118 [New Interpretive Approaches study of early modern Germany, Sexuality, Stat, and Civil Society in Germany (2996), are fine examples of the genre. Other cultural historians work quite differently. Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) bears the marks ofthe social and women’s historians who came before her and shows the strong influence of cultural anthropologists, but her method of reading religious texts owes perhaps most to hermeneutical traditions. CHAPTER FIVE The Nature of Historical Knowledge ory as academic historians write it today would be almost un- Hyscience esags tne a past that isa century, two centuries—or twenty centuries-old In the previous chapter we sketched the ways historical methodology has been transformed in the last century, and throughout the book we have ‘emphasized how frequently and how radically the craft and many of is [purposes have shifted course. At the close ofthis book, we wil return to the significance of the twentieth century's upheavals in the profession and their implications for the next generation of scholar Here we want, however, to make a different, almost a contradictory Point, We want to emphasize the continuities that mark the profession — Contimuties of purpose or intent and continuities of practice. While we certainly do not wish to imply that history writing has been or should have been alvays the same at some “real” level, we do want to consider the iris of questions that have driven and sll continue to dive history writ ing in the West. We also wish to expose the kinds of assumptions histor ans make, usually implicitly, in pursuing those questions. Our discusion focuses on two principal issues: change and continuity, on the one hand, and causality, on the other. A. Change and Continuity ‘No matter how much they may differ in the kinds of events they study, the precise kinds of questions they pose, the research methods they employ, 1g120 ‘The Nature of Historical Knowledge or the reading strategies they use, all historians are in one way or another involved in studying change over time. Not all explicitly focus on change, to be sure; indeed, some of the best known historical studies treat a mo- ‘ment in time—the ethos of an age, the patterns of social intercourse in a particular place and time, or the workings of parliamentary system dur- ing a decade. Even such studies, nonetheless, assume change by exposing the distinctiveness of the practices being described and the ways they ‘came into being. Typically, however, historians are more visibly con- cerned with change over time. Sometimes they provide full accounts of the theories with which they are working; more often they bury these as sumptions in their narratives, seemingly unconscious that they are, in fact, proceeding with theory. ‘Most historians in the West have worked, explicitly or implicitly, with theories of change that are linear in form. In this approach, historical change is imagined to progress toward a predetermined end, In this sense, such theories are teleological. The most easily recognized version of such history is the Christian eschatological model; Augustine's already mentioned City of God is frequently invoked as the example. Recounting, the struggle between the heavenly realm and the earthly, the book de- scribes a preordained, already revealed struggle played out in the contest between the church and the secular world. In this telling, history isa man- ifestation of God’s plan, a purposeful journey. This vision of history in- formed Christian thought for centuries—visible not justin Augustine, but in many other great Christian thinkers such as Sextus Julius Africanus, Eu- sebius of Caesarea, Isidore of Seville, and Bede. Christian eschatology is not, however, the only kind of teleological his- ‘oriography typical ofthe West. The marxist theory of history is, in its strict form, teleological as well, for it conceives of history as an inevitable pro- gression toward communism. In this vision, human history is divided into distinct periods, defined by the “social organization of production.” In the first, the ancient, there was no such thing #s private property. In the sec- ‘ond, private property emerged, but labor was not yet separated from capi- tal (the means of production, such as land, animals, and tools); surplus was extracted from the producers (peasants) by force (or by the threat of force) under the feudal system characteristic of this stage, The third was capitalism, in which one class (the bourgeoisie) owned all capital and an- other class (the proletariat) labored for wages. The fourth, and final, was ‘communism, in which private property was to be destroyed and, with it, classes and exploitation; capital and labor would thereby be reunited, ‘Teleological assumptions are very hard to avoid when one is thinking about time. Even the most neutral-seeming periodizations often embed a Change and Continuity ia kkind of linear thinking. The periodization that historians typically use to divide Western history—ancient, medieval, and modern—was, for exam- pile, devised during the Italian Renaissance and was intended to signal the ‘dawn of a new age, one that would break free from the barbarity of the “middle” period and recapture the splendors of Greece and Rome. Im- pilicitly, it imagined history as progressive, as moving toward a better fur ture, even as it treated the distant past as the inspiration for that future, Often too, when historians set up contrasts between social or political sy tems, between societies or periods, they implicitly create a kind of linear- ity, a sense that one of the paired elements is more primitive than the other. The traditional division between preindustrial and industrial, or premodem and moder, for example, seems to grant a kind of superior ity to the later term, Emile Durkheim's contrast between caste and class societies, in fact, is tied to this premodern/moder dichotomy, for Durkheim credited the latter with dynamism and damned the former as “static.” Fernand Braudel similarly set up an opposition betweéh societies that were more or less urbanized and named the former “modern,” the latter "premodern"; for him, the dividing line between the two was reached when at least 40 percent of the population in a given area was ur- anized. The teleological bias of such reasoning is more evident still in ‘modernization theory. In this model, a certain set of social and cultural characteristics—inevitably those that distinguish the modern West—are taken as definitive markers of modernity, and the rest ofthe world is eval ‘uated in terms ofits similarity to or distance from those characteristics, ‘Typicaly, linear theories of history presuppose a better future, a time when human misery is reduced, when political orders perfectly achieved, ‘or when the human spirit is fulfilled. Most reflect the preoccupations of | the age in which they were conceived. The notion, shared by the great eighteent-century thinkers such as Condorcet, Kant, Voltaire, and Lese ing, that mankind was progressively moving toward greater and greater ‘enlightenment was as characteristic of their age as Augustine's Christian ‘eschatology was of his. Hegel's idea that mankind was achieving maturity via the liberal national state, the realm of the ethical, was equally typical of the nineteenth century. In Hegel's view, mankind had experienced its ‘moral childhood in antiquity (China and Egypt), its youth in Greece, its adolescence in Rome, and was coming of age in nineteenth-century Ger- ‘many. The nineteenth century also gave us positivism, which, in the hands of thinkers such as Auguste Comte, looked forward to the day when sci- tence would transform the human condition. Modernization theory, the carly and mid-twentieth century's typical form of linear social theory, re- flects the optimism of that age.122 The Nature of Historical Knowledge By the time the Second World War had ended, the Eurocentrism that hhad defined Western culture since the Renaissance was fatally threatened by decolonization, the Cold War, doubts about economic miracles, hesita- tions about the effects of economic growth on the environment, and dis: appointment with modern science. Only in the United States, where pros perity had been promptly restored after the war, where no battles had. been fought on native soil, and where science still seemed a blessing, was it possible to sustain optimism, at least for a few decades more. ‘The nationalist histories that characterized so much of nineteenth-cen- tury and carly twentieth-century Western historiography were in many ‘ways equally teleological. They were founded, however, on assumptions about the stability of culture that seem to deny history, for they all pre: sumed that there was something eternal about the “national” character of people. In a limited sense, that is true, for when a population shares the same language, traditions, social forms, and cultural practices, when all the people live under the same laws and are governed by stable political institutions, a unified culture—by definition—dloes develop. This sa tele- ological process, and, in the nationalist histories that celebrated it, the hhappy outcome of a long history of cultural and political development, with a unified nation-state as the goal. To borrow—and render benign—a phrase from Hitler’s politics, what occurs in these processes is a kind of “Gleichschaltung” (*political coordination” or, more generally, homoge: nization), the kind of thing we have in mind when we casually speak of “those Italians,” as though all Italians were alike. Today, of course, as indi- vidual western cultures are disrupted by the constant flow of people, in- formation, and goods that characterizes global capitalism, those national differences—those distinctive national cultures—are being eroded. All of uusare, to some extent, part of an unstable McDonald's culture, Other theories of change, although also linear in form, seem less polit- ally charged. Carl Ritter, for example, argued (in Allgemeine Vergleichende Geographic, 1817-18) that human socleues go through progressive stages of ecological/economic organization. Early peoples settled in river val ley, as did the Egyptians and Babylonians. Later cultures took root on in- land seas, as did the Greeks and Romans. West Europeans inhabited the ‘oceans. Emil Spiess argued in 1939 (Well wnd Heimat im lauf der Zeiten ‘gechildert (World and homeland over the ages}) that human cultures have progresed from a preliterate stage (prior to $500 A.C.) to a liter- ate, and that the literate represents a higher stage of culture because ital lows collective memory—a history. ‘The obvious alternative to a linear theory of history is a cyclical one, that is, one which imagines history to unroll in patterns that repeat them- Change and Continuity 123, selves In some sense then, such theories deny time, or treat me ax only marker of place in a cycle cat isin iself unchanging, repeating, rather than as an index of tue change. Many such theories are pesimistic jus 2S linear theories tend to be optimistic), implying that no improvement, no progiess no real betterment is posible; such theories, undersand- aby, are often formulated during periods of cris, when society seems Imost threatened, the future most Bleak. One of the eaiiest in Western tulture vas developed by Polybius in the second century mck. He argued thatall societies emerged, grew, and aged rather as people did, fix grow: ing to suength, accomplishment, and power, then slowly but steadily de lining until they were replaced by another, more vigorous cilization. Some’ 100 years later the great siamic scholar Ibm Khaldun (1352 108) argued that such patterns were determined not only by politcal organizaion, as Pobbius had claimed, but also by climate, ecology, and geography and by religious or moral purpose. The wentith-century Ger- tran commentator Osvald Spengler returned to such themes in his Une mg des Abendlandes of 1918 (The Decne ofthe West 1927) Ics surely no foincidence that Spengler published the book in 1918, amid the cata- Srophiceffecs ofthe war. Inthe claimed that his beloved Germany was entering its old age, a period of decay and death rather ike that fered tpyinuman beings atthe end of life—and rather ike that earlier sufered by the Egyptians and Aatecs. Perhaps the best-known today of such theories is Amold Toynbee's of fered in his multivolame Study of History, which appeared beween 1653 and 1961, Like many other authors of cyclical theories of history, Toya tee wrot his during a period of pessimism, when England (his native Jana) was losing its empire Like others, he argued that England's experi- ene would parallel those of great empires which had come before, going through four sages. In the frst, the emergence, a primitive community faces challenge to which it must respond; it does ao successfully, it may each the sceond sage, the stage of civllaton, 3a thls phase the chal Tenges are not so much material~they are not about mere surdval or physical wellbeing but spiritual, intellectual, and moral. In the thir, the breakdown, the civilization loses it creative energy. In the fourth, the disintegration, it fils apart. Toynbee found that of the dhiry cultures he studied. wenty-one reached the second stage ot beyond; of them seven Achieved fll maturity and sl existed when he wrote, Some czations, he alo noted, managed to change enough in the fourth stage to avoid death; they remade themselves in some fundamental way 30 that contin- ted sural was posible. Toynbee’s model differed from Spengle's and improved upon it) principally in that he dd not imagine hat these stages