Overall this is a fascinating but frustrating article as it seems to get so close to a postmodern breakthrough but then pulls back at the last minute. It could have had a more radical conclusion, but at the time it was written that wouldn’t have been fashionable and would have aroused a lot of hostility, so perhaps it isn’t fair to criticize Glenn Burgess for not being too far ahead of his time. I wonder how far he realized the implications of what he was nearly saying, and how he would approach these questions today, now that Michael Braddick and Malcolm Wanklyn are quite happy to accept some postmodern ideas.

1. Glenn Burgess, ‘On revisionism : an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 609-27.
2. Keith Jenkins, Re-figuring History (Routledge, 2002).
3. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (Routledge, 2003, first pub. 1991).

Causation has always been a problem for me. I remember as an undergraduate struggling to write a 2,000 word essay explaining the French Revolution, and ending up thinking “what’s the point?”. My PhD thesis was mostly about describing rather than explaining, and where the conclusion touched on the reasons for the outcome of the English Civil War it was particularly weak. My first article mostly revolves around the question “continuity or change?” rather than “why?”, and I only ended up making strong claims about the causes of price changes in order to win an argument with the reviewer. But now I’m working on the Difficult Second Article, where I decided I could make the empirical data sexier by linking it to the debate on the causes of the English Civil War. That was probably a bad idea as it’s taking much longer than I expected, but I’ve put too much time and effort into it to abandon it now, and I need another publication on my CV as soon as possible to help with funding applications. So as well as digging into the mountain of historiography on the civil wars/revolution/whatever I’ve been looking into theories of causation.

There now follow some esoteric theoretical thoughts on an article by Steve Rigby (from 1996, so not necessarily the latest thing, but it’s a useful starting point even if the author might have moved on since then) on causal hierarchies, taking in Keith Jenkins along the way. Don’t be surprised if I’ve misunderstood some of it – this blog was always meant to be about thinking in public.

Rigby argues against hierarchies of causation: the idea that although most historical events have multiple necessary causes, those causes can be ranked in order of how important they were. He easily demolishes both the Marxist position that there is a universal hierarchy of causes (usually with class at the top), and the traditional historiography which says that hierarchies vary according to time, place, and other circumstances. The argument against hierarchies goes something like this: if several causes are all necessary in order for something to take place, then it makes no sense to rank them, because they are all equally important. Without any one of them the event that you’re trying to explain wouldn’t have happened. Furthermore, there is no way to distinguish between causes and conditions. It all depends on the point of view of historians and their audiences. What are they interested in? What are they prepared to take as given, and what do they think needs explaining?

This is all good, but then he comes up against Keith Jenkins and things get a bit less convincing. Jenkins argues that causal chains are inevitably infinite because whenever we identify a factor that caused something, we also need to know what caused that. There is no obvious or natural point at which we can stop following the chain “backwards and outwards” (in theory at least; in practice loss of records allows us to stop sooner or later!). Rigby argues that abandoning causal hierarchies does not require us to keep following an infinite chain, and claims that his own argument does not lead to relativism or nihilism. That’s true up to a point, because his argument is based on a scenario where we agree that various causes are all necessary. In that case we can’t rank them in relation to each other, but it’s assumed that we’ve already rejected lots of other factors as being irrelevant or incompatible with our chosen causes. However, there’s nothing in the article which convincingly refutes relativism or nihilism.

There are two issues here: first, where you pick up the start of a causal chain, and second, how far you follow it. On the first, Rigby points out that not all explanations are equally valid, and gives examples of explanations which no-one would be likely to think were valid. But that doesn’t quite work. Rigby’s examples of invalid explanations are obviously invalid because they’re physically impossible. He doesn’t really have much to say about how to choose between explanations that are physically possible, and doesn’t give an example of an explanation which is possible but invalid for some other reason. If we rejected all explanations which are physically impossible we would still be left with lots of explanations which are physically possible, and therefore can’t automatically be dismissed, but which are not necessarily compatible with each other, so they can’t all be accepted at the same time. So we’re left with a large number of possible explanations, each of which is potentially valid and internally consistent. That means that there could be many different starting points to choose from before you even get as far as asking “how far back and how far afield” you want to follow the chain.

On the second point, Rigby argues that the length and breadth of the chain will be limited in practice by “first, of the existing state of knowledge in a particular field; secondly, of our own particular expertise; and thirdly, of the knowledge which we can take for granted on the part of our audience”. Earlier in the article he emphasizes how this is related to “the interests and purposes of the speaker”. Keith Jenkins points out how ideology and power might play a role here, as well as more mundane factors such as the accepted length for books and articles.

Ultimately Rigby’s attempt to refute relativisim and nihilism falls back on objectivity, despite arguments against objectivity earlier in the article, stating that “causes, in the sense of multiple conditions, objectively exist in the real world and are knowable by scientists and historians”. Jenkins rejects objectivity on philosophical grounds. Even if you don’t follow him that far, the conflation of scientists and historians, past and present, looks suspicious. If causes in the present are knowable by scientists, it doesn’t logically follow that causes in the past are knowable by historians. If objectivity was attainable, would that necessarily make a definitive causal explanation possible, or would it still be too big and complicated even if all the false explanations could be eliminated?

In any case Steve Rigby made a very strong argument against ranking causes, which no-one can really disagree with: if you have a set of necessary causes you can’t say that one is more necessary than the others. They’re all necessary. It’s as simple as that, and it holds up regardless of what methodology you use to arrive at your necessary causes. Since his argument makes no claims about how necessary causes can or should be identified (and doesn’t need to) it clearly doesn’t lead to nihilism or relativism, but it doesn’t really depend on objectivity either. That he tried to go further is possibly a product of the time when he was writing as in the mid-90s when the theory wars were at their height (apparently – I didn’t really notice at the time, as I’ve said somewhere before) even the very mild relativism of arguing against ranking causes would have been more controversial than it deserved to be.

1. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (Routledge, 2003, first pub. 1991).
2. S. H. Rigby, ‘Historical causation: is one thing more important than another?’, History, 80 (1996), pp. 227-42.

Last week I posted some thoughts in response to the discussions at A Historian’s Craft and Civil War Memory about history and philosophy. In that post I took some of the philosophical problems that affect history and tried to restate them in scientific terms. As Brett pointed out, this really amounted to stating the obvious in fairly uncontroversial terms, but I think that was worth doing in order to bypass the unproductive hostility between both extremes in the postmodernism wars (although the extent to which those extremes even exist is debatable). Whether the major problems we face as historians are philosophical, scientific, or a bit of both, the question remains: how much time should we spend thinking about these problems? In this post I’ll be discussing that question, but I have to warn you in advance that I can’t answer it. So there might not be much point reading any further…

First of all I have to say that I agree completely with Kevin Levin that as historians we can’t solve these problems ourselves. If cognitive scientists can’t work out what meaning is and where it comes from, then we have no chance. But while it would be naive and arrogant to attempt to find solutions to these problems, it would also be naive and arrogant to ignore them completely. I think we need to know something about the nature and extent of problems such as meaning so that we know how they affect our work. But how much is enough? Getting good at history is hard enough without also having to know about philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science or whatever. Maybe blogs can help here, because they provide an easy way to find out about unfamiliar areas. For example, I’ve relied quite heavily on Mixing Memory and Babel’s Dawn for science, and The Valve for philosophy and literary criticism. But how do we know if we can trust them if we don’t already know what they’re telling us? Could this also be a problem with peer reviewed publications which are outside our field?

Is it really worth trying to find out about problems which haven’t been solved yet and which we can’t possibly solve ourselves? The problem of meaning has major implications for history, but the jury is still out. It might stay out forever, or maybe just a lifetime. Right now we don’t even know where the answer is going to come from let alone what it will be. (If I had to make a wild speculation I’d guess that sooner or later the cognitive sciences will crack the meaning problem and that the answer will be equally uncomfortable for both empirical historians and post-structuralist theorists, but anyway…) Under these circumstances, we can’t confidently take any position, whether empirical or theoretical. We might all be wrong. Post-structuralist thought is valuable in that it reminds us that meaning is not straightforward, but that is hardly the last word. I found Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory, Text quite disappointing because she promised that post-structuralism offered exciting new opportunities for medieval historians, but failed to deliver. Most of the book is a teleological triumphal progress towards post-structuralism in which she sneers at various historians and philosophers for not being post-structuralist enough. There’s far too little discussion of what post-structuralism can actually do for the historian. The way I see it, post-structuralism is a problem not a solution. I don’t want to ignore that problem, but I don’t want to admit defeat and stop writing on the grounds that people could just as easily find interesting meaning in words randomly generated by a computer.

(Somewhere in that paragraph I changed from first person plural to first person singular. Even I’m not sure what the significance of that is!)

So I believe that there are major problems confronting history, I realise that I can’t solve those problems, but I don’t want to ignore them either. Can I work around them in order to minimize their impact on my work? If the central problem is meaning then probably not. I used to think that digitization offered a way out of this dilemma because you could concentrate on transcribing documents without having to make any assumptions about what they mean: concentrate on information and exclude meaning. Now that I’ve tried digitizing text for myself I can see that it’s not as simple as that (see my theoretical agonizing here and here). Although meaning intrudes into every stage of the digitization process the problem is perhaps more manageable than it would be in literary criticism. Identifying the character string “Lt. R. E. W. Sandall” as a name and rank seems less problematic than interpreting the meaning of a poem (unless it’s by Jessie Pope maybe…). Once I’d established that my editing decisions were arbitrary, I had no problem getting on with it. I have a lot of sympathy for Kevin’s point that theory doesn’t seem to matter so much when you’re actually doing history. But am I deluding myself there? Or am I wasting time on unproductive thinking when I could be doing?

If you’re not convinced that what you’re doing is right, how do you motivate yourself to do the work? Historical research involves a lot of difficult and tedious work. You need a strong commitment to get through it. The possibility that my work could be proved completely worthless by new developments in a different discipline isn’t stopping me from doing history. There isn’t really anything new here. It’s always been accepted by most historians that future research could prove their own work wrong. New sources or new interpretations could easily overturn your conclusions. Historians have usually been able to carry on doing what they do rather than giving up in despair at the thought that they might be wrong.

The hypothetical extreme empiricists would be offended at the hypothetical extreme postmodernist’s suggestion that empiricism is just an arbitrary culturally constructed paradigm. I don’t have any problem with that suggestion. My “proper” work (ie my Phd thesis, my forthcoming article, and other projects that I’m working on) is mostly within the empirical paradigm. The rules and values of that paradigm are arbitrary, but that doesn’t automatically make it worthless. As Brett pointed out in response to my post last week, science is an arbitrary system constructed by human language and culture, but it’s a useful one which can predict or change the future. Empirical history can’t do that, but I still like it. Maybe that’s a lame justification, but it’s honest. I can’t make a strong case for any kind of history being really important, but I know that history is what I want to do. If I like it, and if there’s a paradigm that values my work, is that all I need? I also think that empirical research teaches valuable skills. Some of these are transferable to other careers (eg using databases, analytical thinking, project management) while others are more specialised (eg palaeography, latin). All of them are more valuable than ever in the age of digital history. We need people with these skills and familiarity with historical documents to work on digitization projects. You can only get good at these things through years of practical experience, not by reading Derrida. However, digitization projects also require familiarity with theories of text – structuralism, post-structuralism, and information theory are all highly relevant here.

Although I like working in the empirical paradigm, I also like to look outside it. Right now there still seems to be a big gap between my empirical and theoretical interests. Will I ever be able to bring them together, or are they incommensurable? If they are incommensurable, is being able to think about them both at the same time a strength or a weakness? I don’t want to get too attached to one way of doing things. I want to be as versatile as possible, but will that just make me a jack of all trades and master of none? There’s a serious danger of creating the appearance of being theoretically aware by lazily dropping the right buzzwords but not really understanding the ideas behind them. The phrase “truth effect” can create its own truth effect. In a comment to my previous post I mentioned this experiment which provides empirical proof of the truth effect: non-experts are more likely to accept bad explanations of psychological phenomena if they include irrelevant neuroscience terminology. Now I’m wondering how terminology affects perceptions of historical writing. I’d like to see more experiments here, but do psychologists consider history interesting and important enough to be the object of their study?

Thinking too much is bad, but so is not thinking enough. I don’t think there’s a single point in the middle that’s exactly right. Different amounts of thinking suit different people. Ultimately everyone needs to make their own decisions. And so I’ve written nearly 1,500 words without really saying anything. Does that make me a philosopher? No, just a blogger.

1. Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 2004).

[ETA 18/1/2012: This post is nearly 5 years old. My situation has changed a lot since then so whatever is written below might not be true any more.]

[Looks like I won't be using WordPress 2.1 as my host doesn't have the right version of MySQL. I should've checked that before starting to the upgrade, but everything's back to normal now.]

A lot of military history bloggers have been debating the distinctions between different types of historian: professional versus amateur, and academic versus non-academic. Mark Grimsley at Cliopatria has summed up and linked to various contributions. Having read all of these, I’ve been trying to work out where I stand, which necessarily involves working out how my own “career” and experiences fit in with what has already been said. Unsurprisingly, I think that binary oppositions are an oversimplification. Mark identifies the two oppositions (professional versus amateur, and academic versus non-academic) as meaning essentially the same thing. In the terms of the debate that he’s describing this is probably more or less true, but I’d like to make things more complicated.

I’ll be trying to work out the differences between academic, non-academic, amateur, and professional by looking at various criteria, but first I have to work out what I mean by “historian”. This is even more difficult. Some people might take a narrow view that only academics or professionals can be true historians. I’m looking for a more inclusive definition but that risks making the term meaningless. We could define “historian” as anyone who writes about history. But how much writing do you have to do to qualify? Even posting on a forum or commenting on a blog is writing about history. Do you even have to write at all? Just reading books involves a certain amount of judgement, especially when two books obviously disagree with each other. Readers then have to make their own decisions about what to believe. In that sense everyone can be a historian. So no, I can’t find a useful definition of “historian” but I’m going to carry on despite that fundamental flaw.

Qualifications:

Most bloggers in this debate have identified the PhD as one of the key things which separates academics from non-academics (whether those non-academics are amateur or professional). Authors of successful and well-researched books can feel that their books would be taken more seriously by academics if they had a PhD. This shows that a PhD is perceived as significant by both academics and non-academics. However, a PhD on its own doesn’t define an academic. There are various other factors to be considered.

Jobs and money:

Professional implies someone who gets paid for doing history. This can include academics, who are paid to teach history and to write scholarly articles and monographs, and non-academics who make a living from writing successful popular books. The amateur is not professional and not academic.

Having an academic job is a big part of being defined as an academic. I have a PhD but no job, so I’m not quite a proper academic. Even with a PhD and a history related job, you might not necessarily be considered an academic. The academic job is usually assumed to be teaching or research in a university.

Publication:

Having your work published doesn’t necessarily make you academic or professional. There are non-academic books, which academics often dismiss as “popular”. This can be an inaccurate description, because non-academic history books don’t necessarily sell in large numbers or make lots of money. Some authors make enough money out of writing popular books that they can live on it, and therefore be considered professional authors. Others make little or no money out of their publications and write as a hobby while doing a day job to earn enough money to live on. Academics don’t necessarily get much money for their publications unless they cross over into the popular market, in which case they might be looked down on by other academics.

Getting an article in a respected peer-reviewed journal is an essential step for any academic career (and one more reason why I’m not a proper academic). The next step is the book. It seems to be generally expected that everyone will want to turn their thesis into a monograph. I think my thesis would make a terrible book, and there’s no way I could bring myself to write a book like that. Even if I could find a publisher willing to take it on (doubtful, but there’s at least one potential suspect) it would most likely be read by no more than ten people. And still people ask me when I’m doing the book of thesis or why haven’t I done it yet. This fetishizing (it’s a cliche but I had to use it) of obscure monographs effectively means that your fellow academics will respect you because of a book they have never read and have no intention of reading! Therefore, non-academic historians shouldn’t necessarily feel bad about not being judged solely on the quality of their work, because academics aren’t either.

Quality and importance of work:

I subscribe to the view that works need to be judged on their own merits. If the research and writing are good, qualifications don’t matter. I put this into practice in my own PhD thesis by citing the works of non-academic historians such as Alan Turton and John Tincey, whose work I admired and found useful. Alan and John both write for Partizan Press, a publisher specialising primarily in books on the English Civil Wars aimed at wargamers, re-enactors, and other amateur enthusiasts (a niche market which demonstrates the inadequacy of the academic description “popular”). This is something that I suspect many academics would look down on, but judged purely on quality and usefulness, their output is worthwhile. My post on Horse Imports: A Zombie Myth demonstrated that basic errors and misunderstandings can be found in the works of academic and non-academic authors alike.

Since getting interested in the First World War I’ve discovered that amateur historians are even more important than I used to think. The Great War Forum is a mine of useful facts which I suspect no academic historian knows. There are many unpaid amateur enthusiasts building databases of all soldiers who served in a particular battalion. At present this effort is fragmented and the data is not easily available to anyone other than the historian compiling the list (they are always happy to answer enquiries, but compared to Web 2.0 this is not what I call “easily available”), but there is huge potential for these sources to grow and interact. This will result in far more knowledge of First World War soldiers, giving unprecedented details of enlistment rates, geographical origins, ages, social background, casualty rates, career progress etc. I don’t see any academic projects offering anything so comprehensive, because academic research projects take a long time to get off the ground and have to compete for limited funding. The amateur approach of just doing it offers to bypass these problems and create a truly new history from below and outside: the historians, as well their objects of study, will be from outside or below the academy. I’m now thinking about how we can bring these people and their work into Web 2.0.

Methodology:

Although amateurs are capable of doing detailed empirical work just as well as academics, academics can do much more besides thanks to their specialised training and experience. I’m excited by First World War databases because they offer answers to interesting questions about the composition of the British Army and its relationship to British society. I get the impression that many amateur researchers don’t have any such purpose in mind when they start building a battalion database. On this thread at the Great War Forum, several researchers admit that they have collected large numbers of names and don’t know what to do with them! The real importance of a PhD is that it trains you to think critically and ask questions. Some historians can be capable of this even without formal training and qualifications, but in general I’d say that amateurs are weakest in this area.

The thing which most divides academics from non-academics is theory. That’s theory with a small t. Academics are divided among themselves over Theory with a capital T, but at a basic level they all agree on the importance of thinking about methodology and historiography, even though there are competing and mutually exclusive approaches. Amateurs are generally much less interested in this (although there can be exceptions) and are more likely to declare that they are only interested in “the facts”. They can be suspicious of even quite traditional objectivist empirical theorizing. For example, there’s nothing postmodern about “epistemic probabilities”, but I wouldn’t dare use a term like that at the Great War Forum! However, there can be exceptions, and the same kind of anti-intellectualism can be found among some academic historians (see Arthur Marwick’s denunciation of philosophy). Conversely, an amateur’s obsession with “the facts” and trainspotterish completism could actually lead to more thorough and complete work than any academic is able or willing to undertake. With restrictions of time and budget, teaching commitments, and the publish-or-die treadmill, academics are under pressure to do just enough and no more. This often means taking samples rather than recording everything.

Conclusions:

That’s about all I have to say, but I’ve probably missed something important. I’m no closer to making any sense or reaching any conclusions, so I’ll have to finish with “can’t we all just get along” platitudes. Academic, non-academic, amateur, and professional historians have different strengths and weaknesses. Web 2.0 might offer an opportunity to bring these different kinds of historians together and allow them to benefit from each others’ work and experience, but it will require different attitudes as well as new technology.

Objectivity and neutrality are very controversial topics in historiography. There has been lot of acrimonious debate about how the preconceptions we bring to history affect what we write, and whether it’s possible or desirable to leave those preconceptions behind. This is what I had to say on the issue when I wrote the introduction to my PhD thesis in 2001:

Having studied the supply of horses and tack to the armies of Essex, Manchester and Fairfax in equal detail, I am in a position to present a more balanced case study of the development of parliamentarian supply systems and show to what extent there was any continuity between the old armies and the New Model Army. In fact, the development of the New Model Army and its supply and administration has become a central theme of this thesis. This was not necessarily intended from the outset. Like every PhD student, my research project has undergone significant changes over the years. I had originally planned to cover local forces in several counties as well as the parliamentarian field armies, but this fell by the wayside. I did not set out to prove or disprove anything and brought no preconceptions with me. There was never meant to be any “big idea” which would tie the whole thesis together. I merely set out to see what was there, but as my research progressed, certain ideas grew out of the evidence which I found. Having originally believed that Ian Gentles had well and truly had the last word on the origins and development of the New Model Army, I now believe that there is more to be said.

I now find it hard to believe that I wrote something so naive, and that the examiners let me get away with it. Was I deluded or dishonest? And can I be any more honest now? That one paragraph contains enough incriminating evidence to put me alongside post-structuralism’s favourite scapegoats, Elton and Ranke. So obviously I’m going to disown it. If I still believed that stuff then I might not see any need to deny it, because I wouldn’t want to appease theorists whom I considered to be wrong. But I was able to write something like that because I was completely unaware of theory. I was also completely unaware of Ranke. I’d heard of Geoffrey Elton, but to me he was just someone who wrote some dull books about Tudor government which Ralph Houlbrooke made me read when I was an undergraduate. Although I developed advanced research and analytical skills through years of practical experience, I learnt almost nothing about historiography.

My PhD coincided with what I now call my “stuckist” phase, in honour of Billy Childish (who I also knew nothing about back then). I was determined to ignore trends and fashions, and single-mindedly plough my own furrow. The things I valued were precision, authenticity, integrity, purity, originality, objectivity, neutrality, hard work, and (ironically) honesty. The things I hated were cliches, fashion, superficiality, gimmicks, pretension, vagueness, bias, nepotism, laziness, and (even more ironically considering what hate is) emotion. Blandness was part of my dogme. I wrote in an anti-style which aimed at nothing more than conveying information and analysis as clearly and neutrally as possible. I disapproved of bad puns and incomprehensible quotes in the titles of articles and papers. My papers all had dull descriptive titles, and were weighed down with masses of tedious facts. Pity anyone who had to listen to them. Most of all, I was opposed to exciting conclusions. I was very suspicious of historians who had big ideas and straightforward explanations. Although I didn’t know the word “dialectic”, I found the way historians tended to divide into opposite camps pointless and irritating. During my viva, Martyn Bennett accused me of sitting on the fence over the issue of continuity or change, and was probably quite frustrated by my refusal to retract my assertion that Mark Kishlansky and Ian Gentles were “extreme”.

Strangely, these attitudes weren’t something that I brought into my work fully formed. They seemed to develop over time, getting more explicit and more deeply entrenched the further I got with my work (I could blame spending too much time alone in archives, but that’s something that all historians have to deal with). I did have some big ideas when I started, otherwise how could I have decided what to research and how to research it? And how could I have won the funding? The biggest idea was showing how logistical factors influenced the outcome of the First Civil War more than battles (what Malcolm Wanklyn more recently dismissed as the “determinist case”). That would involve comparing the royalists and parliamentarians. As it turned out, doing that was more difficult than I imagined because there are so few surviving records for the royalist administration, and the records that do survive are more difficult to find and use than the parliamentarian ones (which bring the opposite problem: too much information). I still tried to do the royalists (partly because I’d made a lot of comparing both sides when I applied for funding), but I could only manage one chapter on them and it wasn’t very good. In spite of that, and my protestations in the introduction, my conclusion asserted that the royalists lost the war because parliament had more resources and more efficient systems for extracting them. So much for no big ideas.

The other big idea was whether the creation of the New Model Army represented continuity or change. It’s true that I wasn’t initially expecting this to be such a major part of my conclusion (although that’s partly down to thinking that comparing both sides would be the big thing) but it hardly jumped out of the records of its own accord. Before I started my research, Frank Tallett encouraged me to make a list of questions that I wanted to answer, and this list did feature “continuity or change”. It was surprising to discover so much continuity between the Earl of Essex’s army and the New Model, but this would not have been particularly meaningful or interesting if it hadn’t been for the context provided by the dialectic between Kishlansky and Gentles.

Despite (or perhaps because of) my stuckism, I produced some very solid empirical work. Although I’m beating myself up over some dubious assumptions and theoretical ignorance, I still think a lot of my thesis stands up well today. Some chapters are weak, but I knew they were weak when I wrote them, and they turned out to be good enough for a pass. I now have doubts about the relationship between text and reality, which I had viewed as unproblematic simply by not thinking about it too much, but my work is a very accurate analysis of the information contained within the sources. Whether or not that information means anything, I developed some very valuable skills which are more relevant than ever thanks to the increasing importance of digitization projects.

I did go through some research training and at least thought a little bit about what I now know is called “epistemology”. If pressed on the issue, my answer would have been that absolute truth is unattainable, but we still have to try and get as close to it as possible. Back then, striving for the unattainable seemed like a good way to live. Reading Camus and Nietzche during my career break didn’t necessarily do much to put me off that idea (although having tried to apply them to a very tedious job in the VAT office, I really can’t imagine Sisyphus happy!). I occasionally had some vaguely Buddhist ideas about achieving a state of perfect objectivity and neutrality by erasing the self. When objectivist historians talk about extinguishing the self, it comes across as being naively unproblematic. To “step outside” seems no more difficult, threatening, or permanent than going into the garden or down to the shops. These days I’d prefer to call it “stepping across”, because like Raskolnikov we might find the process terrifying, counterproductive, and difficult to reverse. Would abandoning our morality and humanity make it easier or harder to understand other humans? Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable suggests the cosmic horror of a consciousness without any context, floating free of all assumptions and preconceptions (incidentally this book made me particularly receptive to post-structuralism).

Neutrality is really a non-starter whichever way you look at it. History is all about having opinions, but to be truly neutral is to have no opinions. Unless you are even more ignorant and dogmatic than I was six years ago (in which case you probably write for The Daily Telegraph— miaow!), it’s difficult to pretend that any facts are self-evident absolute truths. Empiricists have to make subjective decisions about which facts they consider to be true. If you can’t have opinions, then you can’t evaluate these epistemic probabilities (and rational deduction won’t get you anywhere either, because you won’t be able to decide whether to accept any premises). John Childs (how often does he get mentioned alongside Beckett, Camus, and Nietzche?) said that everything is attritional. I’ve come to see empirical truth as attritional. In practice, the epistemic probability is high enough when you’ve had enough of repeating the experiment, or run out of time or money. Does putting more effort into my research make it more valid than anyone else’s if we still reach the same conclusions? If it’s good enough for most people, and if perfection is unattainable, is it worth trying to make it any better?

Since I started writing this William J. Turkel has also posted about the difficult question of when to stop researching. He sides with the pragmatic view that you can stop when having more information won’t change your conclusions. My first reaction was “how do you know whether information will change your interpretation without reading it?”, but in practice there will often be situations where the likelihood of any amount of information changing your conclusions is small. Like facts, it all comes down to probabilities. You can’t be certain of exactly what information is contained in a document or archive, but you can narrow down the uncertainty and make an educated guess about whether it’s worth looking at. Ultimately every research project has to be carried out within arbitrary limits and brought to an arbitrary end. You can never have complete information.

Anyway, enough of the mea culpa and sixth-form philosophy. I used to have some strange ideas but I got over them (trying to be boring is self-defeating, because I inevitably got bored with it!). These days I’m more interested in getting ahead of fashion than ignoring it, which threatens to lead me into some equally strange ideas. That reminds me, I ought to post more about women having sex with animals, as that seems to be what most of my hits from Google are interested in. Especially the ones from Alabama…