T.H. Green and the Dissidence of Dissent: On Religion and National Character in Nineteenth‐Century England

Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) has been widely recognized for his contributions to Liberal political‐social theory and for his Liberal partisanship. Historians and political theorists continue to emphasize his advocacy of limited state interference and democratic localism, as well as his anti‐imperialist statements. Recent scholars of English nationalism, national identity and patriotism, including Peter Mandler, Julia Stapleton, Krishan Kumar, H.S. Jones, Roberto Romani and Georgios Varouxakis, acknowledge Green as an acolyte of Giuseppe Mazzini, a Cobdenite and a Little Englander. While they place Green's ideas within a continuum of Victorian Liberal nationalist ideas (blending into Conservatism and socialism during the 20th century), their investigations foster the view that Green placed little value in the nation as a focus of individual and collective identification. In their readings of Green, the abstract ‘community’, free of national peculiarities, was to him the antidote to both individual and national narrowness. However, examination of Green's statements about community, the moral ideal and religion reveals that his theorising was informed by a view of national character different from that of most contemporary liberal intellectuals. Green rejected the ‘Liberal anglican’ view that a national church or clerisy was necessary to guide the development of the English nation. He identified ideas and practices of protestant dissenters as progressive forces in English history and endorsed them as means of national development. Religious pluralism and forms of ecclesiastical organisation promoting democratic localism were to Green among the essential characteristics of Englishness.     

DIAGNOSING FROUDE'S DISEASE: BOUNDARY WORK AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY IN LATE‐VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Historians looking to make history a professional discipline of study in Victorian Britain believed they had to establish firm boundaries demarcating history from other literary disciplines. James Anthony Froude ignored such boundaries. The popularity of his historical narratives was a constant reminder of the continued existence of a supposedly overturned phase of historiography in which the historian was also a man of letters, transcending the boundary separating fact from fiction and literature from history. Just as professionalizing historians were constructing a methodology that called on historians to be inductive empirical workers, Froude refused to accept the new science of history, and suggested instead that history was an individual enterprise, one more concerned with drama and art than with science. E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they “cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow‐worker in the cause of historic truth.” This article examines the boundary work of a professionalizing history by considering the attempt to exclude Froude from the historian's discourse, an attempt that involved a communal campaign that sought to represent Froude as “constitutionally inaccurate.” Froude suffered from “an inborn and incurable twist,” argued Freeman, thereby diagnosing “Froude's disease” as the inability to “make an accurate statement about any matter.” By unpacking the construction of “Froude's disease,” the article exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non‐scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude.     

Imagining Britain: reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles

ABSTRACT

The idea that in the Tudor era the English people became proudly conscious of their national language and history, has been challenged by critical interventions that suggest how England as a nation had to be “written”: the act of writing can construct imagined boundaries, both to appropriate and exclude. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, Drayton replaces Ovid’s mythological figures in the Heroides with specific well-known English historical personas who provide, through their letters, different perspectives on English history. I will contend that Drayton’s assertion of national identity and patriotism is done verbally and semantically, while his allegiance to oppositionist politics is rendered generically and subversively by a remarkable manipulation of the genre of historical poetry in the Heroicall Epistles: this in turn reflects his deep engagement with ideas of history and the construction of national consciousness in early modern England.     

A.F. Pollard*

A.F. Pollard is now better remembered for founding the Institute of Historical Research than he is for his scholarship. In his heyday, however, Pollard was a formidable and prolific historian, primarily of parliament and the Tudor period. Pollard has been characterised both as a modernist and as a whig historian. Rejecting romantic invocations of liberty, he extolled instead the sovereign nation state, pinpointing the 16th century as the moment when it was achieved. Pollard rejected anachronistic accounts of parliament's development: for him, the assembly had grown by accident (out of the medieval king's council), rather than by design. This adaptability had ensured parliament's longevity and would preserve it into the future. Pollard revered the English parliament all the more for its embodiment of this national good fortune. Pollard helped to professionalise the discipline of history, but his own writings could be found wanting when measured against the standards that he had advocated. Criticism of his approach and assumptions comes easily now. Yet, upon reacquaintance, historians of parliament may find enduring interest in Pollard's shrewd and extensive work.     

Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck's Theory of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott

In recent years students of politics have begun to recognise Reinhart Koselleck's practice of Begriffsgeschichte, the study of conceptual history, as a useful approach for investigating key concepts in political ideologies and the history of ideas. But his theory of historical time—the temporal dimension to his semantic project and his broader theorising of the historical discipline—is often overlooked and underused as a heuristic device. By placing the thinking of Michael Oakeshott alongside Koselleck's theory of historical time, this article brings his thinking on temporality to the forefront, fashioning a conversation between the two thinkers about the place for history and the formal criteria necessary for ordering the past properly. In doing so, it juxtaposes Koselleck's reflections on historicity and his theory of historical time with Oakeshott's philosophical enquiry on the historical mode of understanding. It identifies important convergences and divergences between the two thinkers' theories, focusing in particular on questions regarding the potential for representing the past as multilayered and plural historical times. The article then suggests that their respective thoughts on the theory of history are in part a reaction to the modern politicisation of historical time and comprise a shared critique of radical political change.     

论霍布斯鲍姆的史学思想

霍布斯鲍姆是英国马克思主义历史学家,同时也是国际历史学界新社会史学派的代表人物。霍布斯鲍姆在马克思主义历史观指导下,改造西方历史学界的社会史观,重视下层社会的研究,形成颇具特色的新社会史观,使马克思主义史学在西方学术界尤其是历史学界得到发展和创新。作为以马克思主义为指导来研究历史的学者,霍布斯鲍姆在继承传统历史学理论的基础上,研究现实历史发展的进程,对历史、历史学家、19—20世纪历史学发展、历史研究的预测、历史研究的技术等问题发表了新见解,为历史学的发展提供了新的思想资源,奠定了他在20世纪国际历史学界的地位。     

Eavesdropper on the Past: John W. Burrow (1935–2009), Intellectual History and Its Future

Summary

Focused on the much-debated historiographical and academic status of intellectual history, this article addresses for the first time and in detail the methodological views of the British historian John Wyon Burrow (1935–2009). Making use both of his published works and of unpublished material left to the University of Sussex Library (including lectures, letters, academic projects and biographical sketches), its goal is to provide a thorough account of an original and eclectic intellectual historian and, at the same time, cast new light on the role of the discipline in the scholarly context of the last few decades in Europe and the US. More specifically, the following pages will illustrate Burrow's work and career, with particular attention being paid to his insistence on narrative, imagination, irony and style; present his writings as an original instance of the anti-methodological practice of intellectual history; and study his opinions of what it means to carry out the métier d'historien. Finally, by examining Burrow's idea of the intellectual historian as a creative ‘eavesdropper’ on the ‘conversations of the past’ and as a ‘translator’ of past dialogues, this article will both pose some central questions and advance some proposals concerning the future of intellectual history.     

Constructing a national identity from a created literary past: Giosuè Carducci and the development of a national literature

Giosuè Carducci's conception of Italian literature differed from those of Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. He argued that Italian literature, together with a concomitant cultural identity and political mission, developed along a continuous, progressive and evolutionary path. This study analyzes Carducci's creation of an Italian cultural and political identity through literary history and his construction of a plausible model for its historical development by incorporating literary,scientific and political theories. Carducci gave Italians a past of which they could be proud, proof of Italy's leading role in Europe's civilizing mission, and a strategy to accomplish it. Carducci's conception of italianitÀ, defined in terms of a historic mission of grandezza , was one of several brands of Italian nationalism. His linking of literary history to aspirations of national unity and aggrandizement implied that the mantle of the Risorgimento now belonged to the educated elite. This linkage of literature and national identity to aspirations of cultural and political hegemony explains why Carducci was so popular with the Nationalist Party whose leaders invoked his literary history to legitimize their political program and to discredit their political opponents prior to World War I and under Fascism.     

新旧之间:陈黻宸史学成就探析

作为20世纪初期的新派史家,陈黻宸在史著中已尝试着用进化史观来剖析历史,并能够从历史事实本身去寻找历史发展的原因。他在如何撰写民史方面也做出了有益的尝试,同时又对如何建设新史学提出了一系列独到的看法。     

‘Set in the silver sea’: English national identity and European integration

ABSTRACT. Although many short‐term reasons for a specifically English Euro‐scepticism have been proposed, a long‐term perspective is required to provide a fuller and more rounded treatment of this important and topical political issue. It needs to be grasped in terms of cultural, political and religious factors in English history, specifically, the antiquity and political character of a sense of English national identity, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the nature and impact of Protestant covenantalism. Among the factors that have shaped a sense of English national identity are its insular, geopolitical situation, the early development of a centralised English state, and the concomitant growth of a unified English legal system. To the existing sense of national identity under the Tudors was added a strong current of religious separatism, manifested first through Henry VIII's break with Rome and his vindication of monarchical supremacy in a national church, and second through the Puritan return to the idea of election modelled on the Old Testament narrative of the Exodus and Covenant of the Israelites. These currents have lent to the sense of English national identity a strong oppositional character, in contrast to the transterritorialism of Christendom characteristic of the leading Roman Catholic powers. This can be seen both by comparing English with French historical trajectories, and more recently, in terms of the separate, but allied, position of England in relation to European integration.     

Identity formation through national calendar: holidays and commemorations in Pakistan

This article contributes to academic literature on the project of identity formation in a postcolonial nation‐state. The article argues that a nation‐state emphasising certain aspects of the past for commemorative or celebratory purposes, while suppressing or ignoring the memories of some other event or historical figure, are both parts of the same process. Both these processes, in different ways, seek to give a certain direction to the narrative about the history of the nation and the nation‐state. These aspects of national memory and amnesia have been explained through the prism of national/public holidays while foregrounding the case study of Pakistan. The article argues that although this process of shaping a specific narrative (referred to as commemorative narrative in this article by using Yael Zerubavel's work) is common to every project of identity formation, its peculiarity is more pronounced in a postcolonial state like Pakistan, which has certain cut‐off dates and ruptures but is, simultaneously, eager to emphasise continuities in its trajectory and antiquity in historical tradition. The study of the process of developing a national calendar in case of Pakistan will show that identity formation is a transient process in which various identarian values, political considerations and social processes play an important part. In particular, it requires an attempt on the part of the state to try impose a homogenising historical narrative by envisaging a national calendar, i.e. by announcing a national or public holiday. This helps accord prestige to persons credited as founding fathers or ideologues, ascribe solemnity to days remembering wars and festivity to mark independence or religious occasions. By discussing these themes in detail, this exploratory study of the history of national calendar will lend an alternative lens through which to look into the processes of identity formation in postcolonial nation‐states in general.     

Restorationist Counter‐Enlightenment: Thomas M'Crie on the Concept of Civil Liberty

Enlightenment notions for Counter‐Enlightenment purposes have not to date been used to provide a comprehensive context for Scottish religious history‐writing in the age of Counter‐Revolution and Restoration. The Evangelical historian and divine Thomas M'Crie's studies on Scottish Reformation history, Life of John Knox and Life of Andrew Melville, published in 1811 and 1819 respectively, exhibit an abundance of historiographical material for research. M'Crie was among the most renowned writers of his own time, but his historical works have been briefly passed over in recent secondary sources. The main purpose of this study is to rescue M'Crie's historical works on the Scottish Reformation past from near oblivion. This article argues that M'Crie produced an apology for the Scottish Reformation, adopting an aggressive style that attacked Scottish Enlightenment historians and thinkers such as William Robertson and David Hume, especially in the matter of their treatment of John Knox and Andrew Melville. M'Crie tried to restore his chosen past in order to influence the religious and political affairs of Scotland. In M'Crie's Counter‐Enlightenment historiography, the concept of civil liberty and Presbyterianism become interchangeable in a Restorationist religio‐political discourse. That is why M'Crie's enthusiasm for the Scottish Reformation constitutes the most representative example of the Presbyterian interpretation, which held its own against Enlightenment influence.     

Baudelaire's literary criticism

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism.     

Between history and hagiography: Eadmer of Canterbury's vision of the Historia novorum in Anglia

Written between c.1093 and the end of the 1120s, Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia novorum in Anglia is one of the best-known sources for the study of Anglo-Norman political, ecclesiastical and cultural history. This article explores the identity of the text as it developed in Eadmer's own mind. While modern scholars have placed the Historia novorum within the development of English national historiography, Eadmer showed no desire for his work to be received in this way. Instead, Eadmer's Historia was profoundly influenced by his extensive experience in writing the lives and miracles of saints. The Historia novorum occupies a space between history and hagiography, which successfully redeployed Eadmer's experiences of writing the past through hagiography, in order to produce an innovative and unique example of the genre of medieval historiography.     

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman,Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of the Orient, however, suggests the need to revise literature on Western approaches to the East which has assumed that antagonism towards Islam declined in the modern period, or was masked behind narratives that purported to be secular and objective but which continued to empower Europe and subjugate the Orient. Juxtaposing Freeman's narratives on Western and Eastern history, I argue that his association of Christianity with European progress and Islam with Eastern barbarism is key to understanding his deep fear of cultural contact with the Orient. Far from bolstering the strength and power of the West vis-à-vis the East, Freeman's account of the fearful barbarity of the Islamic Orient is underpinned by his belief in an anti-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, conspiracy that threatened the West with degeneration and recapitulation.     

章开沅教授与中国近现代史写作

选题是历史学论著写作成败的关键,要有创新并考虑研究的可持续发展。历史研究及写作需要史实的实证和史识的阐述来支撑。缺少史实的实证,历史就变成一个空架子,但要避免史料的堆砌。史料工作不是机械的工作,而是高层次的智力劳动。转引材料应该注明出处,以示尊重别人的劳动。至于史识,也即史学家的思辨,这有很高的甚至是很残酷的要求,真正的史学家(例如司马迁),能够达到历史哲学方面的理解,甚至是对宇宙生命的终极诉求,这也要求史学家应该有史学的参与意识。此外,文字表达是一件很重要而又很痛苦的事情,历史学家不应该原谅自己在文采方面的缺失,而应该提高文字表达能力,适当地强调史感,以达到设身处地地与古人对话、交流、沟通。总之,史料、史识、文采三者应该达到完美的统一。     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

Danto on Representation, Identity, and Indiscernibles

Arthur Danto has made important contributions to both aesthetics and philosophy of history. Furthermore, as I shall try to show in this essay, his aesthetics is of great relevance to his philosophy of history, while his philosophy of history is of no less interest for his aesthetics. By focusing on the notions of representation, identity, and the identity of indiscernibles we shall discover how fruitful this cooperation of aesthetics and philosophy of history may be. Crucial to all historical writing and, hence, to all philosophy of history, is the notion of identity through time and change. How could the historian write the history of x if x cannot be said to remain the same in the course of its history? It will become clear that aesthetics will provide us with a satisfactory solution for the problem, for the aestheticist notion of representation will enable us to define the notion of identity that the historian needs. Nevertheless, a certain friction can be observed between Danto's aesthetics and his philosophy of history. At the end of this essay I hope to show that Danto's philosophy of history will be our best guide to dealing adequately with this friction.     

Anti-methodology par excellence: Richard Cobb (1917–96) and history-writing

Richard Cobb (1917–96) was a well-known historian of modern France whose numerous studies contributed to revising our interpretations of the revolutionary period and its impact on the people of both Paris and the provinces. Cobb was also a very knowledgeable, sharp, witty and deeply entertaining essayist and reviewer not just of all things French across a wide chronological spectrum, but of historical matters more generally. Controversial and unusual, his work proved to be unique among scholars – and, for this reason, open to criticism. One trait that defined such uniqueness was his unapologetic and fierce aversion to methodological discussion as well as theoretical reflection in historical research. And yet, as this article attempts to show, his oeuvre – including a variety of different material – unveils a range of insightful and important considerations on the métier d'historien and the practice of history-writing. By focusing on a series of compelling images Cobb delineated throughout his works, reviews and essays in order to depict the role of the historian and the way(s) of going about the business of approaching the past, the following pages intend to provide a novel sketch of the ideas of this anti-methodologist par excellence. In particular, attention will be given to his configuration of the identity of the practitioner as wanderer, detective and novelist. It is thus hoped that the light cast on his writings might prompt a new reading of Cobb's opinions as a source of possible historiographical inspiration for new generations of historians.