Some Theoretical Approaches To Intercultural Comparative Historiography Jorn Rusen

Wesleyan University
Some Theoretical Approaches to Intercultural Comparative Historiography

Author(s): Jörn Rüsen
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 4, Theme Issue 35: Chinese Historiography in
Comparative Perspective (Dec., 1996), pp. 5-22
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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SOME THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO INTERCULTURAL
COMPARATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY
JORN RUSEN
ABSTRACT
Intercultural comparative historiography raises fundamental methodological problems:

Is there any ground for comparison beyond the peculiarities and differences of cultures
to be compared? One must avoid taking the Western cultural tradition of historical
thinking as the basis for the comparison. Therefore one has to conceptualize the theoret-
ical grounds for comparison and explicate elements of historical thinking which operate
in every culture. Then cultural differences in historiography can be analyzed as peculiar
constellations of these elements. In order to develop this comparative groundwork,
one has to start with some fundamental considerations about historical memory as the
universal cultural means of orienting human practical life in its temporal dimensions. On
this foundation one has to erect a theory of historical consciousness and its constitutive
factors, procedures, and functions. In a systematized form the relationship of these
elements can be used to identify the varieties of historical thinking in different contexts
over time. This approach has as one objective an intercultural exchange of knowledge
about history as a medium for identity-forming. It should enable the participants in
this exchange to overcome the widespread logic of exclusion in favor of a more inclusive
manner of historical self-understanding.
Es scheint an der Zeit, eine in grdBerem Stile vergleichende Betrachtung der verschie-
denen Formen anzustellen, in denen in den verschiedenen Kulturen und Gesellschaften
historische Fragen, Betrachtungsweisen, Interessen mit den Problemen, Perspektiven
und Bediirfnissen, mit bestimmten Weisen des Handelns, der Verdnderung, der Erwar-
tungen und mit bestimmten Struktureigentiimlichkeiten der Gesellschaft korrelieren.
Christian Meier'
1. Christian Meier, "Die Entstehung der Historie," in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzdhlung
(Poetik und Hermeneutik V), ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich, 1973),
256. (It seems to be time to install an elaborated comparative view of the different forms, within
which the different cultures and societies correlate historical questions, world-views, and interests
with certain ways of activity, of change, of expectation, and with certain structural peculiarities
of society.)
6 JORN RUSEN
I. WHY THEORY?
Most works on historiography are done within the framework of a national

history.2 A broader perspective includes European or Western historiography3
or the historiography of non-Western cultures. The latter mainly deals with a
single country or a single culture like China4 or India.5 Comparative studies
are rare.6 There are a lot of reasons for this; I will mention only two of them
the difficulty of applying specialized research skills to different historical cul-
tures, and the dominance of Western historical thinking in historical studies
even in non-Western countries. This dominance draws academic interest to the
origins and development of the specifically modern way of historical thinking.
On the other hand there is a growing need for intercultural comparison simply
and unavoidably because of the great increase in international and intercultural
communication, not only in economics and politics, but also in various fields
of cultural life.
How should intercultural comparison be done?7 It is not sufficient to put
different histories of historiography together. This may provide a useful and
even necessary overview of the hitherto available knowledge, but it is no sort
of comparison since the different accumulations of knowledge lack a common
framework of cognitive organization. Every comparison needs an organizing
parameter. Before looking at the materials (texts, oral traditions, images, rit-
2. A recent example is Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Funda-

menta Historica, Bd. 3) (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1991).
3. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago, 1983); Georg G.
Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein uiberblick im internationalen Zusammen-
hang (Gottingen, 1993). Iggers's "international relationship" is exclusively European-American.
The older International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory,
ed. Georg Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westport, Conn., 1979) includes most of the non-
Western countries.
4. For example, Historians of China and Japan, ed. William G. Beasley and Edward G. Pul-
leyblank (London, 1961); Yu-shan Han, Elements of Chinese Historiography (Hollywood, 1955);
Charles S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography [1938] (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); The
Translation of Things Past: Chinese History and Historiography, ed. George Kao (Hong Kong,
1982); Rolf Trauzettel, "Die chinesische Geschichtsschreibung," in Ostasiatische Literaturen, ed.
Gunther Debon (Wiesbaden, 1984), 77-90; Extreme-Orient/Extreme-Occident, IX: La reference
a l'histoire (Paris, 1986).
5. For example, Problems of Indian Historiography, ed. D. Devahuti (Delhi, 1979); B. Kolver,
Ritual und historischer Raum: Zum indischen Geschichtsverstandnis (Munich, 1993); Pratima
Asthana, The Indian View of History (Agra, India, 1992); Michael Gottlob, "Writing the History
of Modern Indian Historiography," in Storia della Storiografia 27 (1995), 123-144.
6. For example, Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History and Human Nature: The Social Origins
of Historical Consciousness (Tuscon, 1988). A recent approach to bringing non-Western cultures
into view in dealing with the history of Western historiography is the series Geschichtsdiskurs,
ed. Wolfgang Kuttler, Jorn RUsen, and Ernst Schulin (vol. 1: Grundlagen und Methoden der
Historiographiegeschichte [Frankfurt/Main, 1993]; vol. 2: Anfdnge modernen historischen Den-
kens [Frankfurt/Main, 1994]; vol. 3: Die Epoche der Historisierung [Frankfurt/Main, 1996]).
7. Cf.Jtirgen Osterhammel, "Sozialgeschichte im Zivilisationsvergleich: Zu kunftigen Moglich-
keiten komparativer Geschichtswissenschaft," in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), 143-164;
Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansdtze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschrei-
bung, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jirgen Kocka (Frankfurt/Main, 1996).
INTERCULTURAL COMPARATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY 7
uals, monuments, memorials, and so on), one needs to know what realm of
things should be taken into consideration and in what respect the findings in
this realm should be compared. Putting it more simply: what are the similarities
and where are the differences in the field of historiography?
This simple question calls for a very complex answer. Intercultural compar-
ison is a very sensitive matter. It touches the field of cultural identity and it is
therefore involved in power struggles among different countries, especially with
respect to Western dominance and non-Western resistance to it in a great many
forms of intercultural relationship. But it is not only political struggle for power
which renders an intercultural comparison problematic in the discipline of his-
tory. Beyond politics there is an epistemological difficulty with enormous con-
ceptual and methodological consequences for the humanities: every comparison
is done in a given cultural context, so the culture is involved in the subject
matter of the comparison itself. Historians looking at historical thought in
other cultures normally do so through their own culture's idea of historiography.
They feel no urgent need to reflect on it or to explicate it theoretically. This
pre-given sense of what historiography is functions as a hidden parameter, as
a norm, or at least as a factor structuring the outlook on the varieties of historical
thinking in different places and times.
Non-awareness is the problem: in such a comparison a certain kind of histor-
ical thinking has an unreflected meta-status, and therefore prescribes the com-
parison's results. The "real" or the essentially "historical" mode of historiog-
raphy naturally can only be found in this pre-existing paradigm, and the other
modes get their meaning, significance, and importance only in relation to it.8
Comparison here yields nothing but a measure of the distance from an uncriti-
cally held norm. In rare cases scholars may use projections of alternatives into
other cultures in order to criticize their own points of view; but even in this
case they never get a substantial insight into the peculiarities and the similarities
of different modes of historical thinking and historiography.
For example, one may ask: how should we deal with elements of fiction
and poetical imagination in representing the past? Whether we evaluate these
elements as ahistorical, nonhistorical (even antihistorical), or as essential for
making sense of history depends on our culture's given concept of historical
thinking and historiography. Another example is the question of the importance
of a written language. Because of an uncritically held conviction about the
constitutive role of a written language for historical thinking, for a long time
we called cultures with only an oral tradition "ahistorical," even as not belonging
8. A typical example is Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature. Franz Rosenthal re-
flected upon the problem when dealing with the subject matter of "Muslim historiography": he
identifies it as "those works which Muslims, at a given moment of their literary history, considered
historical works and which, at the same time, contain a reasonable amount of material which
can be classified as historical according to our definition of history . . ." (A History of Muslim
Historiography. 2d rev. ed. [Leiden, 1968], 17).
8 JORN RUSEN
to history at all.9 Only after the introduction of writing were such cultures
deemed historical. Of course, this bias prevents insight into the culture-specific
kinds of historical thinking that did not depend upon a written language.
One can't avoid the clashes between involvement and interest concerning
the historical identity of the people whose historiography must and should be
compared. This involvement and interest have to be systematically taken into
consideration; they must be reflected upon, explicated, and discussed. There
is at least one systematic way of doing so which provides an opportunity for
comprehensive insights and knowledge and for potential agreement and con-
sensus among those who feel committed to a fuller grasp of the different cultures
in question. I think of theory, that is, a certain way of reflecting upon and
explicating the concepts and strategies of comparison. Only by theoretically
informed reflection can we prevent or correct any hidden cultural imperialism
or misleading perspective in comparative scholarship.'0
11. WHICH THEORY?
How can we avoid simply assuming as generally valid our own traditional way of
historical thinking? The answer to this question is in looking for anthropological
universals of historical consciousness. To do so we have to go beyond the limits
of professional and academic historiography and its rational procedures of
historical cognition. History as an academic discipline cannot serve as a model
or paradigm for the universal foundation of historiography. Instead, we have
to ask for basic mental operations which can be found in every human culture.
Is there something like an anthropological universal called "historical conscious-
ness"? We know that thinking historically in the usual meaning of the word
"history" is a result of a long process of cultural development and cannot be
presupposed in all forms of human life. But if one looks at some basic mental
operations constituting historical consciousness it is possible to identify them
as universal. Explication of these procedures leads to a general theory of cul-
tural memory.
There is no human culture without a constitutive element of common
memory. By remembering, interpreting, and representing the past peoples un-
derstand their present-day life and develop a future perspective on themselves
and their world. "Histoty" in this fundamental and anthropologically universal
sense is a culture's interpretive recollection of the past serving as a means to
orient the group in the present. A theory which explicates this fundamental
9. For example, Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte, 4th ed. (Leipzig, 1896), 1, viii. Cf. Andreas
Pigulla, China in der deutschen Weltgeschichtsschreibung vom 18. bis zumn 20. Jahrhundert (Wies-
baden, 1996).
10. I have tried a first approach to such a theorization for the sake of an intercultural comparison
(concerning the history of human rights) in Jorn Rusen, "Die Individualisierung des Allgemeinen:
Theorieprobleme einer vergleichenden Universalgeschichte der Menschenrechte," in Jorn Rusen,
Historische Orientierung: uber die Arbeit des Geschichtsbewu/3tseins, sich in der Zeit zurechtzu-
finden (Cologne, 1994), 168-187.
and elementary procedure of making sense of the past in respect to cultural

orientation in the present is a starting point for intercultural comparison. Such
a theory thematizes the cultural memory or the historical consciousness which
defines the subject matter of comparison in general.11 It serves as a categorical
definition of the cultural field in which historiography takes shape. In the frame-
work of such a theory there is no a priori definition of historiography. On the
contrary: historiography appears in the framework of such a general theory
of historical consciousness or cultural memory as a specific form of a universal
and basic cultural practice of human life.
The theoretical framework of an intercultural comparison not only has to
"define" the realm of what should be compared. It has to open up a perspective
within which "historiography" or "historical thinking" as a matter of compar-
ison comes into view. It also has to open up perspectives which make the variety
of differences visible, and thus be clear about how this variety of differences
is constituted. First of all it depends on the circumstances in which historical
consciousness works. What are the challenges which bring it about, and what
functions does it have to fulfill? Furthermore one has to look for the cultural
practice by which historical consciousness is pursued as a process of communica-
tion, as an element of social life. Third, one has to look for the mentalprocesses
themselves by which an interpretive recollection of the past gets the specific
quality which we call "history."
Special attention should be directed to the principles of "sense" which govern
this reconstruction of history. They determine the logic of historical interpreta-
tion, the poetics and rhetoric of forming a representation and the possibilities
of understanding the past as something relevant and important for a culture's
present orientation. Hao Chang's book on Chinese thinking at the turn of the
twentieth century provides an excellent description of these principles.'2 Here
he speaks of an "orientational symbolism," a "general interpretation of life and
world" which enables people "to maintain coherence and order in the universe
of meaning." This symbolism is related to three main subjects: self, society,
and cosmos. It shapes the modes of historical thinking as well. As to history,
it is expressed in concepts of time and temporal change which define the relation-
ship between past, present, and future. Such concepts put the human world
into an order and enable people to handle the experience of contingency by
which their lives are permanently threatened. The Chinese also define their
forms of social life by shaping identity, togetherness and otherness. In Chinese
one could speak of the Tao of history, which can be compared with the logos
of history or its "sense" in the West. The related principles and modes of thought
draw a line between sense and senselessness with respect to the temporal dimen-
sion of human life. (So one should inquire not only into sense, meaning, and
11. For the following cf. Rusen, "Was ist Geschichtsbewul3tsein? Theoretische uberlegungen
und heuristische Hinweise," in Historische Orientierung, 3-24.
12. Hao Chang, Chinese Search for Order and Meaning 1890-1911 (Berkeley, 1987), 7.
10 JORN RUSEN
significance, but into its opposites as well: what is seen as being senseless,
chaotic, threatening, and so on?)
Finally one has to look for modes, processes, and factors of change and
development concerning the work of historical consciousness. Can the different
ways of making historical sense of the past be put into a temporal sequence?
Is there anything comparable in the structural change of historical thinking
across the boundaries of different cultures? Here one has to be especially careful
not to generalize to all cultures the changes occurring in European historical
thinking.
On the following pages I would like to deal with these points in some detail.
However, a systematic argument would require a comprehensive and fully artic-
ulated theory of "making sense of history," which I can't offer (yet).'3
III. SOME REMARKS CONCERNING THE METHOD OF COMPARISON
In any intercultural comparison one must ask how the units of comparison
should be viewed. Are there pre-given entities, well distinguished in time and
space? What are the adequate presuppositions for a theory of intercultural
comparison? There are sense criteria which constitute historical thinking in
general. These sense criteria are an essential part of a cultural code which defines
the units of comparison. Consequently, cultures can be compared by way of
fundamental concepts which define the forms and realms of reality and human
self-understanding. So a typology of such concepts is a very useful theoretical
means for a comparative approach.
Johan Galtung has proposed a well-structured typology of this kind.'4 He
characterizes six different cultures (occident 1, occident 2, indic, buddhic, sinic,
nipponic) with respect to eight basic concepts ("nature," "self," "society,"
"world," "time self," "time society," "transperson," "episteme"). Such a ty-
pology reveals the specificity of cultural codes. But what is the status of such
a code constituted by the systemic interrelationship of basic concepts and sense
criteria? It makes culture become something very static and spatially discrete.
Cultures become monads, isolated configurations of sense and meaning fol-
lowing the regulative force of their deeply rooted cultural codes.
13. In doing so I will refer to many arguments, hints, and ideas gleaned during the work of
a research group of the Center for Interdisciplinary Study at the University of Bielefeld, which
is treating the issue "Making Sense of History: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Structure, Logic,
Function, and Intercultural Comparison of Historical Consciousness." The term "sense" is used
as an equivalent for the German word Sinn, which is distinct from "meaning" (Bedeutung). I
feel especially indebted to Klaus E. Muller, Burkard Gladigow, and (concerning China) Helwig
Schmidt-Glintzer and Joachim Mittag. Joachim Mittag has substantially enriched my comparative
approach to historiography. I owe to him most of the Chinese examples in this text.
14. Johan Galtung, "Die 'Sinne' der Geschichte," in Historische Sinnbildung: Problernstel-
lungen, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungsstrategien, ed. Klaus E. Muller and
Jorn Rusen (forthcoming, Reinbek, 1997); Johan Galtung, "Six Cosmologies: An Impressionistic
Presentation," in Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means (London, 1996), 211-222.
Such a theory of cultural differences has a dangerous tendency to essentialize

or even reify the single cultures concerned. Their internal historicity, their mani-
fold interconnections and mutual conditioning are lost from sight. Comparison
merely draws dichotomies or clear alternatives: historical thinking either follows
this code or another one. The related forms of cultural identities look like
spatial realms with clear borderlines. Nothing seems to exist beyond or across
the single codes. But the typology itself transgresses this borderline in a decisive
step and indicates a mode of thinking which does not necessarily issue from
one cultural code. A typology of cultural differences, a necessary heuristic
construct, has to avoid characterizing cultures as pre-given units and entities.
The idea that cultures are pre-given units and entities is committed to a
cultural logic which grounds identity on a fundamental difference between inside
and outside. Such a logic conceptualizes identity as a mental territory with clear
borderlines and a correspondingly sharp division between self and other. This
logic is essentially ethnocentric, and ethnocentrism is inscribed into a typology
of cultural differences which treats cultures as coherent units which can be
clearly separated from each other.
I would like to propose a theoretical conceptualization which avoids this
ethnocentrism. We avoid ethnocentrism if a specific culture is understood as
a combination of elements which are shared by all other cultures. Thus the
specificity of cultures is brought about by different constellations of the same
elements. Such an approach has the following virtues: it presents the otherness
of different cultures as a mirror facilitating better self-understanding; it thus
includes otherness rather than uses it as a principle of segregation; it encourages
recognition and mutuality in people of different cultures.
IV. WHAT SHOULD BE COMPARED?
Historiography issues from historical consciousness, which cannot be under-

stood without going back to a complex set of assumptions, circumstances,
challenges, and functions that shape its peculiarity. How is it possible to com-
pare peculiarities? It is necessary to find their basic components and reconstruct
them as a specific relationship and synthesis of various elements. If it can be
shown that these elements, or at least some of them, are the same in different
manifestations of historiography, a comparative analysis can be done in a sys-
tematic way. So the first step toward a comparative historiography is a theory
of the main components of these specific cultural manifestations called histori-
ography.
In order to do this one has to identify anthropological universals in historical
consciousness. There is a universal experience of time which can be called
"contingency." Contingency means that human life is always vexed by a sense
of rupture, of unexpected occurrences like death and birth, catastrophes, acci-
dents, disappointed expectations. In short, we experience what can be described
by Hamlet's words: "The world is out of joint; -0 cursed spite / that ever I
12 JORN RUSEN
was born to set it right.""5 "To set it right" means to develop a concept of
the course of time, of temporal change and development, which makes the
contingent occurrences meaningful with respect to everyday human activities
and a group's stable order of change. We find the same idea in a Chinese
expression in the Kung-yang commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals:
"To set to right things which have been thrown into chaos and to restore the
world to order, there is none better than the Spring and Autumn Annals.""6
The experience of structurally threatening temporal change" has to be inter-
preted in order to enable the people who are threatened by it to go on with
their lives. In order to do so they have to construct an idea of temporal order
which responds to the challenge of contingency. The work of historical con-
sciousness can thus be described as a procedure by which such an idea of
temporal order is brought about. It deals with the experience of temporal change
of life and world, which can then be stored in memory. It makes sense of past
change which can then be applied to understanding the present, and thus enables
people to anticipate the future, to guide their own activities by a future informed
by the experiences of the past.
The work of historical consciousness is done in specific cultural activities. I
would like to call them practices of historical narration. By these practices
"historiography" becomes a part of culture and a necessary element of human
life. Any intercultural comparison has to take systematically into account these
practices and has to interpret specific forms of the universal cultural activity
of making sense of the past by narration. (I would not deny that there are
non-narrative elements operative in the work of historical consciousness and
that the narrative representation of the past has its limits, but the peculiar
cultural phenomenon called history essentially depends upon the cultural prac-
tice of narration.)
What are the substantial elements of this mental construct called "history"?
In order to distinguish it from other contents of human memory one should
first of all underline its specific character as a memory of a more distant past
which goes beyond the limits of one's own personal recollection or (more objec-
tively) beyond one's own lifespan. This temporal extension of memory is a
necessary condition for giving the past the quality of being "historical." On
the other hand, the future perspective opened up by historical consciousness
transcends the limit of one's own lifespan as well. Historical consciousness thus
enlarges the concept of the temporal dimension of human life and extends it
far beyond the lifetime of the people who do the historical work of recollection.
The simple enlargement of the temporal horizon of memory is a necessary,
though not sufficient, condition for the specific "historical" quality of going
back to the past. The human mind has to fill this dimension with a specific
"sense" which makes the past as experience significant for the present and future.
15. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

16. Kung-yang chuan, Ai-kung 14th year.
17. In Chinese it is expressed by the term pien ("change" in the sense of "turmoil").
This "historical sense" is an image, a vision, a concept, or an idea of time which

mediates the expectations, desires, hopes, threats, and anxieties connecting the
minds of people in their present-day activities with the experiences of the past.
Recalled real time becomes synthesized with the projected future; past and
future merge into an entire image, vision, or concept of temporal change and
development which functions as an integral part of cultural orientation in the
present. Examples of this idea of time as a meaningful order of human activities
are regular and incessant cycles of order and disorder,"8 the category of progress,
the belief that God governs the world, or that there is a moral world order
(such as Tao).
All these concepts are based on the idea of the order of time. So concepts
of time are the foundation of the sense of history; time related to the human
world and its precarious balance between the experience of the past and the
expectation of the future preforms any sense and meaning of the past as history.
For comparative purposes a basic dichotomy has often been used: cyclic versus
linear time. This distinction in itself does not very usefully characterize funda-
mental modes of historical thinking, since there is no concept of history which
does not make use of both of them. So we should direct our efforts to uncovering
the modes of synthesis of cyclical and linear time.
The comparative outlook on historiography has to identify these criteria of
historical sense and meaning. Normally they do not occur in an elaborated
form. Very often they are implicit principles or potent presuppositions, which
make it all the more necessary to identify and explicate them. So we can explicate
a system of basic concepts governing historiography as a whole, structuring
its way of transforming the experience of the past into a history with sense and
meaning for the present. Such a system uncovers the semantics of history and
creates the grounds for comparison.
These basic categories may appear as ideas of a divine order of time, as a
divided or dual world in which the everyday occurrences of the human world
are less important than or inferior to the imagined world of a higher temporal
order devoted to divine beings or higher principles of civilization or progress.
Examples of these ideas in the Chinese and in the European tradition of histori-
ography may be the following: first of all, the concepts of "record keeping"
(chi) and of "warming up the old [precedents] to know the new" (wen ku erh
chih hsin), of memory, sense, and history, to be completed by basic notions
like tradition, continuity, discontinuity, development, process, revolution, res-
toration (chung-hsing), evolution, transformation through virtue (hua), prog-
ress, decay, and so on. Then we should take into account different "philosophies
of history" embedded in a moral world order, sacred history, divine providence,
the philosophy of history since the Enlightenment, and the concept of modern-
ization. For comparative purposes it is necessary to find corresponding basic
concepts in all other historiographies.
18. Cf. Mencius III B, 8.
14 JORN RUSEN
Today these sense criteria are mainly seen as fictional, as inventions. But
one cannot deny the reality of the experience which molds the mental construct
called "history" as well as the images, symbols, and concepts used to interpret
it. Very often these interpretive elements are a part of the experience itself, so
it is misleading to characterize them as substantially fictional.
In the realm of the various cultural practices of historical narration and of
different manifestations of the mental construct called history, "historiography"
can be distinguished as a species of cultural practice and mental structure. It
is an elaborated presentation of the past bound into the medium of writing
with its possibilities and limits. It presupposes the social experience of a histori-
ographer characterized by a certain degree of specialization and even profession-
alization and his or her function in a social and political order. For the purpose
of comparison the following questions are important: What social rank do
historiographers have? Whom do they depend on? What is their functional
position in a system of political power? What role does their work play in
legitimating or delegitimating political power? What role does gender play in
determining who is competent to be a historiographer? What other groups or
persons are concerned with recalling the past? Against whom do the historiogra-
phers have to defend their position? Who legitimates their profession?
Historiography is a specific way manifesting historical consciousness. Gener-
ally it presents the past in the form of a chronological order of events which
are presented as "factual," that is, with a special quality of experience. For
comparative purposes it is important to know how this relationship to the
so-called facts of the past is organized and presented.
Another characteristic of historiography is its linguistic form. Is it presented
in verse or in prose? What do these two main modes of writing indicate? Is
this distinction the same across cultural boundaries? In Western culture, prose
indicates a certain rationality, a discursive molding of the experience of the
past on the basis of an integrating idea of sense and empirical evidence.
The comparative approach to historiography depends on the distinction
which defines the units to be compared with each other. What does it mean
to compare "Chinese" historiography with "Western" historiography? Before
going into detail it is necessary to establish the existence of these units of histori-
ography and the modes of their conceptualization. Are they simply projections
from present-day distinctions or is there anything corresponding to the supposed
unit in the conceptual framework of the historiographical work itself? For
China this question might have a simple answer, since at least paradigmatic
works of Chinese historiography are related to "China" as a cultural unit in
the minds of the historiographers and their audience. But what about Europe?
Is the horizon of self-understanding or the elaboration of historical identity
always "European" in the historiographical works of the West? Without estab-
lishing and explicating the internal horizon of the historical space which gives
the past its specific perspective, comparative interpretation might simply be a
misrepresentation or a naive projection of the interpreter upon the material.
V. PERSPECTIVES OF SYNCHRONIC COMPARISONS
Synchronic comparison should be done with respect to (a) types of cultural

practice regarding historical narration, (b) types of historical sense or meaning,
(c) conditions for historical consciousness, (d) the internal strategies and opera-
tions of historical consciousness, (e) topoi of historical sense, (f) forms of
representation, media, and species of historiography, and (g) the various func-
tions of historical orientation.
(a) Concerning the types of cultural practice of historically recalling the past,
historiography has to be placed on a scale of different modes in order to find
out its context and relationship to other modes of dealing with the past. What is
historiography's relationship to rituals, ceremonies, festivities, public holidays,
religious performances such as pilgrimages and other performances of collective
memory? What is its relationship to popular culture; can it be an integral part of
popular culture? Another question puts historiography into a social perspective:
How is history writing placed in a social hierarchy? Does it look at human
affairs from the top of the hierarchy or from below?
Gender is a very important aspect of the social history of historiography. It
is important to distinguish between male and female voices in the representation
of the past and systematically to take into account the male and female realms
of experience presented by historiography. The same is to be done in respect
to the orientation function of historiography: How does it present identity, or
more precisely, how is gender identity related to history?
(b) In respect to the types of historical sense one should use a comprehensive
typology which provides a clear and distinct conceptual framework for the
interpretation of historiography. With respect to historiography in its elabo-
rated written form there are at least four typologies of historiography worked
out in the Western metahistorical discourse of the last centuries:
1. Droysen distinguishes in his "Topik" the investigative, narrative (in a more
narrow meaning), didactic, and disputative presentation of the past."9
2. Nietzsche describes three ways of dealing with the past: monumental,
antiquarian, and critical representation.20
3. Hayden White offers the most elaborated typology of historiography.
He bases historical sense on four tropes that shape all narration: metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and he adds three parallel typologies of
historical sense: four modes of emplotment (romantic, tragic, comic, satirical);
four modes of explanation by formal argument (formist, mechanistic, organi-
19. Untersuchende, erzdhlende, didaktische und diskussive Darstellung: Droysen, Johann

Gustav Historik, historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1977), I,
217-283, 445-450. Cf. Jorn Riisen, "Bemerkungen zu Droysens Typologie der Geschichtsschrei-
bung," in J6rn Riisen, Konfigurationen des Historismus: Studien zur deutschen Wissenschaftskultur
(Frankfurt, 1993), 267-275.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben, in Sdmtliche
Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15Einzelbanden (Munich, 1988), Bd. 1, 243-334, esp. 258-270.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses andDisadvantages of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations,
transI. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge, Eng., 1983], 83-100).
16 JORN RUSEN
cistic, contextualist); and four modes of explanation by ideological implication

(anarchist, radical, conservative, liberal).2"
4. My own typology combines functional and structural elements of historical
narration and distinguishes among four different modes of making sense of
history: traditional, exemplary, critical, and genetic modes of historical nar-
rative.22
(c) With respect to the cultural context of historiography one should look
at the culture's religious criteria for sense and meaning, since in most societies -
at least of the premodern type -religion is the main source for a sense of the
relationship between past and present. It is trivial to say that the distinctive
nature of historical thinking in the West is deeply influenced by Christianity,
even at the time of historicism, when historical studies achieved academic form
as a discipline with its own research methodology. Its relationship to religion can
function as a key to decipher the language of sense, meaning, and significance in
historiography.23
In order to understand why specific sense-criteria of history have come into
use, one should first ask what challenges provoke historical consciousness and
which demand a historiographical answer? I have already characterized those
challenges as an impressive rupture disturbing the temporal continuity and
coherence of human life. Examples of this experience of discontinuity are the
French Revolution for historicism, the fall of Rome for Augustine's concept
of sacred history, the new political structure and role of Athens in the late fifth
century for Herodotus,24 the founding of the empire of the Ch'in and Han
dynasties for Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Since not all temporal incoherence can be mastered
by historical narration one should look for those specific temporal experiences
which do yield to historiography. What kinds of problems will be solved by his-
toricization?
(d) With respect to the internal operations and strategies of historical con-
sciousness one should first of all look at the formal characteristics of historiog-
raphy. Is it structured as a narrative? If not, like the classical annals in China,
what does it mean for the underlying criteria of historical sense? If there is no
real historical representation of the past without narrative elements, where will
we find these elements if important texts are structured differently? Additionally
one should therefore look for the existence and role of non-narrative elements
21. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe
(Baltimore, 1973), 1-42.
22. Jorn Risen, "Die vier Typen des historischen Erzahlens," in Rusen, Zeit undSinn: Strategien
historischen Denkens (Frankfurt, 1990), 153-230; cf. Ruisen, Studies in Metahistory (Pretoria,
1993), 3-14.
23. Cf. Jorn Rusen, "Historische Methode und religioser Sinn: Voruiberlegungen zu einer Dia-
lektik der Rationalisierung des historischen Denkens in der Moderne," in Geschichtsdiskurs, Bd.
2: Anfdnge modernen historischen Denkens, ed. Wolfgang Kiittler, Jorn Riisen, and Ernst Schulin
(Frankfurt/Main 1994), 344-377.
24. Meier, Die Entstehung der Historie, 251-306. Meier speaks of a "politically determined
process of an entire rapture, a deep shift of measures" (254).
like images and symbols which, while not narratives themselves, may initiate
them or at least give them meaning.
(e) A list of historical topoi facilitates comparison. These topoi organize the
narrative presentation of the past by ascribing to it a specific significance for
orienting people to present problems. Historical topoi can be defined as forms
of perception and representation within the texture of the historical sense of
the past, which occur as repetitive patterns related to diverse contents.25 The
most famous topos of historical significance is, of course, expressed by the
Ciceronian slogan "historia vitae magistra" and in China by the metaphor
"mirror" (chien).26 Historiography which represents the past according to this
topos teaches general rules of human conduct by examples; it is governed by
the logic of judgment, that is, the generation of rules from cases and the applica-
tion of rules to cases. Mostly these rules are related to politics and are addressed
to the rulers in order to commit them to ethical principles legitimating power
and domination.27 There are, of course, many other topoi. For the purpose
of comparison, they should be specified and systematized into a rhetoric of
historiography. Such a rhetoric doesn't exist yet. So I can only mention some
topoi, drawn systematically from empirical findings in a recent investigation
of the historical consciousness of young people': the past is a place of evasion;
the past is a utopian counter-image of the present; the past should be altered; the
past imposes traditions; the important things of the past endure; the important
things of the past are changing; the past has to be explicitly connected with
the life of the present; the past can teach us something, so history is a matter
of learning.
(f) There are a number of other ways in which one might create parameters
of comparison. I cannot explicate all of them systematically; so I will simply
suggest some in the form of questions: How are events of the past related to
each other? What kind of rationality governs this relationship? On what level
of complexity are different elements of experience and signification synthesized?
How much does historiography reflect upon its own structure and principles?
25. Jorn Rusen et al., "Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbewuf3tsein von Abiturienten im Ruhr-
gebiet," in Geschichtsbewufltsein empirisch, ed. Bodo von Borries, Hans-JiArgen Pandel, and Jorn
Rtisen (Pfaffenweiler, 1991), 286.
26. Cf. Chun-chieh Huang, "Historical Thinking in Classical Confucianism: Historical Argu-
mentation from the Three Dynasties," in Time and Space in Chinese Culture, ed. Chun-chieh
Huang and Erich Ziircher (Leiden, 1995), 76: "Chien originally meant 'mirror,' and mirror is that
by which we examine ourselves, how we look to people, the representative of our 'conscience.'
The character, chien, then turned later to mean 'lesson, norm, pattern,' without totally shedding
the original meaning of normative mirroring."
27. This topos seems to be universal in all advanced civilizations. It is, for example, the basis
for Ibn Khaldfin's (1332-1406) Book of Examples and Collection of Origins as well as for Ssu-ma
Kuang's (1019-1086) Comprehensive Mirror for Aid of Government.
28. Riisen, "Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbewuf3tsein von Abiturienten im Ruhrgebiet," in
Risen, Zeit und Sinn; Jorn Riisen, et al., "Geschichtsbewuf3tsein von Schidlern und Studenten
im internationalen und interkulturellen Vergleich," in Geschichtsbewufltsein im interkulturellen
Vergleich: Zwei empirische Pilotstudien, ed. Bodo von Borries and J6rn Ruisen (Pfaffenweiler,
1994), 79-206.
18 JORN RUSEN
How deep do the analysis and the explanatory strategies of historical representa-
tion go? What role do values and norms play in structuring the past as history?
To what degree is the past historicized? How does historiography deal with
the experience of other cultures, different from the historian's? Are the others
marginalized, used as a focus for projecting one's own desire, or are they given
due recognition? What different species of historiography have been observed
and how have earlier thinkers systematized them? Does this order correspond
to our strategies of systematization?
I have already mentioned the problem of the foundation of historiography
in experience on the one hand and elements of fictionality in its interpretation
of the past on the other. According to this relationship there should be an effort
to find typical constellations between factuality and fictionality in dealing with
the past. This relationship may even indicate a stage of development, since a
clear distinction between factuality and fictionality demands a highly developed
historical culture which has specific procedures for making sense of history by
emphasizing the factuality of the reported past.
(g) Finally the practicalfunction of historiography should be systematically
taken into account, its orientative function for human groups. Its most remark-
able manifestation is the articulation of the historical identity of the people to
whom historiography is addressed. For comparative purposes we need to
present the different points of view concerning identity. The most important
view is related to inclusion, to the norms and values which determine inclusion
in a group. Who is included, who is excluded in the historical narratives? How
is the relationship between them presented? Where is the borderline between
self and other, between togetherness and strangeness?
VI. PERSPECTIVES OF DIACHRONIC COMPARISON
Diachronic comparison is related to change in historiography. Its theoretical

task is to identify universal factors, types of processes, and directions of change.
But before explicating corresponding perspectives of change in historiography,
a general periodization should be reflected upon within which historiography
gets its historical significance in relation to the entire process of change in the
human world. Such a periodization clarifies the dependence of historiography
on its context, which provides its constitutive challenges and its basic sense-
criteria, and within which it fulfills (or abdicates) its orientation-function. One
intensively debated question is whether the main epochs of European history
can be applied to other cultures. If not, the different periodizations should at
least be compared with respect to the criteria which determine the division
of epochs.
Historiography is best served by a general periodization relating to the domi-
nant media of human communication. One might begin by distinguishing three
epochs, defined by the three media: orality, scribality, and "electronality."29
29. Albert D'Haenens (Louvain la Neuve) once in a debate used the slogan "oralit6, scribalit6,
electronalit6" which I pick up here.
In specific cases one has to look at those factors and elements which transform
the way in which we make sense of and represent the past. To give at least one
example of such a force for changing historiography, I would like to suggest
the growth of knowledge about the past. It can provoke new categorizations,
and these new categorizations in turn reshape and restructure historiography
in general. The rise of historicist thought in the late eighteenth century could
not be understood without reference to the explosion of knowledge in Europe.
There was an impressive accumulation of historical knowledge in China, but
it doesn't seem to have brought about a shift in the underlying categories of
historical perception and interpretation.
Another question is related to the presentation of change in historiography.
Is there anything like the experience of progress, based upon a successful group's
self-esteem, with which historiographers can associate?
The most important parameter of diachronic comparison is the direction of
change. Is it possible to discern transcultural tendencies? Today this question
seems too loaded with the ideological burden of Western supremacy. But a
rejection of Western ideology should not shut off inquiry. I think that such a
question is unavoidable, since all countries of the world today are directly or
indirectly involved in the process of modernization, and this modernization
challenges historical identity for all of them. It is extremely important to know
whether there are developmental tendencies in one's own cultural history similar
to those in the West. And for Westerners it is useful to know whether such
tendencies exist in non-Western cultures. If there is a cultural development or
evolution common to all countries, then the modernization process will be more
than only a threat of alienation; it may even be conceptualized as an opportunity
to gain or regain one's own identity in a broader perspective of humankind.
So Max Weber's notion of universal rationalization and disenchantment
might be reformulated for a comparative analysis of historiography. There is
no historiography without rationality, that is, a set of rules which bind the
sense-making process of historical consciousness into strategies of conceptual-
ization, of bringing empirical evidence into the representation of the past, and
of coherent argumentation. This rationality should be reconstructed and investi-
gated as a universally valid development. The same should be done with respect
to the norms and values which constitute historical identity. Do they show a
trend toward universalization, and does historical identity expand accordingly?
I think we can observe such a process of universalization in many cultures:30
it starts from the small social group in archaic times and leads to humankind
in modern history. Along with this universalization a corresponding regionaliza-
30. I have tried to conceptualize such a process in respect to the question of the universality
of human rights and general issues of humankind, selfness, and otherness in JoMn Rosen, "Die
Individualisierung des Allgemeinen" and JoMn Risen, "Human Rights from the Perspective of a
Universal History," in Human Rights and Cultural Diversity: Europe-Arabic-Islamic World-
Africa-China, ed. Wolfgang Schmale (Frankfurt, 1993), 28-46; Jorn Rusen, "Vom Umgang
mit den Anderen: Zum Stand der Menschenrechte heute," Internationale Schulbuchforschung 15
(1993), 167-178.
20 JORN RUSEN
tion very often takes place. Additionally one should look for a process of
particularization and individualization; it may be a reaction to universalization
or a consequence of it.
Another direction of development can be conceptualized in respect to the
treatment of "facts" in relation to the presupposed order of time. Is historiog-
raphy governed by a tendency toward the increasing integration of positive
facts and principles of temporal order? In archaic societies mundane "facts"
are not important for the narrative presentation of the divine order of the world.
Myths as narratives which organize the cosmos are remote from chronologically
fixed dates given and proved by empirical evidence. But the mythical order has
vanished or has been mixed up with the temporal chain of positive, that is,
"factual" events and structures.
Following this line of argument, I dare to outline a periodization for the
media of cultural communication and their transformation which might at least
function as a heuristic for a comprehensive history of historical thinking. It
hypothesizes a post-historic period in the form of an ideal type, composed of
the most challenging elements of postmodern historical thinking:
Pre-historic Sharp distinction between paradigmatic cosmic time ("archaic" time of myth)
and mundane time; the latter is meaningless for the order of the world and
self. Contingency is radically eliminated. Dominance of the traditional type
of historical narration. Medium of oral tradition.
Historic Intermediation of both Traditional The entire order of time has a divine
"times." Contingent character. Religion is the main
facts (events) are laden source for sense of temporal change.
with meaning Dominance of the exemplary type
concerning the of historical narration.
temporal world order.
Contingency is Modern Minimization of transcendent dimen-
recognized as relevant sion of time-order. The entire sense
for this order and of history tends to become this-
bound into a concept worldly. Human rationality is able
of time which orients to recognize it by methodically
practical activity and investigating the empirical evidence
forms human identity. of the past. Dominance of the genetic
Medium of writing. type of historical narration.
Post-historic No comprehensive order of time including past, present, and future. The past
is separated into a time for itself. Facts of the past become elements of
arbitrary constellations which have no substantial relationship to present and
future. The human past becomes de-temporalized. Contingency loses its
conceptualization by ideas of temporal order valid for present-day life and
its future. Medium of electronics.
Universal periodization of historical thinking'
31. I have put three of the four types of historical sense-making into a clear periodical order.
This is misleading, since they play a much more complex role in all periods. But nevertheless they
can be used to characterize an epoch-related type of historical thinking.
Modernization is, of course, one of the most important perspectives of dia-

chronic comparison. It should be concretized as an internal process of rational-
ization in dealing with the past. Historical studies as an academic discipline
indicates forms and stages of this rationalization. But rationalization is only
one side of the coin of modernization. There is always a reaction against it, a
re-enchantment in the relationship to the past which at least compensates for
the loss of sense and meaning brought about by rational methodologies. So
the comparative approach to historiography should always keep in mind both
rational disenchantment and a compensatory irrational re-enchantment or new,
reformulated ("reformed") sources and potentials of the sense and meaning of
the temporal dimension of human life.
VII. NEW QUESTIONS
The twentieth century has challenged historiography's basic criteria of sense

and meaning. I have in mind the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and
similar occurrences of mass-murder and other radical violations of our sense
of things in the course of human history.32 Such experiences cause traumatic
reactions and very often suppression of important elements of collective
memory into the unconscious. In historiography this unconscious must be ex-
posed as a silence about the past, which, nevertheless, influences the present.
In order to make exposure plausible one has to identify indications of this
suppression in the articulated representations of the past. Thus, historiography
has the additional burden of systematically taking into account intended or
unintended procedures of a negative mode of making sense of history. This
negative sense or the sense of senselessness can be demonstrated as "limits of
representation" for which discussions of the Holocaust are already para-
digmatic.33 It may be fruitful to look for such limits even in ordinary historiog-
raphy, thus bringing to our awareness a dimension of historical consciousness
in which historiography speaks the language of silence.34
In my introductory remarks I pointed to the fact that every work in historiog-
raphy involving comparison is also involved in the process of identity-forming
and is guided by practical interests. This is no less true for my proposed strategy
for comparative historiography. There is a negative and a positive side to this
strategy. On the negative side, it should prevent stereotypes of cultural pecu-
liarity from becoming presuppositions and guidelines for the study of historiog-
raphy, thus avoiding the widespread dichotomy between self and other and the
related strategy of exclusion in identity-forming. On the positive side, it should
32. To give a Chinese example, the Taiping Rebellion cost 20 million victims.
33. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution, "ed. Saul Friedlander
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
34. Concerning the fall of Nanking (1867), an already established literary pattern of suppressed
memory was applied which articulated a weariness of looking back: "And I fear to look back, to
read too carefully Yii Hsin's fu" (Stephen Owen, "Place: Meditation on the Past at Chin-ling,"
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 [1990], 417-457.)
22 JORN RUSEN
enable scholars to present the historiographical traditions of different cultures,

peoples, and societies in a mental movement between sameness and difference.
Those whose identity is at stake should become aware that otherness is a mirror
for their self-awareness. Then their communication can serve the worthy goal
of mutual recognition and acknowledgment.
University of Bielefeld
Germany

Some Theoretical Approaches To Intercultural Comparative Historiography Jorn Rusen

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Some Theoretical Approaches To Intercultural Comparative Historiography Jorn Rusen

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Some Theoretical Approaches to Intercultural Comparative Historiography

Intercultural comparative historiography raises fundamental methodological problems:

Most works on historiography are done within the framework of a national

2. A recent example is Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Funda-

11. WHICH THEORY?

and elementary procedure of making sense of the past in respect to cultural

III. SOME REMARKS CONCERNING THE METHOD OF COMPARISON

Such a theory of cultural differences has a dangerous tendency to essentialize

IV. WHAT SHOULD BE COMPARED?

Historiography issues from historical consciousness, which cannot be under-

15. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

This "historical sense" is an image, a vision, a concept, or an idea of time which

18. Cf. Mencius III B, 8.

V. PERSPECTIVES OF SYNCHRONIC COMPARISONS

Synchronic comparison should be done with respect to (a) types of cultural

19. Untersuchende, erzdhlende, didaktische und diskussive Darstellung: Droysen, Johann

cistic, contextualist); and four modes of explanation by ideological implication

VI. PERSPECTIVES OF DIACHRONIC COMPARISON

Diachronic comparison is related to change in historiography. Its theoretical

Universal periodization of historical thinking'

Modernization is, of course, one of the most important perspectives of dia-

VII. NEW QUESTIONS

The twentieth century has challenged historiography's basic criteria of sense

enable scholars to present the historiographical traditions of different cultures,

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