Ethan Kleiberg PDF

Just the Facts: The Fantasy of a Historical Science
Author(s): Ethan Kleinberg

Source: History of the Present, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 87-103
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Intervention
Just the Facts: The Fantasy

of a Historical Science
Ethan Kleinberg
One tries, one strives, but in the end it is not attained. Let none be im-
patient with this! The important thing [ . . . is always] how we deal with
humanity as it is, explicable or inexplicable; the life of the individual, of
generations, of nations; and at times, with the hand of God above them.
—Leopold von Ranke
The above quote by Ranke follows his more celebrated but also vilified his-
torical aspiration to show the past event wie es eigentlich gewesen—“how it
actually happened” or “how it actually was.” And it is here that I want to
begin my exploration of the fantasy of a historical science. I do not wish to
point to Ranke as indicative of scientific history. Instead, I want to empha-
size the way that Ranke’s later statement about the limitations of historical
inquiry has been effaced by his bolder, more positivist, and definitive claim
about presenting the past “as it actually happened”: just the facts.1 Historians
have always been adept at offering paradigms they know are unattainable
and then effacing those aspects that expose the instability or limitations of
their model.
What is under consideration here is the resurgence or return of science in
historical method, yet my focus is not on “science” per se but rather on the
fantasy of what science is or could be for the practice of history. This most
recent infatuation with science is new and troubling because I believe it
serves to close off discussion and debate between historians and scientists
rather than promote it, and also because the impetus for it is, to my mind,
primarily a financial one. But the fantasy of a historical science, even in its
most current incarnation, is in line with a tension that has haunted history
since the days of Herodotus. For Aristotle, the problem with history was not
that it was insufficiently “scientific” but that it privileged the particular over
the universal: “This is why poetry is more philosophical and more serious
History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2016.
Copyright © 2016 University of Illinois Press
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intervention • Kleinberg
than history; for it speaks of what is universal, whereas history speaks of

what is particular.”2 Isaiah Berlin framed the issue in terms of Cartesian
rationalism, citing Descartes’s denial to history of any claim to be a serious
and therefore scientific study. Berlin believed that “those who accepted the
validity of the Cartesian criterion” dismissed history as “beneath the dignity
of serious men [ . . . so that] ever since this doctrine of what was and what
was not a science was enunciated, those who have thought about the nature
of historical studies have labored under the stigma of the Cartesian condem-
nation.”3 For our purposes, we can look to the enunciation of this “Cartesian
condemnation” as the moment where, for historians, “science” took up the
position of the timeless universal, embodying the more philosophical and
serious qualities that Aristotle lauded while history remained as the mere
domain of the particular.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century “the triumph of science was
ensconced linguistically [ . . . as the] term ‘science’ without a specifying ad-
jective came to be equated primarily (and often exclusively) with natural
science,” while the human sciences lost their “scientific” standing and were
termed the “humanities.”4 This linguistic move led aspiring and emerging
scholars to develop themselves as “social scientists,” emulating and advo-
cating the nomothetic or general laws of the “hard sciences.” History as a
discipline found itself caught between its own ideographic interests and the
nomothetic “scientific” aspirations of the other developing social sciences.
The rise of the U.S. university system as the dominant model after 1945,
coupled with the extraordinary quantitative and geographic expansion of
universities over the next twenty-five years, led to a restructuring in the
university as institution with a decided emphasis on the “more nomothetic
tendencies within the social sciences. The massive public and private invest-
ment in scientific research gave these poles of scientific developments an
unquestionable advantage over orientations that seemed less rigorous and
policy oriented.”5 As a result of such developments, there were both intel-
lectual and economic interests at stake as the discipline of history took a
quantitative turn in the 1970s, placing it in closer proximity to the other social
sciences despite its own ideographic tradition. This tension is maintained
today, reflected in the location of history departments within their universi-
ties: they reside in the faculty of social sciences at some institutions, and in
the humanities at others.
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History of the Present
If money were not an issue and historians were content to be nominal-

ists, then there would be no problem at all. We could all settle into a realm
of particular investigation with little or no concern for the bigger picture,
logical transformation rules, or large-scale conclusions. But as the History
Manifesto, Big History, and Deep History all make clear, many historians
are not content dealing solely with the realm of particulars or singularities,
and it is certainly hard to imagine justifying departmental hires, classes,
or proposed manuscripts on the basis of this claim.6 Instead, the histori-
cal profession has a long history of trying to make itself “more serious” by
employing universal claims in the service of our particular investigations,
claims that in turn serve to substantiate a more general and stable (if unan-
nounced) theory of history. The fantasy of a historical science is predicated
on this desire to correct the perceived weakness that Aristotle diagnosed by
providing universals to shore up the instability of our malleable and par-
ticular historical condition.
There are several ways that historians have gone about this process. Some
have done so by subordinating history to—or even appropriating—the meth-
ods of one of the natural sciences. Others have turned their backs on the sci-
ences, arguing that history was more akin to literature and that its subjective
and imaginative nature should be a point of pride, as in the arts. And then
there are those historians who have sought to define history as its own kind
of science—one that follows rules that are quite different from but no less
serious than those of the natural sciences.7 Here I’d like to point to the work of
Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey—in particular to the distinction
that each articulated between the timeless perspective of Naturwissenschaften
(the natural sciences) and the historically conditioned, and thus ever chang-
ing, position of Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences). Intended to create
a space for a particularly “historical science,” such a distinction also served
to reinforce the designation of the natural sciences as those that contained
the laudable and serious qualities presented by Aristotle and Descartes.8
In any case, whether by challenging or accepting the perceived “domi-
nance” of the scientific model, historians, along with their discipline, have
been defined by the response to their alleged lack of rigor. To look to one
example, when the journal History and Theory was founded in 1960, the journal
stated as its chief intellectual concern the connection between explanation
in science and in history, specifically in regard to Carl Hempel’s covering law
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model. On Hempel’s account, the ability to explain an event by reference to

another event necessarily presupposed an appeal to laws or general propo-
sitions that could be repeatedly observed. Maurice Mandelbaum wrote the
following in 1961: “Viewing the matter in historical perspective, covering
law theorists were in rebellion against a very widespread and influential
movement in German thought which attempted to show that the methods
of the historian were necessarily different from the methods employed in the
natural sciences. The contrasts between ‘Naturwissenschaften’ and ‘Geisteswis-
senschaften, between ‘erklären’ and ‘verstehen,’ between the ‘repeatable’ and the
‘unique,’ between nomothetic and ideographic disciplines, were the stock in
trade of those against whom the covering-law theorists rebelled.”9
Hempel sought to demonstrate “that general laws have quite analogous
functions in history and in the natural sciences, that they form an indis-
pensable instrument of historical research, and that they even constitute
the common basis of various procedures which are often considered as
characteristic of the social in contradistinction to the natural sciences.”10
In doing so, Hempel argued that there is no difference between history and
the natural sciences insofar as “both can give us an account of their subject-
matter only in terms of general concepts, and history can ‘grasp the unique
individuality’ of its objects of study no more and no less than can physics or
chemistry.”11 Thus Hempel advocated that historians accept the validity of
“general laws” and “universal forms” on the model of the natural sciences
and in recognition of the “methodological unity of empirical science.”12 To do
otherwise would be methodologically unsound, the implication being that
those historians who see themselves as operating under different rules are
likewise unsound.
I bring this up partly to recount one attempt to provide a logical empiricist
scientific scaffold for historical investigation. But more importantly to note
that while the covering law model was eventually rebuffed by historians as
inadequate to the task of understanding causality for history, it was actually
advances in molecular and cell biology in the 1960s that led to the larger
demise of the covering law model. Such scientific advances determined
that special sciences (chemistry, biology, neuroscience) should no longer
be labeled defective because they lacked universal laws.
Thus it was that the roundtable “History Meets Biology” in the December
2014 American Historical Review caught my eye with its initial, if superficial,
affinity between history and biology.13 But the particular is not what attracts
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many of the participants in the roundtable to biology nor is it what has led
to the resurgence of scientific method for history in our current climate. In
his concluding comments to the roundtable, the paleontologist Norman
Macleod summarized the ground upon which the collaboration between
biology and history is taking place. Basing his comments on his reading of
the individual panelists’ contributions and incorporating as well the title of
his own essay, “Historical Inquiry as a Distributed Nomothetic, Evolutionary
Discipline,” Macleod harkened back in his remarks to the general (nomo-
thetic) explanatory laws at play in Hempel:
Biology, like all sciences, is grounded on the twin foundations of the discovery of new
facts and the testing of statements regarding the manner in which natural processes
operate. New facts are discovered (usually) by traveling to new locations either physi-
cally (e.g., trained experts gaining access to unexplored regions) or via technologies
that extend human senses (e.g., invention of the telescope, microscope, and synchro-
tron). Hypothesis tests are constructed, and evaluated, on the principles of inferential
logic and may use results obtained through the employment of advanced technologies,
though this is not always the case.14
As did Hempel, Macleod accepted that perfect knowledge of all aspects of

a phenomenon is not necessary before insights can be gained. He concluded:
The practice of science is in many ways identical to the practice of history. Scientists,
like historians, selectively choose which ‘facts’ they will pay attention to or collect. This
choice is informed by the theories and hypotheses that form the core structure of scien-
tific investigation, as well as by the backgrounds and personal histories of individual
scientists. As a result, scientists, like historians, are influenced by the society that sur-
rounds them, up to and including interpretation of the results of their investigations.
Science is philosophically committed to progressivism and deterministic causality,
despite in some cases admitting important roles for contingency and constraint.15
While there are several issues at play here, I first want to emphasize that
the rapprochement or conversation between biology and history here seems
quite one-sided as it takes place on the nomothetic grounds ascribed to sci-
ence rather than through an investigation of the ways such laws are rendered
problematic through historical inquiry.16 Interestingly, Macleod is aware
of this dilemma more generally; he questions the historian contributors’
emphasis on the light that biological concepts and theories can shine on
historical events but not on the light historical work can shine on concepts
and theories in biology. He comments: “Historians should not suppose that
they cannot, or should not, engage fully with this process of disciplinary
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reciprocal illumination,” thus raising by implication the problem of the re-

lation of “truth” versus “meaning.”17 Science, or at least the modern physi-
cal sciences, are not concerned with meaning except insofar as truth and
meaning are held to be the same thing. History continues to be interested in
meaning: what is the meaning of, to cite just one example, the Holocaust—for
the Germans, for Jews, for us, for me? If “the true” has to do with “statements
about the world” rather than with the world in itself, then “the true” continues
to be “made” rather than discovered in things.18 The truth value of biology as
a scientific statement may be one such thing, and while Macleod does not
actively recognize this critical possibility, the contents of his article make
clear that he should welcome this sort of robust contestation.
To be sure, the contributions by Julia Adeney Thomas and Michael D.
Gordin provide important critical interventions, but for the most part the
roundtable features historians who advocate for the universal nature of the
explanatory powers of biology.19 Such interventions champion scientific
explanatory powers that purport to provide harder evidence and greater
scope, scale, and reach than conventional history, as well as an interpreta-
tive methodology that allows the historian to cast back beyond the time of
written records and constructed artifacts. And while the group introduction
is careful to articulate that the essays in the roundtable “do not advocate a
new biological, evolutionary, or neuroscientific ‘turn’ in historical research,”
this statement is hard to square with Smail and Shyrock’s earlier assertion
that “thanks in part to the biological turn, scholars in all fields are feeling
the pull of humanity’s deep past” which appears in the introduction to Deep
History.20 Whether or not a “turn” is proposed, it is clear that the contributors
to the AHR roundtable consider biology to be our dominant explanatory
paradigm and that “the challenge for historians is to come to grips with these
biological discoveries while recognizing that historians have an ever more
important role to play in an era when biology holds sway.”21
But it is unclear what this “ever more important role” for historians might
be, given that the logic of the roundtable, despite protestations to the con-
trary, is that biology offers something that history cannot. Here, the resur-
gence of science in historical method is a shift to the “hard sciences” in the
form of biology (though as “neuro” and “evolutionary” science as well) and
away from the humanities in order to remain relevant and “serious” in this
moment when biology holds sway. But the historical logic of this collabora-
tive endeavor is worth investigating, and we can do so by looking to an older
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example of evolutionary history before returning to Daniel Smail and Lynn

Hunt’s respective contributions to the roundtable.
In William McNeil’s Plagues and Peoples from 1977, McNeil provides a macro
narrative of human development based on Darwinian evolutionary theory
and, specifically, the role that disease plays in the history of humankind.22
In his analysis of the origins of the Black Plague in Europe, McNeil admits
that he does not have sufficient historical evidence to recreate the conditions
that led to the outbreak of bubonic plague. What he does have, however,
is evidence from more recent outbreaks, and he uses them, along with an
evolutionary framework to discern the processes that lead from parasitic
stasis to outbreak. Because the model is evolutionary and the process of
natural selection is presented as constant, McNeil can use his investigation
into the plague outbreak in 1894 to give us a historically plausible account of
the origins of the plague outbreak in the fourteenth century. This argument
is based on scientific observation of verifiable and particular data, but what
is interesting is that it only holds true and can be applied to other situations
where concrete data is not available due to the universal, transcendent or
transhistorical meaning afforded to the theory of natural selection; other-
wise it must be taken as an analogy only. The mechanism used to analyze
the modern case history is equally applicable to past events. But the ap-
propriateness of this causal hypothesis is not questioned, nor is the role it
plays in questions of agency or network.
In his work, Daniel Smail is critical of the functionalist fallacies that have
troubled evolutionary history, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
and thus he turns to recent developments in neuroscience to provide what
he considers to be a more nuanced and deeper history. I won’t dwell here
on the claims or merits of Deep History, but I do want to point to a tension
in Smail’s work that was articulated by William Reddy in his review of On
Deep History and the Brain.23 Smail is keenly aware of the ways that recent
advances in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology rely
on purely speculative functional explanations of behavior that generate no
testable hypothesis to determine something like “behavioral modules,” and
he states so explicitly. Nevertheless he presents an account of a “module”
for “recognizing social subordination in appropriate settings and respond-
ing accordingly” because he considers it a “reasonable assumption, since
recognizably similar behavioral patterns are common in virtually all primate
species.”24
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I want to make several points about these claims. Firstly, after raising
serious doubts about the viability of behavioral modules, Smail nevertheless
deploys such a module based on primate studies. But secondly, in doing so
Smail, like McNeil, transposes research from one temporal scheme onto
another (research into baboon behavior and that of eleventh- and twelfth-
century European castellans) and thus creates a transhistorical and func-
tionally universal model that is applicable across time and space. He does
this even as he argues for a field of evolutionary adaptation in which certain
neural configurations are likely to evolve due to functional appropriateness,
implying significant change over time. Thus, the constancy of the explana-
tory mechanism runs contrary to the historically specific condition of evo-
lutionary adaptation at any given point in time or place. For neuroscientists,
these are speculative paradigms. But in Smail’s narrative they are natural-
ized, and what’s more, they become the unquestioned field of evolutionary
adaptation, outstripping the particular nature of the special sciences that
lack “universal laws.”
But there is a larger and more pernicious contradiction at work. Smail’s
rhetoric often presents the rapprochement of science and history as ca-
pable of dispelling the anthropocentric focus of the historical discipline. In
the co-written introduction to Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present,
Smail and Shyrock write: “A century ago, modern historiography was built
on the scaffolding of progress, a story line rooted in the rise of civilization
and the break with nature that supposedly took place some five thousand
to six thousand years ago. This narrative enshrined a triumphalist account
of human reason.”25 The co-authors lament that human exceptionalism,
based on the opposition between “nature” and “civilization,” is still at work
in our modern historical models. By contrast, they argue that the turn to
scientific models for the practice of history will collapse this false binary.
Such a collapse would liberate us from human exceptionalism through a
deeper understanding of time that reaches back before textual historical
evidence, and would lead to a more broad acceptance of what and who count
as “history.” By collapsing the distinction between the natural and the human
sciences, such a move would also eliminate the privileging of written texts,
and would thus remove the cultural and intellectual biases that sustain the
narrative of the “powerful men of the past.” Following this logic, it is not just
our understanding of time but also the field of potential historical actors
(human or otherwise) that expands: “The logic that makes Neanderthals
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and other early hominins visible to a deep history is the same logic that has
made subalterns everywhere visible to modern historical practice.”26
But what appears to be an eminently democratizing sentiment is actually
deeply troubling because of the way it evacuates politics. The critique of rea-
son as the exemplar of the human is one that has animated many feminist,
queer, and critical race theorists, and historians have worked with this notion
since at least the 1970s. Here, though, Smail and Shryock ignore it and sub-
stitute instead a false promise of universal humanity, one that depoliticizes
history and historiography. What’s more, while Smail regularly presents the
argument for a rapprochement of history and science as one of increased tem-
poral distance and a more inclusive scope, it is an argument predicated on the
very “scaffolding of progress” he decries. This is because he understands our
contemporary moment as a privileged one—a time when science has suffi-
ciently advanced so that we can finally understand history in a scientific man-
ner, and we can thus cast away our antiquated ways of interpreting the past.
Whereas before a “critical absence of data made a deep history of humanity
methodologically unthinkable,” now “the accumulation of knowledge about
the human past has become so impressive that a rapprochement [between
history and science] is needed” because “the natural-selection paradigm
has enabled us to generate highly nuanced understandings not only of how
the hominin lineage has evolved but also of how social forms and cultural
capacities have developed over long stretches of time.”27
But from this enlightened position, the proponents of Deep History ac-
tually seem to do more to close off conversations between history and the
sciences than they do to foster them because they imply that those historians
who remain skeptical of the scientific model are simply unenlightented.
Those who question whether “history and biology share common ground”
are under the influence of “a history of disciplinary misunderstanding and
mistrust.”28 The idea of a split between the humanities and the natural sci-
ences is taken to be parochial, disciplinarily hidebound, or out of touch, and
this then suppresses the crucial question posed by Roger Cooter: is it really
in everyone’s interest to resolve the old ‘two cultures’ war with the victory
of science? Or is it simply culturally convenient to purport it to be so?29
The resolution takes place on the terms of the natural sciences evacuated
of politics and thus these sorts of critical questions are disallowed.
In Lynn Hunt’s contribution to the recent roundtable she follows Smail’s
lead, turning to neuroscience to stimulate “new ways of thinking about
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historical interpretations of selfhood,” which itself provides a counter to

the demotion of human agency we see in McNeil or the dangers of function-
alism articulated by Smail.30 And, like Smail, Hunt employs the rhetorical
device of characterizing the historian who embraces neuroscience as one
who works against the main stream: “Historians have long been allergic to
psychological forms of explanation, so it seems unlikely that many will be
eager to jump on the bandwagon of neuroscience or neurohistory.”31 Hunt
herself, however, is eager to jump on this bandwagon.32 But unlike Smail, or
even McNeil, Hunt keeps a greater rhetorical distance from the science she
employs in her historical work; she prefers to cite scholars from the relevant
fields, such as Hannah and Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, and even
Smail, rather than work through the evolutionary and epigenetic issues that
undergird her assertions. This is because, despite her confidence in the value
of neuroscience for understanding questions of the historical self, she is also
aware of the limitations in importing this model. In Inventing Human Rights,
Hunt tells us that “there is no easy or obvious way to prove or even measure
the effect of new cultural experiences on eighteenth-century people, much
less on their conception of rights. Scientific studies of present-day responses
to reading or watching television have proved difficult enough, and they
have the advantage of living subjects who can be exposed to ever-changing
research strategies.”33
Nevertheless, and in a manner mirroring the rhetorical shift in registers
in the example by Ranke at the beginning of this paper, Hunt follows the
qualifications about “neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology [as] still un-
certain about the nature of the self” with the supremely confident assertion
that her “argument depends on the notion that reading accounts of torture or
epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes and
came back out as new concepts about the organization of social and political
life.”34 This is an assertion that works perfectly well at the level of imaginative
interpretation, but it is also one for which Hunt cannot provide evidence in
any meaningful neuroscientific way. Hunt states as much in her contribu-
tion to the roundtable: “How can historians reorient their research with
these ideas in mind? We cannot do fMRI studies and find out how individual
brains reacted to Christian doctrine, tobacco, or newspaper stories of battles,
and we cannot assume that present day reactions to such stimuli would be
the same as those in the past.”35 As with McNeil and Smail’s work, Hunt’s
“scientific” grounding must either be taken as a timeless transhistorical
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mechanism or else as analogy. If we assume the former, then Hunt is out of

step with the limited and hypothetical nature of these claims that refer solely
to biology. If we take the latter, then her argument lacks the grounding in
hard scientific evidence that Hunt seems to think separates her work from
conventional historical explanation. In the end, Hunt’s analysis seems to
have very little to do with the intersection of neuroscience and history and
everything to do with the interpretative choice of the historian.
But here is the point: In each of these cases, what happens in the appropria-
tion by the historian is that the speculative scientific paradigm is naturalized
so as to become the basis of explanation rather than a possible hypothetical
template. Once the historically conditioned moment of explanation—be it
biological, neuroscientific, evolutionary, or other—is naturalized and pre-
sented as a given, then everything else that follows is taken to be so: just the
facts. This is the fantasy of a historical science uncoupled from the speculative
and hypothetical actuality of neuroscience, evolutionary theory, or research
in biology. It is also a narrative bereft of the critical interpretive power that
historical research can bring to these fields.
When historians treat recent discoveries of the natural sciences as bearers
of authoritative truth, too often they do so as if these were purely “discover-
ies” and not possible, hypothetical, or speculative modes of approaching
nature. This is to say that it is the historians, by appropriating science, who
are endowing the natural sciences with the mythical and grandiose authority
of the timeless “given” as Dilthey and Windelband once did. Ironically, this
approach belies the self-understanding of natural science as a speculative
inquiry that is always subject to self-criticism and revision. Humanists, in
other words, and historians in particular, are themselves guilty of inflating
natural science into a purely positivistic discipline to which they can then
turn in their longing for hard and indisputable facts: just the facts. The fi-
nal irony is that even the more critical sort of historian will often project a
mindless positivism onto the natural sciences and then ascribe this mindless
positivism to the self-understanding of the sciences themselves.
And it is on this naturalized and thus unquestionable field of explanation
that digital history has emerged, providing us with an incredible array of
tools for acquiring and processing data. But because digital history has no
critical theoretical or imaginative historical scaffold, we have found our-
selves entering a zone of neo-empiricism that accompanies the resurgence
of “science.” By and large, what we are doing is discovering new means of
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acquiring evidence and then putting them in the same buckets. We are not
innovating the historical discipline with the data, codes, or maps we now
can acquire, nor are we doing the epistemological work of inquiring as to
what is happening to key historical apparatuses such as the archive, and how
this effects our discipline. When looking at visual imaging of the brain, are
we questioning the nature of visual appropriation or coding that delivers
us this information, or are we taking it as brute fact? Data is a “given,” but
by whom and to what purpose?36 After all, the image is not the thing; there
is a way in which the historian can lose track of the object that is the past
by creating a map of it and then assuming the map to be the determinative
guide and not a secondary representation.
This lack of critical self-awareness in the appropriation of scientific mod-
els, along with its possible consequences, was made painfully apparent in
Ian Hesketh’s recent article “The Story of Big History,” which appeared in
this journal. In his article, Hesketh demonstrates the ways that, despite the
claim to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences through a
grand synthesis, “big historians borrow not just the facts that are produced
in these disciplines but, more importantly, the rhetorical tropes of the sci-
ence literature that popularizes this work, tropes that in a very general way
imbue the science being popularized with an anthropomorphic quality.”37
But a larger question looms. Why give pride of place to the hard sciences,
a discourse and set of disciplines so fraught with problems of hierarchy,
gender bias, and presentism? The history of these sciences is profoundly
troubling in relation to social programs and politics, and one need only think
of Victorian racial theory or Nazi eugenics to give one pause.
At the most cynical level my answer is that despite the many good inten-
tions of those scholars seeking to expand the horizons of the historical dis-
cipline, the question is primarily an economic one. The criteria to determine
which disciplines are considered “serious” are no longer those of Aristotle,
but rather pertain to funding, though it seems to be the case that present-
ing a universal and unifying explanatory platform is a key to success in that
arena, so perhaps Aristotle was right all along. Over the past twenty years,
historians have moved increasingly toward affiliation first with the social
sciences and then with the hard sciences; such movement tracks the rise
of the STEM initiative and the perceived crisis of the humanities. It is not
surprising or even a coincidence that as federal, state, and local governments
have invested increased amounts in the “hard sciences,” enrollments in the
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humanities and history in particular have declined. This is then coupled with
a logic of impact assessment where funding agencies measure the question
of whether research is worthwhile on a metric of funds previously gained.
The money follows the money and, in this current incarnation, the ideas
follow the funding and not vice versa.
The pursuit of capital stimulates ideas and paradigms, and one result
is that historians now run toward science in search of those funds. To my
mind, the interpretative choices of Lynn Hunt, Daniel Smail, and the other
members of the “neurohistory group” at UCLA, or the Bill Gates-supported
proponents of Big History must be seen in this light, whatever the merits of
their particular interpretations. Such choices also point to the way that their
supposedly insurgent position against the mainstream of historical work
is actually, in the larger sense, aligned with the most mainstream trends
in emphasis and funding. It is also worth noting that arguments about the
“utility” of history or other forms of knowledge actually build in a time frame
wherein the knowledge-making must be helpful, useful, or actionable in the
short-term. This time frame is measureable specifically by grant cycles or
funding requests, not in terms of the longue durée, big history, or deep history.
I would further argue that what we are seeing in this run to the sciences is not
a rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities, though talk of
interdisciplinary work between these divisions certainly helps raise funds,
but rather historians subordinating or sublimating the practice of history
to a fantasy of “scientific method.”
Perhaps funding is all that is left. Increasingly, I have come to read Fou-
cault’s lectures on bio-politics at the Collège de France in the light of a state-
ment he made at the end of The Order of Things about the disappearance of
the category of the human “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”38
Later, in his lectures Foucault states: “Homo œconomicus is the one island of
rationality within an economic process whose uncontrollable nature does
not challenge, but instead founds the rationality of the atomistic behavior
of homo œconomicus.”39 It is the “economic process” that takes center stage
guiding homo œconomicus by the power of an invisible hand that conserves
rational choice devoid of political or economic agency.40 Here I take the
category of homo œconomicus not to indicate “economic man or human” but
instead I read homo as “same” to indicate a time of “œconomicus œconomicus,”
an order of economics for economics’ sake, a time where the human is ef-
faced, sublimated, or erased.
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The turn to the material, to the real, to experience, to presence, and to

“hard science” are each responses to the current anxiety that history, as we
know it, is disappearing. Fears of declining enrollments, declining book
acquisitions, declining positions, and most importantly, declining funding
are forcing us to reconsider our discipline. But here we must be careful lest
we, historians, simply erase ourselves. The turn to science is such a move
because it cedes the mantle of history to interpretive scaffolds that in and
of themselves are not historical and for reasons that I believe are ultimately
economic ones. As Cooter observed: “Because biology is held to be use-
ful and economically efficient, it becomes more ‘real’ than any of the other
disciplines established during the Enlightenment as pragmatic means to
explore what it is to be human. . . . The same process of displacement through
neurobiologization also applies to academic history: in a context in which
biology is taken as the way to understand the self, who needs historical study
as a means to this end?41
One need only look to a recent “historical account” of the famous 1914
Christmas truce that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, authored by Stan-
ford professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery Robert M. Sapol-
sky. In Sapolsky’s account, the key to understanding the truce lies in an
understanding of evolutionary rituals of cooperation: “Many primates have
ritualized gestures of aggression—say, a male baboon yawning in the face
of a rival, displaying his canines. Such displays serve as a threat. But in
the trenches, the ritual of bullets flying innocuously by, well over soldiers’
heads, signaled a continuing commitment to peace.”42 The issue here is not
to question the merits of Sapolsky’s contribution, though ideally this article
should have been co-authored with a historian unwilling to subordinate the
critical elements of the historical discipline to the universal reign of biology.
Instead, I use this example to point out the way that Sapolsky’s intervention
renders the historian redundant and unnecessary on the very same grounds
that are used by those historians calling for a biological or scientific turn.
Here, in accordance with “neo-liberal values and interests, among which
is a penchant for dissolving ‘old-fashioned’ divisions of labor and other
obstructions to the rapid flow of goods and information for the purpose of
accumulating capital,” the labor of the historian is consolidated with and
replaced by that of the biologist.43 This is not a rapprochement, conversa-
tion, or interaction between history and the sciences but an unconditional
surrender. The move serves the logic of neo-liberalism well, since by ceding
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ground to this fantasy of science, historians also cede the space for critical
intervention that is the strength and heart of our discipline.
Aristotle was wrong, at least in his assessment of history, because the
strength of our work does not rest on accounting for universal truths but in
assessing the ways that our understanding of such truths is always histori-
cally conditioned and thus subject to change. The power of history and the
humanities lies in our ability to provide a critical intervention and, spe-
cifically, to determine the ways that seemingly universal methodologies are
actually historically determined. This is what allows us to challenge para-
digms that are presented to us as “natural” and thus immutable—be they
evolutionary, biological, neuropsychological, or economic—and to show
them to be historically determined, contingent, and subject to critique. And
this of course includes the discipline of history itself.
It has never been “just the facts.”
I want to thank the anonymous readers of History of the Present for their comments and sug-
gestions. Hayden White, Laura Stark, and Peter Eli Gordon provided invaluable advice. I would
also like to thank Carolyn J. Dean for organizing the panel at the 2015 American Historical As-
sociation meeting where I presented this as a paper and my co-panelists Stefanos Geroulanos,
Samuel Moyn, and Joanna Radin.
Ethan Kleinberg is Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University and Ex-
ecutive Editor of History and Theory.
Notes
1. Felix Gilbert, among others, has addressed this issue as well as the contradictory
interpretations of Ranke and the ramifications of translating eigentlich by “actually’
as opposed to “essentially.” See Gilbert, “What Ranke Meant,” The American Scholar
56, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 393–397.
2. Aristotle: Selections, ed. Terence and Gail Fine (1995), 549, 1451a36–b11.
3. Isaiah Berlin, “History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History,” History
and Theory 1, no. 1 (1960): 1.
4. The Gulbenkian Comission (Immanuel Wallerstein, Chair), Open the Social Sci-
ences (1996), 5–6.
5. Ibid., 35. See also 33–36.
6. David Armintage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto (2014).
7. Berlin, “History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History,” 1.
8. Wilhelm Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (Strassburger Rek-
toratsrede, 1894),” in Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte Book
2 (1915), 136–160; Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswis-
senschaften: Gesammelte Schriften Book 7 (1992), 79–190. For a useful interrogation of this
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distinction as it relates to our current understanding of the “humanities” and “sciences”

and their relationship to histories, see Lorraine Daston “The Sciences of the Archive,”
Osiris 27, no. 1, Clio Meets Science: The Challenges of History (2012), 156–187.
9. Maurice Mandelbaum, “Historical Explanation: the Problem of ‘Covering
Laws’,” History and Theory 1, no. 3 (1961): 231. In addition to the article by Mandelbaum,
the issue was addressed and debated by Isaiah Berlin (in the first essay published in
History and Theory), “History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History,” William
Dray in “Toynbee’s Search for Historical Laws,” History and Theory 1, no. 1 (1961):
32–54; Gerhard Ritter in “Scientific History, Contemporary History, and Political
Science,” History and Theory 1, no. 3 (1961): 261–279; John Passmore, “Explanation
in Everyday Life, in Science, and in History,” History and Theory 2, no. 2 (1962): 1–32;
and Samuel Beer in “Causal Explanation and Imaginative Re-enactment,” History
and Theory 3, no. 1 (1963): 6–29.
10. Carl G. Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” The Journal of Phi-
losophy 39, no. 2 (Jan. 15, 1942): 35.
11. Ibid., 37.
12. Ibid., 48.
13. “History Meets Biology” Roundtable, American Historical Review, Dec. 2014.
14. Norman Macleod, “Historical Inquiry as a Distributed Nomothetic, Evolution-
ary Discipline,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014, 1610.
15. Macleod, “Historical Inquiry as a Distributed Nomothetic, Evolutionary Dis-
cipline,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014, 1613–14.
16. Surely there is some irony to the historical use of the special science that de-
stabilized the covering law model for the purpose of advancing general claims.
17. Macleod, “Historical Inquiry as a Distributed Nomothetic, Evolutionary Dis-
cipline,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014, p. 1610.
18. The formulation is Hayden White’s based on comments he provided to an
earlier draft of this piece.
19. I find Julia Adeney Thomas’s essay particularly sympathetic to the claims
made in this essay. See Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene:
Problems of Scale” and Gordin, “Evidence and the Instability of Biology,” American
Historical Review, Dec. 2014.
20. Daniel Lord Smail, Philip Ethington, John L. Brooke, Michael D. Gordin, Kyle
Harper, Lynn Hunt, Clark Spencer Larsen, Norman Macleod, Randolph Roth, Ed-
mund Russell, Walter Scheidel, Julia Adeney Thomas, “Introduction: History Meets
Biology,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014, p. 1496; Andrew Shyrock and Daniel
Lord Smail, Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present (2011), 12.
21. Smail, Ethington, et. al., “Introduction: History Meets Biology,” American His-
torical Review, Dec. 2014, 1499.
22. William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (1976).
23. William Reddy, “Neuroscience and the Fallacies of Functionalism,” History and
Theory 49, no. 3 (2010): 412–425. The book in question is Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep
History and the Brain (2008).
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24. Smail, On Deep History, 143.

25. Shyrock and Smail, Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present (2011), 4.
26. Ibid., 14.
27. Ibid., 7, 12.
28. Smail, Ethington, et. al., “Introduction: History Meets Biology,” American His-
torical Review, Dec. 2014, 1494.
29. Roger Cooter, “Natural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Histo-
rians of Science Need to Take the Neuro-Turn Seriously,” Isis 105, no. 1 (2014): 149.
30. Lynn Hunt, “The Self and Its History,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014,
1577.
31. Hunt, “The Self and Its History,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014, p. 1576. I
think it worth noting that Hunt’s assertion is problematic. Historians do use all sorts
of psychological explanations so it is likely Hunt is referring to psychoanalysis and
the unconscious as the form of explanation historians refuse.
32. To be sure this is not Hunt’s first bandwagon. On this see Samuel Moyn’s
“Bonfire of the Humanities” in The Nation (Feb. 9, 2015) for an assessment of the
ways “Hunt has had the most reliable eye for new trends in the American historical
profession,” and “her preternatural sense of the new thing being touted by historians
to study old things.”
33. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (2007), 32.
34. Ibid., 33.
35. Hunt, “The Self and Its History,” American Historical Review, Dec. 2014, 1576.
36. Lorraine Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive,” Osiris 27, no. 1, (2012): 164.
37. Ian Hesketh, “The Story of Big History,” History of the Present 4, no. 2 (Fall 2014):
176.
38. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1970), 387.
39. Michael Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France. 1978–1978
(2004), 285. Trans. Graham Burchell The Birth of BioPolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978–1979 (2008), 282.
40. Ibid., 278–80.
41. Cooter, “Natural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Historians of
Science Need to Take the Neuro-Turn Seriously,” Isis, 105, no. 1 (2014): 148.
42. Robert M. Sapolsky, “The Spirit of the 1914 Christmas Truce,” Wall Street Journal,
December 19, 2014.
43. See Cooter, “Natural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Historians
of Science Need to Take the Neuro-Turn Seriously,” Isis 105, no. 1 (2014): 153.
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Just the Facts: The Fantasy of a Historical Science

Author(s): Ethan Kleinberg

Just the Facts: The Fantasy

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than history; for it speaks of what is universal, whereas history speaks of

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If money were not an issue and historians were content to be nominal-

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model. On Hempel’s account, the ability to explain an event by reference to

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As did Hempel, Macleod accepted that perfect knowledge of all aspects of

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reciprocal illumination,” thus raising by implication the problem of the re-

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example of evolutionary history before returning to Daniel Smail and Lynn

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historical interpretations of selfhood,” which itself provides a counter to

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mechanism or else as analogy. If we assume the former, then Hunt is out of

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The turn to the material, to the real, to experience, to presence, and to

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distinction as it relates to our current understanding of the “humanities” and “sciences”

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24. Smail, On Deep History, 143.

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