A Critique of Historical Scholarship
The distorted logic and ideological function of historical thinking

Whatever arouses historians’ interest, the first thing that interests them is the date of the event. “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Such mnemonics for cramming historical dates may have fallen out of fashion somewhat. But what they are supposed to help us remember — the year — is still considered fundamental to any historical consideration. That is why reference works such as The Encyclopedia of World History, which lists all important dates from the past in chronological order, are still very popular — even if dating events contributes little to understanding them, one might think. Providing an individual event with a year merely allows it to be sorted chronologically; a chronology of events says no more about them than “before,” “after,” or “at the same time.”

However, it is precisely these temporal relations that historians consider fundamental to knowledge in their field. Quoting a forefather of modern historical studies, “for us, what is crucial [in phenomena] is the sequence, the element of time.”^[1] Historical understanding and explanation are supposed to be characterized by being based on the chronological sequence of events — in such a way that what happens before provides the reasons for what happens after. Modern representatives of this discipline say, “The field of history rests on the belief that the present emerges from the past.”^[2] History aims at “explaining the present world as having come about historically.”^[3] “History views itself as studying the present by studying the past.”^[4] According to all these programmatic statements, the special feature of history is not simply that its objects of study are events from past times, but that it explains its objects — past and present ones — historically. It is the way its explains things that distinguishes it: it explains its objects through the events that happened before them; it refers back to the past in order to use it to make sense of the present, i.e., what is happening today. The aforementioned grand master of the discipline explains this program once again as follows:

“Among the determining factors of what exists in the present is also that this particular thing has come to be, its prehistory… It is therefore undoubtedly very important to consider human affairs also in terms of the preconditions for their effects, in terms of their having come to be, and to see the affairs of the present only as the latest tips that are protruding from the past.”^[5]

After initially only pointing out that the prior history of something “existing in the present” is “also” relevant for explaining it, he already stresses in the next sentence that understanding how something “came to be” is “undoubtedly very important” for understanding what exists today, before finally insisting categorically that the “affairs of the present” can be grasped “only” as an appendage of the past. From the banality that everything that exists must “also” have come into being, he draws the conclusion that everything we encounter today finds its explanation in the past, in the “prior conditions,” the conditions for its coming about. A modern colleague takes the same position, declaring the past without further ado to be “key to understanding the present.”^[6]

1. The prior-history principle: mixing up chronology and causality

When historians, asking how their object “became what it is,” take a look at its prior history; when, wanting to know how the matter in question came about, they see a need to consider its preconditions — then neither the question nor the consequence is in itself a mistake. It can certainly be of scientific interest to find out how something came into being, and it is only logical to examine the circumstances and conditions for its coming about. Reflecting back on the conditions that led to the emergence of this thing clarifies why it exists; one then knows the circumstances it owes its existence to.

However, it is a mistake to expect that clarifying this question will provide insight into the identity of the matter in question. If you set out to explain a thing by its prior history, to explain the present by the past, you are embracing a contradiction. You are turning away from the thing to be explained and insisting that the thing is to be explained not by the features to be found in it, but by something else beyond the thing — in events that precede it. The fundamental error of all historical thinking and explanation is to equate these two things: asking how something came about and asking what its identity is. By shifting the explanation of an object to the explanation of how it came about, history completely abstracts from the nature of the thing it wants to help understand.

This has consequences. The first is that abstracting from the identity of the thing also negates any specific connection between the thing and the conditions under which it came into being. For historians, however, there is nothing wrong with this; it instead opens up the wide and expansive field of historical connections where they, by profession, move like fish in water. When one of these scholars asks under what conditions a thing came about, you can be pretty sure they will not stop at the immediate circumstances surrounding the thing. For example, a representative of this guild undertaking to shed light on the parties and positions that opposed each other in the French Revolution will first announce, “If we want to know more precisely what Jacobinism ‘actually’ is, we can go further back on the ladder of knowledge or information.”^[7] From this we learn that when historians want to know something “more precisely” they move ever “further” away from their object. When another historian tackles Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik^[*] — these examples being chosen at random and only of interest here for the historical perspective and approach they reveal — he does not dwell long on the question of what political aims this policy pursued, what reason of state it served, and what situation West Germany was in when it adopted it. He takes the prior history as his subject and begins by noting that it goes very far back: “Anyone who takes a closer look at the Eastern treaties of 1970 will very quickly find it necessary to trace the history of German-Polish relations back to the Middle Ages.”^[8] These distant times are also where anyone who wants to learn about the true reasons for the machinations of European imperialism will end up: “Certainly, the modern development of European expansionism has given rise to many new facets, but the decisive course for this special development was already set in the Middle Ages.”^[9] And the Middle Ages are far from the end of the story. A text on ancient history explains that the “beginning of Europe” is to be found in the “Greek beginnings”^[10]. And following the prior-history principle, a ‘history of the West’ ends up in the mists of time once and for all: the “origins of the Occident” lie in the 14th century BC with Pharaoh Akhenaten and his first attempts at monotheism: “Without him, the West cannot be explained.”^[11]

Once historians start acting on the prior-history principle, there is obviously no stopping point. In their writings, they draw on everything possible from the long history of the world that, simply by virtue of having existed before a certain event, can be used to help explain the reasons and causes that led up to it. The examples cited show that scholars of history do not care one bit about the connection between a thing and the conditions under which it came about, but simply follow the prior-history principle to parade everything that existed before it — merely because it previously existed — as conditions or factors contributing to its coming about.

The relationship that the thing has with what is cited from its prior history consists objectively only in the external connection given by the temporal juxtaposition and succession of events. Historians are making this external connection into something else when they explain a thing from its prior history, the present from the past. They are recasting it as a connection that has an inner necessity and logical consistency. What happened before the thing is raised to the status of a cause that brought about what came later, merely because it took place before it. Conversely, what came later is taken to be the effect of this cause, its product, merely because it happened at a later date. That — this theoretical swindle — is why “the element of time” is held in such high esteem in the field of history. Whenever it is used as an argument, the point is always to have the chronology of events indicate a causality that is supposedly revealed in the chronology.

A social history of the rise of capitalism that attempts to explain, among other things, the nationalist excesses that dominated the scene at the time, provides an exemplary demonstration of how a historian transforms the temporal juxtaposition and succession of events into a relation of necessity:

“In the German Empire, the extremely rapid transition to a capitalist market economy and market society involved harsh individual and collective pressures to adapt. These led to traumatic damage that gave rise to an acutely radicalized nationalism.…”^[12]

In just a few lines, he lists economic, social, psychological, and political phenomena. There is no word of real explanation of why and in which way all these diverse and disparate phenomena are connected, and how they are to be held responsible in this combination for the terrible consequences mentioned. It is solely the time relation between all these phenomena that suggests the relation of causality, which is expressed with all kinds of rhetorical formulas: the transition “involved” pressures, these “led to” damage that “gave rise” to nationalism.

Thanks to this pattern of explanation, the mere numbering of world wars reveals historical connections between the first and the second. At least, that is the entire logic when historians define the First World War “as the prior history and determining force of the Second World War”^[13]. Thus, a study of the Nazi era begins “with the First World War, the act of conception for most of the other disasters and atrocities of the twentieth century. It was this war and its complicated aftermath…”^[14] This scholar does not even need to clarify in what way the First World War is supposed to be the cause of the Second. After all, it was the first and that is enough to identify it as the “act of conception” for the Second World War. And with the “complicated aftermath” this war supposedly had, it then also serves — again solely on the basis of chronology — as the origin and explanation for all kinds of later “disasters and atrocities.” All interpretations of the First World War, no matter how contrary they are, are accordingly in perfect agreement that the First World War was the primordial catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Proponents of this field readily acknowledge that this type of reasoning is essential to how theories are developed in their discipline. They frankly admit that they have, and claim, no other argument for the causal relations they assert than to cite the chronology of events, and they construct their concept of cause and effect from that. In historical circles, the category of cause is understood to mean nothing other than “that the concept of cause depends on the idea of a linear time sequence.”^[15] Because “the causes as a rule are earlier in time,”^[16] this discipline feels justified in assuming that what came earlier in time must be the cause of what came later. “An event occurs because other events have taken place before”;^[17] therefore, “what comes later can be explained by what came earlier.”^[18]

2. Teleology, or: The present determines the past

Looking through a typical work of historiography, it is striking that the reasons and conditions that the historian has identified in the past to account for present events include not only facts from earlier times. Currently existing political or social conditions themselves can already be found in the past that the historian is mobilizing to explain them — in a different logical state of aggregation of themselves, as it were. According to historians, before a German nation, or states with a democratic constitution, or a political actor called Europe existed — i.e., in their prior history — all these things were already present as ideas, as a yet-to-be-realized telos or ultimate end, and were already active in this contradictory mode of non-existing existence. To historians, the events of the past they are discussing reveal nothing but “acting forces”^[19] whose sole purpose is to realize something that does not yet exist, an idea that anticipates the future.^[20]

Thus, on “nation building” an encyclopedia of history offers insights such as the following:

"The search for the shape of the future manifested itself in the 19th century first primarily in the process of nation building, for it was in this process that the diverse lines of social development converged and acquired their political impact."^[21]

The historian quoted is dealing with the founding of nation states in 19th-century Europe and elsewhere in the world, and he does not waste a thought on what kind of political entities were being launched. He is interested solely in the process that led to the emergence of these entities, and because he knows from the outcome that it was the nation state as we know it today that was seeing the light of day, he feels justified in calling it the “shape of the future.” But that’s not all. He even has the “process of nation building” begin with the search for this ‘shape.’ Following his thinking, the emergence of nation states manifests nothing other than the “search for the shape of the future” — which “manifested itself in the process of nation building.” The reason why the search manifested itself in this process — i.e., why nations and not something else formed at the time — is supposedly that this process is where all kinds of developments “converged” which owed their “political impact” to the fact of their converging in this process. However, the “diverse lines of social development” he refers to do not provide any way out of the tautological idea he uses for explaining nation building, but only lead to the next tautology. He answers the question of why these lines of development converged in the process of nation building by saying that their proponents — those pursuing the “diverse reform goals and modernization strategies of the time,” i.e., the “leading figures of the national movements” in the various countries — were widely committed to the “nation and nation-state model”^[22]. In all his explanations, the only reason he gives for this model — and not some other — prevailing in the various “movements” is that it had what it took to prevail: “It was a powerful model that no other could seriously compete with.”^[23] And by prevailing “it proved … its power.”^[24] The entire argument can thus be summed up in the tautology that nation forming took place because the idea of the nation, or the “movements” committed to this idea, managed to prevail.

Historians use the same logic to explain whatever they deal with. The above-cited social history attempting to explain “radicalized nationalism” in the German Empire argues the same way, stating that the ultimate reason why such nationalism prevailed at the time was that “it did not encounter the opposing forces of an established political culture that might have defused and watered down some of its excessive demands.”^[25] In other words, this nationalism ultimately owes its success to there not being what the author clearly envisions at this point in his argument as a valuable achievement of today’s conditions and the telos of further historical development: a democratically “established political culture” that might have checked the power of this nationalism to prevail.

The same logic graces the comments made by another representative of this guild to explain the “collapse of East Germany.”^[26] He sees this state’s demise and the takeover of its assets by capitalist Germany — which he tacitly presents as an act of liberation and democratization, being himself an advocate of democratic governance — as “impressive confirmation of the power of democratization that was imprinted on the modern idea of the nation from the very beginning.”^[27] Thus, according to his explanation East Germany’s fate was already sealed when ‘nations were formed,’ i.e., in the nineteenth century, long before anything like East Germany was even conceived of. This historian, too, knows how to project the event he claims to be explaining back into history as a not-yet-realized telos, in order then to explain it by the power he attaches to this telos. It is no problem that the nations where he sees this “power of democratization” already at work in their origins showed little evidence of any desire for democracy “from the very beginning.” In his argumentation, the power he attributes to democratization is “impressively confirmed” not by the conditions of the time but by today’s; namely, by the fact that democratically constituted states have now become the global norm. And if, as historians report, Bismarck’s newly founded state was dominated by an “authoritarian mindset,” then the confirmation of democratization’s power to prevail is all the more impressive according to this logic. After all, the resistance that said mindset posed to the democratization of society first had to be overcome by the power inherent in democratization.

This shows some progress in historical thinking and explaining compared to the mix-up of chronology and causality that we dealt with in point 1 of our critique. Those who practice this art do not limit their argumentation to making a causal relationship out of past and present, what came earlier and what came later, due to the chronology of events. They go beyond a scholarship that, as they themselves say, “links facts together to form interrelations of effects.”^[28] By looking at the past, which they hold responsible for causing everything that is familiar to us in today’s world, and identifying teleologically oriented forces at work there, which are solely characterized by their bringing about “what exists in the present,” they add an argument that they were always postulating but had not delivered: the inner coherence, an identity between past and present events, which any talk about cause and effect after all assumes. The “facts” from the past and those from the present that history “links together to form interrelations of effects” are — taken per se, the way they present themselves specifically — simply different matters that as such fail to indicate what predestines some to be causes and why others should be understood to be their effects.

To make their arguments more persuasive, scholars of history aware of the difference between mere temporal succession and a causal relation therefore proceed to read into the chronology of events the inner coherence that it is supposed to reveal. And this they do by starting out from the result, the end of the story, and interpreting history as a goal-directed process moving toward this end by an inner necessity. Modern historians embrace this method quite openly and without any hint of self-doubt:

“To produce a chronology of any kind is in some way to locate causality in chronology. That is, historians select information and order it chronologically precisely to demonstrate the causal relations between the events described.”^[29]

This ‘locating’ and ‘demonstrating’ is done by locating and demonstrating in the chronology exactly what one has previously read into it backwards starting out from the outcome:

“The structure of a story, the actors, what is important and what is unimportant, the kind of sequence, the interdependence and causal linking — all of this depends on the end of the story. The storyteller selects everything that is relevant to the end; he always knows how the story will end, and he organizes the material from this point of view.”^[30]

"Historical accounts require a converging point."^[31]

Using this method, historians arrive at insights such as those cited and analyzed at the beginning of this second point. They directly connect a reason with what it explains, but on closer inspection actually do nothing more than formally split the phenomenon to be explained into itself and a force or powerful idea that brings the phenomenon about. The latter itself possesses no determination but to produce or be realized by the phenomenon supposedly attached to it. So historians argue by way of an explicit tautology: the nation-state owes its existence to the striving for it; full-blown democracy shows how powerful the forces of democratization were that brought it about; and so on. The explanation ends with the same thing it begins with. The past, which historians mobilize to explain what is happening now, is, as they present it, permeated by the present, which they see as the telos of history and which they make the “converging point” of history. This turns the cause-and-effect relationship upside down, as it were. The causality they see at work in history is based on tautological conclusions by means of which historians, starting out from the ‘needs of their times,’ attribute corresponding features to the past in the opposite direction. The absurd consequence is that what happened in the past, taking the way historians present it seriously, seems to undergo change after the fact.^[32]

But the representatives of this discipline stand by the consequences of their pursuits, considering it a challenge in itself that history must be constantly rewritten because something has changed in the present. And they are happy to inform people not so familiar with their discipline about how much irrationality one has to accept if one wants to gain a foothold in this field:

“There is a sense in which we may speak of the Past as changing; that sense in which an event acquires new properties because it comes to stand in different relationships to events that occur later.”^[33]

Would you believe it!

3. The constructing craft and its tools

So it is not as historians constantly try to make us believe and proclaim like an incantation in their works:

“Looking at all the phases of the French Revolution, their sequence resembles the links in a logical chain.”^[34]

“If one attempts to reconstruct the events that led to the formation of the Delian League, one event seems to result quite logically from the other.”^[35]

If that is how it seems, this semblance of necessity and logical sequence is due to the historians’ interpretative efforts to make it seem that way. And to make it seem that way they execute their historical teleology (whose abstract principle was discussed above) on the material.

The first task they face is to make an apparent unified whole out of the disparate events that occurred simultaneously and successively in history: the deeds of the mighty, wars, peace treaties, royal weddings, but also national debts, technological achievements, social movements, and natural disasters. To this end, historians have created their own conceptual toolkit, with the prime concepts being epoch and development. These two concepts, which are closely related and mutually referential, as will soon be seen, basically convey on their own nothing more than an abstract idea of continuity, with one emphasizing unity in change and the other emphasizing change in unity. These “ideas of continuity,”^[36] which are supposedly the alpha and omega of all historiography — “The study of history always privileges the search for continuities”^[37] — are applied by historians to historical events. The way they do this is first to divide the chronology of events, which often spans centuries, into sections defined by when they began and ended, this being represented by a striking event in each case. Each section is placed by historians under a unifying motto that is supposed to express the “essence of a historical epoch”;^[38] its ‘dominant tendency,’ its ‘signature,’ the ‘hallmark of the era.’ Modern historians will quite candidly say what is gained by such a motto, be it ‘absolutism,’ ‘industrialization,’ ‘age of imperialism,’ ‘the modern age’ or ‘postmodernism.’ It serves to “interpret events so as to even out relatively an infinite number of impulses into the unity of a meaningful whole.”^[39] They will openly divulge that to achieve the “unity of a meaningful whole” it is essential to wipe out the particularities found in the objects they apply their art of interpretation to: a single unity is needed in the disparate events so that they can be understood as events governed by an inner necessity. This unity is created by a point of view that allows the particular epoch to be understood as a step towards the here and now — as an encyclopedia of history explains:

“Thus, the designation ‘Middle Ages’ primarily refers to the broad cultural unity of the Romance, Germanic, and West Slavic peoples that emerged in a centuries-long development and transformation, having formed, on the basis of the rise of the Carolingian Empire, that Roman, Western Christendom from which modern Europe was to emerge [our emphasis].”^[40]

The naming of an epoch may well have been guided by some substantive issue such as ‘nation building’ or imperialism. Yet on closer consideration of what historians note as the interesting feature of the epoch, what it is really about is solely the abstract notion of a unifying viewpoint that dominates the epoch, a development that in turn is essentially about merely leading from one epoch to the next. That is why such an epoch is not designated more precisely by the specifics of the events that took place during it, but by another subdivision that breaks the developmental process supposedly taking place in it into phases — an initial phase characterized by the new epoch emerging; a middle phase when it is in full swing with its defining characteristics coming into their own; and a late phase in which it reaches its end and the new epoch is looming.

This only too well-known pattern contains not a shred of knowledge about any objective state of affairs, revealing instead the historians’ intention to read into the course of historical events an inner logic, a connection that suggests a necessity. And this is the pattern they apply to the chronology of events, as mentioned above; they subsume historical events and conditions under it. This makes the historical facts, which historians extensively research and incorporate into their construction of history with great erudition and obsessive detail, into factors. As such, their identity does not lie in the determinations to be found in them, but in determinations that they only acquire from their relation to the wholes that historians construct to overarch historical events and place them in. The facts are taken to be constituent elements of such wholes, of an epoch or of the process supposedly occurring in it. One historian taking pains to lay down clear methodological principles for his discipline explains this connection as follows: what “contributes to a process is to be called an impulse here… Through the category of process, impulses are subsumed under the meaningful whole of a unifying, comprehensive process.”^[41] Thus, an individual historical event that is acknowledged as an impulse or factor when placed in the comprehensive context of the historical construction is taken to be the motor of a historical process, the ‘driving force’ advancing or otherwise influencing a development. Even when historians diagnose an event as marking a ‘leap’ in the course of history, a ‘setback,’ ‘detour,’ or even a ‘critical escalation,’ i.e., any kind of discontinuity in the continuity, these are never inherent features of the event in question but are always based on the relation the event has to the historical development as a whole, a relation historians bring into being through their presentation and place the event in.^[42]

On that basis, the epoch where the event thus defined has been localized together with a thousand other occurrences — as a factor, it is always only one factor among others, one element, a part of the whole — is seen to be

“a network of extraordinarily dynamic, directional driving forces that ran into resistance, were blocked at times, constantly posed new problems as they unfolded — but ultimately proved capable of prevailing.”^[43]

Even though such a “network” still basically consists in nothing more than the simultaneous or successive occurrence of historical events, it tacitly acquires from historians the quality of being an independent entity. And the “processes of development” driven by the many events acting as “driving forces” and “impulses” advance to become the primary agent of the events:

“Historical development processes…roll onward, driven by a multitude of impulses working with and against each other.”^[44]

So historians metamorphose historical processes, the particular period in which they took place, and ultimately the period itself into powers that stand above things. They carry this off quite simply by reversing the relation between the many events and the totalities they supposedly constitute. One of the founding fathers of modern historical scholarship even noticed that this reversal is indeed all there is to the ‘logic’ that historians present:

"The particular is understood through the whole from which it arises, and the whole through the particular in which it expresses itself."^[45]

However, it does not seem to have struck him that what he is setting down here reflects rather badly on his discipline. After all, it means that this discipline does not take anything of what it deals with — either past or present events — as what it is. It robs everything objective of its determinations, declaring it an element, a derivative of a higher-level connection, which in turn has no determination of its own because it dissolves back into the individual elements that constitute it.

This circular reasoning drained of any content, which can also be brought up for discussion in scholarly fashion as “the reciprocal dependence of event and development,”^[46] manages to elevate the course of history itself to the reason why history took the course it did. It declares the time when this and that occurred to be a higher necessity and power — the “power of the time”^[47] that “dominated the whole world”^[48] — this power furnishing the reason for the historical events taking place in it.

Historians use this central historical figure of thought as a universally applicable explanatory model. An example of an explanation constructed on this model is provided by a researcher studying pre-revolutionary France. As he tells it, at that time in France, the monarchy’s claim to a high concentration of state power was countered by a constitutional reality in which the monarch in fact had a “power that was often only indirect”^[49]. He answers the question of why the monarchy failed to achieve its absolutist ideal of the state as follows:

“Nothing else was possible; the development of European states did not lead to a consolidation and monopolization of power, but to power sharing and power regulation.”^[50]

“The development led" to something else — that is the argument the historian is using to explain why the development had to lead to something else. He knows what it led to from studying the facts. On the one hand, the “development” he sees is nothing more than a term that summarizes these facts. On the other hand, he treats this development in his explanation as an entity existing independently of the facts, an autonomous law of motion, that furnishes the reason for the facts. He thus manages to explain the course of history with the course of history.

4. The dual function of empirical evidence — as material for construction and as the authority for authenticating the construction

Historical thinking moves in a dizzying circle. On the one hand, it reads into the chronology of events an inner logic that always dictates precisely what the course of history actually produces. On the other hand, it conversely authenticates this inner logic and higher necessity by citing the actual course of history. In this circle, empirical evidence, the facts, thus acquire a dual importance. Historians turn all knowledge about past events into material for their theoretical constructions; they grant no validity as such to the objective events they invoke in their arguments, but rather subsume them under their categories that they seek to use for stamping the course of events with the mark of irrefutable necessity. On the other hand, while making such efforts they call on the facts as the authority for authenticating the claims they make about historical relations. They invoke the facts, making them into an argument for the objectivity of their judgments.

That is why they consider it worth some effort to attend to this authority. Separately from their theory forming, which continues to go along in the ways described above at the same time, using the facts in this dual function, historians maintain a department called empirical research. Its aim is to do the groundwork for their theory forming and make it possible for it to develop and be honed further. What it does is collect facts with a great deal of effort and a downright idiotic conscientiousness.

This business owes its idiocy to the standards that historians are trying to meet and that follow quite logically from the wrong approach they are practicing. A discipline that directs its theoretical efforts toward equating the chronology of historical events with a causal relation, thus being fundamentally unwilling to heed the differences between causes, conditions, external circumstances, or even merely associated connections, accordingly arrives at overall judgments such as the following:

"The total cause of an event consists of the total sum of conditions for that event, that is, the total sum of circumstances that made its occurrence necessary."^[51]

In their empirical research historians therefore pursue the ideal of completely recording the facts. The aim is to find all the facts that can be found. And because this is an ideal that no research activity in the world can ever achieve, researchers are spurred on to ever higher levels of performance. No effort is too great to save as many facts as possible from being lost to oblivion. Every remnant from times near and far — any kind of written document, record of oral transmission, shopping list, ruin, garment, pottery shard, burial object, etc. — is considered a potential window into the past through which further insights into historical events might possibly be gained. For this reason, empirical researchers must not, in principle, distinguish between what is essential and what is not; everything, even the most trivial and unimportant thing, is treated here as a matter of utmost significance. And because these researchers see their work as a prerequisite for their colleagues to create ever better empirically based theories, they commit to the imperative of themselves refraining from making any theoretical assessment of the facts they are collecting. So objectivity comes into its own here in a form that is utterly perverse for a science — and only in this form! Facts are not being grasped so as to understand them, but rather upheld as pure facts with no concept of them, separately from any judgment about them. But this is quite fitting for a discipline that tramples on objectivity in its theoretical branch by relentlessly degrading all objective events to material for its intellectual constructions, and then proceeding to invoke the facts as an authority for authenticating the objectivity of its constructions, deriving from them all its pride as an empirical science.

5. Historiography: science tells stories

A specialty of this discipline — which has always characterized it and which it has meanwhile also inspired other humanities and social sciences to do — is that it presents the findings it has reached through the above-mentioned theoretical crimes in the form of narratives. Using this form, it disowns its argumentative efforts, its judgments and conclusions by which it reads a teleology into history, and acts as if it is actually only describing the course of history, the factual sequence of events. To create this appearance, historians have a whole repertoire of rhetorical devices at their disposal.

A first trick for presenting the chronological sequence of historical occurrences so that they directly seem to be an inherently consistent chain of events is simply to swamp the reader with the overwhelming mass of facts that one cites and puts in chronological order. In historians’ great (and also lesser) works they like to parade facts along the timeline over a few hundred pages with no regard for their readers’ patience, facts they have meticulously arrived at, scrutinized the sources of, and dated most precisely, so that the sheer row of back-to-back facts reveals how logically historical events converged toward the final result and how purposefully all obstacles that stood in the way of that development were bulldozed under. The art of letting the facts speak for themselves is all the more convincing the more facts are mustered. What matters is how dense they are and that they create the impression of presenting an unbroken chain of events.

However, because the facts themselves do not convey the message as clearly as historians would like them to, some assistance is provided. The accompanying text cannot emphasize enough how “convincingly” and “impressively” the historical facts combine to form a whole “causal chain,”^[52] a “chain of causes,”^[53] a “chain of continuity”^[54], and result in the picture of a “string of continuity,”^[55] a “chain of actions,”^[56] or even a “stream of forces.”^[57]

Extravagant metaphors are also used to persuade. Writers like to characterize historical events by drawing on botanical imagery, talking about roots, seeds, and blossoming, about ripening and decay. Historians also enrich their means of expression by referring to the course of the day with the sun changing position. Some things ‘dawn,’ while others have already ‘passed their zenith.’ And there is an avalanche of linguistic constructions for conveying the unchanging teleological message needing to be expressed: ‘The time was ripe’ for what one ruler wanted, while what another stood for had ‘become obsolete’; a third was ‘ahead of his time’ so he ‘had’ to fail; but he ‘was to be’ proven right (as we know today)… In this discipline, it is widely acknowledged that a convincing presentation out to impress and win over the reader is part of the craft. There is no clear dividing line between this and art, entertaining or edifying literature, where the writer’s originality, brilliance, and boldness also count. And because in this field much of the persuasive power is based on literary form, it is only logical that for historians, the highest distinction is to have their work recognized as major literature, possibly even worthy of a Nobel Prize.

6. The point of the whole exercise: to find meaning

History plays a considerable part in a nation’s intellectual life. It is an integral part of this realm to turn history into an argument and to ask what it means for us. The common view is that this is a matter of nothing less than ‘our identity,’ which educated people know is ‘rooted in history.’ There are challenges to be seen that history presents to ‘us’; lessons to be drawn from history; and ‘historically based rights’ are invoked to justify demands and activities that are considered necessary today.

In such debates and speeches, people unabashedly argue in the name and from the standpoint of an ‘us’ that exists in the present and sees its present existence as its home, adopting a positive stance on existing conditions. To the members of this ‘us,’ the nation, the law, the morality that prevails in a democracy like ours, the modern state system, Europe, or the West are values they take for granted. That is, these are things they do not just hold in high esteem personally, but that unquestionably deserve to be held in high esteem by all of us. Those who argue in the name of such an ‘us’ step up and join the debate with this rights standpoint of representing the consensus of the community of shared values. This does not result in them all agreeing, but in them now getting down to quarreling about how nation, democracy, morals, etc., should be properly understood. For all parties are defending their own position — on how to deal with foreigners, with America, with the auto industry, with unborn life — claiming that their position has to be recognized as universally binding. And anyone holding a different position is not seen to be violating one’s own with an opposing interest, but to be violating the higher values that our fine community has supposedly agreed upon and are supposedly what everything is about. There are two things happening here. Political points of view are competing in regard to what stance the nation should take on the fundamental questions up for decision that arise from the business of politics, i.e., asserting the nation’s economic and other interests at home and abroad. However, this competition is being carried out in the form of a dispute about what stance to take on the higher and highest Goods and what consequences to draw from them. And one popular authority to cite here is history, which gives ‘us’ lessons and tasks that explain, when it comes to this or that ‘question,’ what we owe to ourselves and others (as Germans, Europeans, etc., with this history).

Historical scholarship is based on this kind of intellectual life in a nation. As an institution committed solely to truth and scientific research, it is by common recognition, and officially, responsible for the matter — history — that is cited as an authority in national debates. And when looking at this matter it automatically adopts the standpoint of the moral community that is omnipresent in the nation’s intellectual life.^[58] It even adopts this standpoint quite openly, professing that “historical thinking fundamentally relates to values,” proudly regarding it as an achievement to present the events of past times so as to make them into a story that is relevant “to the present,”^[59] i.e., to us. It offers methodological pointers that this requires an approach that consistently subjects the events of the past to the perspective of the present, insisting that the point is to grasp what past events mean to us as what they mean as such. And that is just what this discipline has worked out its three to five lines of argument for that fly in the face of all rational logic.

And this brings us to what such historical inquiry yields. First and foremost, even before the idea is filled with any substance, it is the finding that ‘we’ are a product of history and must understand ourselves as such. What needs to be ‘understood’ is that this ‘we’ stems from a higher necessity. The core of historical thinking is that the collective ‘we’ historians assume or even explicitly name in their considerations, whose fate they follow in a spirit of intellectual partisanship — ‘our identity’ — has a purpose that is rooted not in our present existence and doings but beyond them, in the past. According to the logic of this thinking, the meaning of the community of values we get to belong to has arisen from history and consists quite simply in us becoming or having become what we are today. The mission of this community of values is to realize and assert itself, and fulfilling this mission, if one follows the same logic, justifies the community’s existence.

The second feature of the insights into the past that historical thinking achieves is that they, logically enough, boil down to comprehending historical events as contributing to the formation of this wonderful community of values. Accordingly, the affirmative stance that historians have toward the present by way of their profession, so to speak, carries over to the past times they take a look at. In the view of these scholars, who apparently have nerves of steel, the most horrific conditions that earlier rulers inflicted on their peoples, and in particular the most brutal forms of power wielded by the key actors in history to advance their causes, produced cultural achievements that we owe our present existence to.^[60] This is a judgment that neither says anything about what interests the actors at the time were pursuing and why they did what, nor anything about the actual nature of the cultural achievements that historical doings were supposed to be producing, such as the end of serfdom, national unity, the overcoming of National Socialism, or the postwar order. In both respects — what purposes were being pursued, and what was culturally achieved — the judgment is informed solely by the spirit of affirmation, and it satisfies no intellectual need other than the apparently abundant need for meaning.

Which already brings up the third accomplishment of historical thinking, namely, that the way historical scholars look at the past ennobles present-day conditions. They invite people to see the modern world as one big set of achievements and to congratulate themselves on existing in this world.

Historians can be relied on to perform this service through all political changes and eras because the values they subscribe to are due to their affirmative attitude to whatever conditions are prevailing — and not the other way around. Such values idealize these conditions while incorporating the particular author’s ideological views, their political preferences, and the accepted moral norms. But no matter what their ideological colors are, they always idealize these conditions. So it is no wonder that during Hitler’s time droves of German historians set to work assuming it was the formation of a racially defined leader-state that had to be taken as humanity’s cultural achievement and the ultimate goal of history, while afterwards the majority of them quickly shifted to portraying the same history as a triumph of freedom and democracy and identifying National Socialism as a calamitous historical episode on Germany’s path to the modern era. The logic of historical thinking has proven to be as useful for one as for the other; their “relating to values” makes historians into opportunists out of conviction.

The way historians intellectually ennoble our existence is all the more impressive the greater the arcs of meaning are that they construct across the centuries and millennia. And so it is inevitable that even a battle taking place 2,500 years ago, in the early summer of 480 BC, near a small island in the Aegean Sea close to Athens, is taken as a key event bringing world history a decisive step forward on the way to Western democratic culture:

“The Strait of Salamis was, as it were, an eye of a needle that world history had to go through if it was to be marked, not by large, monarchically ruled empires, but by that strange people seeming exotic to those in the East, living as it did in small, independent cities, almost everywhere without a monarch and often already with extensive political participation by broad sections of the population. John Stuart Mill thus claimed that Salamis was more important for English history than the Battle of Hastings.”^[61]

And it was not only pathbreaking for English history:

“The way the Greeks asserted themselves was less important for the world affairs of the time, but all the more so for world history, which was taken a great step forward in the Aegean region during this period.”^[62]

A brilliant feat of historical interpretation! A battle that people today would not even know about if there were no historians is processed by them into a date of utmost significance to us. Where would we be today if the Greeks had not heroically fought to ward off the Persians back then? The despotism of Oriental monarchies might actually have gained the upper hand in world history and would determine our lives today! So we can be thankful that this droll people courageously confronted the Persians because only then could the democratic culture of “political participation” forge ahead, the one we value so much in our enlightened Christian West.

So the art of historical interpretation, especially when it is dripping with meaning and drama, certainly has its silly sides. However, that should not make one forget that it is not so easy to laugh at the argument that historians base their value judgments on, and that underlies the meaning they ascribe to present and past conditions. The above-quoted historian goes on to summarily award the idea of political participation the seal of quality, “historically approved”^[63] — for no better reason than because it prevailed. The fact that it could only prevail through an act of violence is not just mentioned by him, it is in fact the only thing we learn about this ‘idea.’ And precisely that dignifies it, according to the logic of historical thinking, as a matter that deserves our respect.

This thinking follows the brutal ‘logic’ of success, which makes whatever has succeeded right. According to the same logic, historians know that the cause of socialism was doomed to failure from the start from the fact that the Soviet Union with its socialist bloc of states was successfully pushed back and arms-raced to death in its confrontation with a capitalist West united under American leadership into the largest military alliance of all time, and ultimately gave up. Socialism proved to be “unviable”^[64] and therefore had to perish, while the model of democracy and market economy accordingly showed itself to be ‘sustainable’ and proved itself. Such judgments elevate the fact of succeeding or failing to a moral quality of the thing in question. The power of states, which they use to assert themselves, is turned into something that makes a higher moral justice prevail. So to historians, big military campaigns and mass battles are not simply decisive events in history that altered the political situation in one region or even all over the world and settled it for some time. Their outcome is equivalent to a judicial verdict that history — the world tribunal — delivers on the nations and peoples involved:

“War was important for cultural history as a form of communication… Viking voyages and crusades, which acquainted foreign peoples with each other, were important in terms of cultural history. The last wars of this kind were the colonial wars, which proved the superiority of European civilization to the peoples of America, Africa, and Asia, thus setting off the Europeanization of the world… War, as Bismarck said, sets the hands of the clock of history right. It is a process of adaptation… The wars that were important in this way were not fought between two armies, two peoples, or two states, but between two eras.”^[65]

In terms of cultural history, i.e., from the perspective of the present that is quite generally adopted in historical thinking and that sees history as a process producing one cultural achievement after another, the raids of the Vikings and the crusades of Western princes only brought the assaulted peoples closer to the world, opening their eyes to the world outside their limited cultural sphere. If peoples occasionally fell victim to such forms of communication and perished, this only shows any historically minded person that their culture was inferior. Their time had run out. History sets such things right. Conversely, the “Europeanization of the world,” i.e., the subjugation of the “peoples of America, Africa, and Asia” to European rule as a result of the “colonial wars,” is to be seen as the logical consequence of the “superiority of European civilization,” which Europeans demonstrated in those same wars. This was progress, not least for the subjugated peoples as well, since their countries’ “Europeanization” allowed them to participate in a superior civilization. That’s how historical thinking works!^[66]

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