(originally published by H-German on 9 January 1996)
The encounter between F.R. Ankersmit and Georg Iggers displays the very different talents of these two authorities on German Historicism. Since Iggers has devoted much of his career to searching criticisms of the German historiographic tradition, the editors of History and Theory made an excellent choice in selecting him to comment on Ankersmit's surprising, virtuoso defense of Historicism as both a revolutionary methodology and as a historiographic position that twentieth-century historiography has neither overcome nor surpassed.
Ankersmit begins with a schematic overview of the reception history of German Historicism. There have been two traditions of scholarship on Historicism. Meinecke and Mannheim represent the tradition that views Historicism as a product of the historicization of the Enlightenment's natural law tradition.
More recently, scholars have begun to emphasize the Historicists' move away from rhetoric and towards an emphasis on historical fact. Ankersmit reconciles the two views of Historicism through an analysis of the causal theories informing Enlightenment and Historicist historiography. One could quibble with Ankersmit's schematic classification of Historicism's various explicators, but his argument is so engaging one is inclined to tentatively grant his premises and pursue the argument.
Basic to Enlightenment historiography, according to Ankersmit, is what he calls the "ontology of the statement:" Enlightenment historiography views change in historical objects (such as states) as the product of causes external to those objects. Yet it is difficult to determine where external causes end and internal causes begin. This difficulty sets in motion a dialectic, the outcome of which is the encroachment of causal language into the domain of the historical object. As Enlightenment writers become increasingly self-conscious of the breakdown of their ontology, the effectiveness of their causal arguments is increasingly linked to their rhetorical vigor. But because Enlightenment historians are aware of the arbitrary nature of their causal claims, their master literary trope is irony.
Ankersmit illustrates this dialectic at work in an analysis of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work he takes to be paradigmatic for Enlightenment historiography. Rather than argue that "external" causes such as barbarism and Christianity were responsible for the decline of Rome, Gibbon asserted that internal causes ("Rome's immoderate greatness" and the "principle of decay") hastened Rome's collapse.
Some contemporary historians find Enlightenment historical writing comforting because its ontology excludes metaphysics and provides us with straightforward empirical knowledge of the world. Fissures in that ontology are papered over with rhetoric. Ankersmit considers Historicism a heroic endeavor that reveals the aporia in Enlightenment ontology and makes that aporia the focus of historical research. Historicism does not reify historical objects; Historicists rather study internal processes of change and development within historical "substances" (again, such as states). Historicist innovations tremendously complicate the historian's task, since it is no longer possible to identify the stable objects whose history historians are supposed to describe. Humboldt's notion of the "historical idea" provided Historicists with a technique they could employ to give coherence to their historical narratives. Humboldt's historical idea was, however, an incomplete solution to the dialectic that led Enlightenment historians to rhetoric and irony, since Humboldt could not say whether the historical idea resides in events or in the mind of the historian. Humboldt's uncertainty separated Historicism from the "narrativism" Ankersmit endorses.
Narrativists believe that the historian's language -- and not historical events themselves -- gives coherence to the past. Ankersmit had earlier praised the revolutionary component in Historicism, but he now decries the reactionary tendency of Historicists to believe that the stories they tell themselves about the past reflect a coherence to be found in the past. If many contemporary German historians will be relieved to read that Ankersmit admits some criticisms of Historicism, they will likely be repelled by his assertion that the characteristics of Historicism he criticizes are shared by what he calls "its latter-day variant," Geschichte als Sozialwissenschaft.
For Ankersmit, modern German historical social science engages in a reification of historical subjects that is in no way an improvement upon Historicism, and only the microhistorical approach of Alltagsgeschichte can transcend reification. Microhistory focuses on experience rather than on language and thus does not attempt to produce coherence. And yet, Ankersmit adds, since microhistory attempts to give us a sense of what it would really be like to live in the past, it revives the original Historicist aim of a mimetic recreation of the past. Ankersmit thus concludes that there is no escape from Historicism, and historians are well-advised to reconcile themselves to their own Historicist tendencies.
Georg Iggers begins his reply with a number of specific criticisms of Ankersmit's interpretations of Gibbon and Ranke. Iggers could have taken these criticism much farther by raising the question of whether the figures Ankersmit discusses (Gibbon, Ranke, Humboldt) really are representative of broad movements in historiographic practice. Is the Goettingen School committed to this same Enlightenment ontology? Is Voltaire? Does the historical idea really motivate the historiographic practice of all German historians between Ranke and Wehler?
Iggers also suggests that a political analysis be reintroduced into Ankersmit's argument, for certainly there are political as well as methodological differences separating Historicism from the Enlightenment. Moreover, Iggers argues, Ankersmit exaggerates the philosophical differences separating Historicism from the Enlightenment -- Historicists did not break away from Enlightenment ontologies to the extent Ankersmit claims. Here Iggers is clearly on solid ground, and numerous scholars have commented on the tensions between Historicists' programmatic statements about what their methodology is and the historical narratives they produce.
Finally, while Ankersmit claims we must choose between finding coherence in history and finding it in our own reconstructions of history, Iggers defends a compromise position in which our coherent narratives bear a metaphorical relation to historical coherences. For Iggers, recent cultural histories posit coherences and interpret experience within cultural systems that give that experience meaning. Iggers finds common ground with Ankersmit in the hope that historians will return to an attempt to search for the truth without casting off insights gained from our immersion in the approachers associated with the "linguistic turn."
Ankersmit seems, however, far more deeply committed to the continued focus on language. In Ankersmit's reply he restates his assessment of Historicism's revolutionary and reactionary components. Historicism is revolutionary in replacing the Enlightenment's ontology of the statement with the concept of the dynamic "historical idea," but Historicism is reactionary in reifying that historical idea as a kind of Aristotelian entelechy inhering in nations or peoples. Historicism thus becomes trapped between the Enlightenment ontology and the nominalist account of historical change. Historicism nonetheless makes possible real advances in historical knowledge by replacing the merely "probable" knowledge (in the Aristotelian sense) that Enlightenment notions of causality can produce with "certain" knowledge, which is presented without rhetorical manipulation and based on archival research into the progress of the historical idea. The only mistake Historicists made was to believe that historical ideas were not products of the historians' mind.
In general Ankersmit's argument exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the history-of-ideas approach to historiography. He creates a compelling narrative of the development of historical methodology, but one wonders if the narrative would cohere if more political analysis, cultural contextualization, and sociological investigation were added. Ankersmit is comfortable with narrativism, and so he may not be irked if I point out that the developments he narrates are a creation of his rhetoric and that the reality is far more complex and less coherent. Ankersmit is clearly capable of fielding such objections, and so one is left feeling that the weaknesses in Ankersmit's position are not fatal flaws. On the contrary, his arguments are so ambitious and complex that, despite the difficulty of the concepts involved, one longs for a more thorough explication and defense of his position.
Such an expansion of Ankersmit's arguments should clarify why the aspects of Historicist methodology he emphasizes are crucial to post-Historicist historiography as well. One may concede that reification and totalization are components of all existing historical approaches and yet maintain that some of those approaches differ from Historicism in vital ways. Ankersmit also tends to decontextualize Enlightenment and Historicist methodology, and so Georg Iggers' politicized readings of Historicism can fruitfully supplement Ankersmit's approach.