Objectivity and the writing of history

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ (The Logic of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 98). There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge.     

Objectivity and the writing of history

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ (The Logic of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 98). There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge.     

Seeing Farmers' Markets: Theoretical and Media Perspectives on New Sites of Exchange in New Zealand

In this paper we explore the extent to which a reciprocal relationship exists between contemporary theorisation about farmers' markets in geography and the rapidly expanding public discourse surrounding these sites of exchange in New Zealand. Activities branded as farmers' markets are seen widely as local phenomena of systemic significance for the understanding of evolving geographies of production, consumption and exchange. As something ‘new’ on the landscape, farmers' markets also attract attention in the media. An electronic database of significant print media contributions over the period 1995 to 2007 provides the empirical basis for an assessment of the extent to which theorisation and the public discourse address common themes. Our analysis indicates that, while the economic and social constructions in both the research literature and the media database share common themes, strong contrasts in ways of ‘seeing’ farmers' markets are apparent. We note the predilection in the print media to present the nature and purpose of farmers' markets through the personal experiences and ‘stories’ of participants. There is a tendency to focus on the appeal of markets to the consumers who form the readership base. The theorised alterity of the farmers' market, either in terms of production methods or motivations for consumption, is not reflected strongly in media reports, and this raises questions about ‘over-theorisation’ in the academic literature. Our aim is to promote reflection in both the editorial offices of the media and in the academy by documenting the nature of these contrasting views.     

Decentring international and institutional famine relief in late nineteenth-century China: in search of the local

This article uses rural gazetteer biographies to examine village and household-level famine relief during the great North China Famine of 1876–9 to deepen our understanding of past relief methods and dynamics at the most local level. Despite the appearance of major works recently on famine in modern China, particularly on the Great Leap Forward, knowledge of Chinese famine relief remains thin and scattered considering the enormity of the subject. Nineteenth-century China saw intensifying international relief activity as well as the emergence of a vibrant charity-relief sector based in China's major cities, leading to the rise of prominent relief institutions in the twentieth century, such as the Chinese Red Cross. But the increasingly intense disasters of China's modern period also saw a surprising persistence of local humanitarian traditions still barely covered by historians.     

WHAT'S WRONG WITH ECONOMIC HISTORY?

In this polemical book, Francesco Boldizzoni argues that economic history is so moribund as to require resurrection. He maintains that economic history has been converted into a subfield of economics and has embraced the antihistorical and a priori intellectual style of mainstream economics departments: it has, in effect, ceased to be a form of history. Boldizzoni hopes to force a recognition of contemporary economic history's bankruptcy and to show the way toward a revitalization. He criticizes both economic history as retrospective econometrics, as in the work of Robert Fogel, and economic history as a branch of the new institutional economics, as in the work of Douglas North. Boldizzoni suggests that economic history should return to the sort of research and models that prevailed earlier in its own history—models based on induction from observed economic life rather than on deduction from the theories of contemporary microeconomics. He particularly singles out the work of Witold Kula, Moses Finley, and the Annales historians for emulation, but also praises the perspectives of economic sociology and economic anthropology. Boldizzoni's call for a return to a more inductive form of economic history is welcome, and his discussions of his heroes should remind us that economic history was once a vibrant and creative part of the history profession. But the book's advice is more useful for historians working on premodern than on modern economic life. The claim that self‐governing markets and interest‐maximizing individual actors are pure figments of economists' imaginations seems far less certain for recent than for premodern times. And his insistence that each society has its own distinct form of economic life that must be discovered inductively leaves unconceptualized the world‐spanning forces of capitalist development that increasingly shape societies everywhere. Boldizzoni's critique and his positive suggestions are certainly valuable, but he by no means supplies a sufficient recipe for economic history's resurrection as a vibrant field.     

HISTORY WRITING WITHOUT CLOSURE

In The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, Kalle Pihlainen pays tribute to Hayden White's work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. The book's seven chapters are based on previously published and reworked essays, starting with Pihlainen's 2013 essay on narrative truth and ending with his 2006 essay on the confines of the form. The Work of History is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as Pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical constructivism (xiii). At the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as White states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains White's work and its reception, including the debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. Although narrative constructivism seems a bit passé, Pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach to disentangle and explain some fundamental misconceptions about it that still exist among historians. One misconception is that constructivism inherently neglects the ethical impulse and supposedly lacks the potential for political engagement. Pihlainen urges historians and theorists to find ways of becoming politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same.     

Darwin to Einstein: Primary sources on science and belief

R.G. Collingwood defined historical knowledge as essentially ‘scientific’, and saw the historian's task as the ‘re-enactment of past thoughts’. The author argues the need to go beyond Collingwood, first by demonstrating the authenticity of available evidence, and secondly, using Namier as an example, by considering methodology as well as epistemology, and the need to relate past thoughts to their present context. The ‘law of the consumption of time’ encourages historians to focus on landmark events, theories and generalisations, thus breaking from Collingwood's emphasis on fidelity to past ideas and interpreting the past from the concepts of the present. This conflict can only be reconciled by the study of historiography.     

ANIMAL HISTORY

This review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research prospects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal. These include such topics as the problem of “the animal's point of view,” animal agency (animals understood as “historical” agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces of animal actions in “anthropocentric” archives and searching for new historical sources (including animals’ testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians) who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge: can we achieve “interspecies competence” (Erica Fudge's term) for creating a multispecies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals’ perception of change help us to develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based on multispecies co‐authorship?     

Historians and Their Duties

We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non‐natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of “accountability”. Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. This is not a duty shared with everybody, for the right to truth varies with the audience. Being a historian is essentially a matter of searching for historical knowledge as part of an obligation voluntarily undertaken to give truth to those who have a right to it. On a democratic understanding, people need and are entitled to an objective understanding of the historical processes in which they live. Factual knowledge and judgments of value are both required, whatever philosophical view we might have of the possibility of a principled distinction between them. Historians owe historical truth not only to the living but to the dead. Historians should judge when that is called for, but they should not distort historical facts. The rejection of postmodernism's moralism does not free historians from moral duties. Historians and moral philosophers alike are able to make dispassionate moral judgments, but those who feel untrained should be educated in moral understanding. We must ensure the moral and social responsibility of historical knowledge. As philosophers of history, we need a rational reconstruction of moral judgments in history to help with this.     

Writing Witness History: The Historiography of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania

From their humble origins as small, loose‐knit groups of Bible students in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, Charles Taze Russell and his followers laid the foundations of a highly visible, and frequently controversial, worldwide religious organisation known since 1931 as the Jehovah's Witnesses. Despite the Witnesses' broad historical role in defining and shaping understandings of religious tolerance, freedom of conscience, and civil liberties around the world, historians have paid very little attention to the Witnesses, with the notable exception of their treatment in Nazi Germany and the United States and Canada in wartime. The paucity of historical knowledge is all the more surprising given their visibility and notoriety. This article aims to initiate discussion of this under‐researched history by addressing what has been written, by whom, and for what purpose. It represents the first effort to evaluate the English‐language historical literature on the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.     

Silences Broken,Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African-American History

In 1989, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham observed that African Americanists paid scant attention to issues of gender and women's historians typically ignored questions of race; she warned that this silence compromised the very analysis of US history. Much has changed since Higginbotham issued her cautionary words. Not only has Americanist literature on gender and race grown exponentially over the past ten years, African-Americanist gender historians have produced some of the most influential monographs and articles in their field. This article surveys a decade's worth of conceptual breakthroughs in African-Americanist historiography as it ponders the question of whether certain silences still remain.     

Livres, Pouvoir et Théorie

This article tries to understand what kind of theories is produced in books and only in books, without any institutional or scientific guarantee. Two cases are successively studied: a method for accountants and a treatise on nobility. Both contain theoretical proposals, although neither accounting nor knowledge of genealogies or aristocratic habits was considered more than mere practical competence at the time (the end of the xvii ^th century in France). The aim of this inquiry is to suggest that identifying material and social conditions of some evolution of thought (context of composition of an important book, circulation of printed materials or of information, literary market, relationships of the authors with powerful patrons) does not differ that much from a « Zeitgeist » analysis, as long as a book is viewed as a result or a product and its own action is not taken into account. This action consists here in an elevation of accounting and genealogical techniques to theory or even to quasi-political philosophy. Both case-studies then try to show that the adaptation of a book to political action is not an available explanation for historians; rather, it is nothing other than the fact of an interpretation of theoretical needs aroused by this action.     

Improving the use of history by the international humanitarian sector

Abstract

This article challenges the often implicit assumption by historians working on humanitarian history that their work is being read and used by present-day humanitarian workers. Key characteristics of the modern-day humanitarian sector are highlighted, including the unpredictable and often inadequate levels of funding, stressful working conditions and high staff turnover. The article argues that, to a significant degree, the humanitarian sector is ahistorical and locked into a state of ‘perpetual present’. Two principal obstacles to the greater use of historical knowledge within the present-day humanitarian sector are identified as being the limited accessibility of the available literature on humanitarian history and the perceptions that the work of humanitarian historians is of limited relevance. The paper concludes by describing recent initiatives including the planned humanitarianhistory.org website which is intended to improve the accessibility of the available literature and facilitate engagement and co-production between historians and humanitarian workers.     

The Interregional Location of Foreign Investors in Turkey

There are several dynamic factors that contribute to the reinforcement of the commercial relationships of Turkey. That is to say not only the strategic regional importance of Turkey, placed on the axis extending from the Far East to the Mediterranean side, Middle East and Europe, but also the new opportunities arising from the continuously developing relationships with the Balkan countries and the newly-established Turkish Republics, since the beginning of the 1990s, have been strengthening Turkey's commercial contacts. Istanbul has the communication networks and infrastructure required to develop into a regional centre. The major investments made in the communication sector during the 1980s have acted to develop the telecommunications infrastructure, thus supporting Istanbul's development into a regional communications centre. Today Istanbul has one of the world's most developed telecommunications infrastructures and this has given the city advantages in terms of expanding into international markets.     

Eine handgreifliche Geschichtslüge. Wie Martin Luther zum Gegner des copernicanischen Weltsystems gemacht wurde.

Martin Luther has been severely criticized for an offhand remark about Copernicus. In the most frequently cited version of this statement, Luther is alledged to have branded Copernicus as a fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down. This disparaging judgment on Luther prevails in many publications by respected historians of science of the 20th century, although since the early thirties, it has been convincingly demonstrated that the famous citation from Luther's table talk is next to worthless as an historical source, that Luther never referred to Copernicus or to the heliocentric world system in all of his voluminous writings, and that there is no indication that Luther ever suppressed the Copernican viewpoint. His attitude towards Copernicus was indifference or ignorance, but not hostility. In this paper, it is shown that the story of Luther's anti‐Copernicanism emerged in the second half of the 19th century. It was invented by Franz Beckmann and Franz Hipler, two Prussian Catholic historians who were engaged in the conflict between the German government under Bismarck and the Catholic Church (Kulturkampf), and it was disseminated by influential German and American historians like Leopold Prowe, Ernst Zinner, and Andrew D. White. In the second half of the 20th century, many historians of science relied on the authority of these authors, rather than studying the sources or the secondary literature in which it has been proved that Luther's anti‐Copernicanism is an outright falsification of history.     

The London Broadcasting Company (LBC) and Independent Radio News (IRN) Archive

UK commercial radio was formally launched in October 1973 whenLBC went on air. Its sister station, IRN, began providing anews service at the same time for the growing number of ‘IndependentLocal Radio’ stations. During the period 1973–1996these two organisations assembled an archive of over 7,000 reel-to-reeltapes which now represent the largest commercial radio archivein Britain. For historians of the media, and of the twentiethcentury more generally, the collection is a rich and variedsource of social, cultural and political evidence. Media historians,including historians of journalism, can hear examples of a morepopulist and innovative style of reporting (or ‘reportage’)than was to be heard on the BBC. For the first time the phone-inwas an integral part of the schedule and a more opinionatedstyle of presentation was pioneered by Brian Hayes and others.The archive, soon to be digitised and made available online,contains a radio history of the period which started slightlybefore Margaret Thatcher's election as Leader of the ConservativeParty and finished a few years after the end of premiership.New clips, current affairs series like Decision Makers, parliamentarydebates (made by the LBC parliamentary unit) and phone-ins allcovered the major news stories of the time. There are, to takea notable example, 62 tapes on the Falklands War including 778individual news items. The archive is an important and hithertolargely neglected source for future historians of the period.     

La ragion di Stato in biblioteca

The Fondazione Luigi Firpo, based in Turin, houses the library collected by Luigi Firpo (1915–1989), one of the most distinguished European historians of early modern political thought. The collection includes around 6 000 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century books, among which one can find almost all European literature on the reason of State. The Foundation organizes international conferences, grants scholarships and publishes the research of young scholars. Therefore it has established itself as one of the leading research centres on political thought and on early modern and modern history.     

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYZING ATTITUDES TOWARDS ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOUR

Encouraging environmental action by citizens in developed nations has become a major priority for governments who are seeking to reach environmental targets by exhorting individuals to participate in a range of behaviours to ameliorate the negative impact of their lifestyles. Such activities conventionally include energy saving, water conservation, waste management and forms of ‘green’ consumption. Current policy discourses are focused around a linear model of behaviour, which assumes that an awareness of environmental problems and knowledge of how to tackle them will lead to individual ameliorative actions. This paper explores these assumptions by applying a previously developed conceptual framework (Barr et al. 2001) to a range of environmental actions, to show how a variety of different factors influence environmental action. Using data from a major (UK) Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research project in Devon, United Kingdom, data on environmental actions collected during the project are interrogated to uncover the relationships between environmental actions and how these are influenced by values, personal situations and attitudes. The research demonstrates that environmental action is structured around people's everyday lifestyles (rather than a compartmentalized notion of behaviour) and that these have radically different antecedents.     

THE CONTINUING MODESTY OF HISTORY

The critique of conventional historical writing has been emergent for a century—it is not the work of a few—and it has immense practical implications for Western society, perhaps especially in English‐speaking countries. Involved are such issues as the decline of representation, the nature of causality, the definitions of identity or time or system, to name only a few. Conventional historians are quite right to consider this a challenge to everything they assume in order to do their work. The challenge is, why do that particular work at all? Understandably, historians have consolidated, especially in North America where empiricism and the English language prevail. But even there, and certainly elsewhere, and given the changes in knowledge and social order during the past century at least, the critique of conventional historical method is unavoidable. Too bad historians aren't doing more to help this effort, and by historians I don't mean the most of us who think constantly in terms of historical causality as we learned it from the nineteenth century and our teachers; by “historians” I mean the experts who continue to teach the young. A major roadblock to creative discussion is the fact that problems such as those just mentioned all exceed disciplinary boundaries, so investigation that does not follow suit cannot grasp the problem, much less respond to it creatively. Of course everyone is “for” interdisciplinary work, but most professional organizations, publications, and institutions do not encourage it, despite lip service to the contrary. Interdisciplinary work involves more than the splicing activity that is all too familiar in academic curricula. Crossing out of one's realm of “expertise” requires a kind of humility that does not always sort well with the kind of expertise fostered by professional organizations, publications, and institutions. And even the willing have trouble with the heady atmosphere outside the professional bubble. In such conditions key terms (“language,”“discourse,”“relativism,”“modernity,”“postmodernity,”“time,”“difference”) are pushed here and pushed there without gaining the focus that would lead to currency until finally the ostensible field of play resembles a gigantic traffic jam like the one that opens the film Fellini Roma. Discussion of these issues leads in the end to Borges and his story, ‘The Modesty of History,” from which the title of this essay is borrowed.     

Sovereign wealth funds: dangers and opportunities

Soaring oil prices since the early 2000s have led to a historic transformation of wealth from consuming regions to major oil exporters. In recent years many of these exporters have set up oil funds to utilize their massive and growing oil revenues. These funds are divided into two categories—stabilizing and saving. Their large investments in western markets have raised concerns that they might be driven by political and strategic interests rather than commercial ones. This article examines oil funds in the Persian Gulf, Norway and Russia. It discusses US and European proposals to regulate oil funds' investments. The article examines the International Monetary Fund's efforts to forge a consensus on a ‘code of conduct’ that would guide the relationship between oil funds and the recipient markets. The analysis argues against excessive regulation.