美国新社会史述评

美国新社会史学是 2 0世纪 60年代出现于美国的新史学潮流 ,它改变了美国学术主流的路线 ,是在美国 60年代的社会动荡的背景下产生并发展起来的 ;美国 60年代思想潮流和思维方式的变化是美国新社会史学产生的思想渊源 ;新的历史观的确立标志着美国新社会史学的最终形成 ;新社会史在它的发展过程中遇到了许多无法解决的问题 ,出现了许多弊病 ,80年代美国史学界针对这一切提出了改进方案 ,重新确立了自己独到的史学理论。     

MODELING IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH PRACTICE AND METHODOLOGY: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM POLAND1

This selection of texts (mostly translations from Polish) should interest those who study analytical philosophy of history, methodology of history, and historical sociology. It contains contributions by Polish historians and philosophers since 1931, with pride of place given to the work of the Poznań school in the philosophy of science and humanities. With Jerzy Kmita, Leszek Nowak, and Jerzy Topolski as its leaders, it emerged in late 1960s as a synthesis of Marxism and the Polish brand of logical positivism known as the Lwow‐Warsaw school. Most papers discuss or exemplify various forms of idealization in historical research. Although the papers demonstrate the usefulness of modeling in historical sociology and nonnarrative history, the collection as a whole does not provide realistic examples to substantiate the Poznań school's stronger claim of the decomposability of historical narratives into separate strips related to hierarchically ordered “essential factors.”     

Zeitschichten des Klons. Anmerkungen zu einer Begriffsgeschichte

Temporal Layers of the Clone. Remarks on a Conceptual History. This paper aims at a history of the clone concept in 20th‐century life science and culture. The first part of the paper is concerned with conceptual history approaches. Here, the idea of ‘Zeitschichten’ by Reinhart Koselleck is discussed and its implications for the history of science are explored. In the following parts of the paper, I trace the historical dynamics of the clone concept in various fields of 20th‐century life sciences. I argue that the clone concept, which originated in plant breeding around 1900, soon developed into a technical tool in a variety of research areas. With this, specific meanings became attached: the idea of standardization, genetic identity, and mass reproduction. A further connotation of the clone was the idea of stagnancy with respect to processes in time: The clone was seen as something that was exempt from evolutionary changes. In the last section of the paper, I trace the shifting meanings of the clone concept in the 1960s and 1970s, when the clone became a widespread metaphor that pointed to future biotechnologically driven possibilities to reshape the nature of human beings. In this regard, the debates of the 1970s are analyzed as a turning point: Whereas utopian and eugenic visions predominated the debates in the 1960s (when the human clone was seen as something which will occur in a distant future), the 1970s discussion focused on the advent of a biotechnological era and the human clone had became a reality.     

Women's history in Italy (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

This essay surveys the development of women's history in Italy since its origins, examining the principal questions that have driven research and debate from the 1960s to the present, the ways in which women's history in other countries (notably the US) has been influential in Italy, the impact of women's history on other branches of historical research in Italy and its place — or rather lack of place ‐ in Italian universities.     

TRAUMA DELEGITIMIZED: KARL LÖWITH AND THE COSMIC VIEW OF HISTORY

This article uncovers the work of trauma in Karl Löwith's historical thought. Although best known for his critique of the philosophy of history and for the conception of secularization in his 1949 book, Meaning in History, Löwith deepened his positive historical vision in several essays that he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. From these texts emerges a unique historical orientation, which I call the “cosmic view of history.” This perspective was at once a critique of modern historical consciousness and an embodied corrective to that consciousness, one in which the catastrophes of the twentieth century were relativized and made endurable. In both the origin and structure of this historical orientation and in its textual expression in Löwith's work, trauma is a residual force that links Löwith's language, his experiences, and the postwar context. The role of trauma in Löwith's thought further reveals a process of delegitimization in which historical consciousness and historical events lose their power to determine historical meaning, thus enabling a response to and an escape from catastrophe. This article also explores the significance of this cosmic view of history for contemporary theoretical concerns related to the Anthropocene and its consequences for historical theory.     

The modernization paradigm based on monistic multi-linear theory: a response to some comments

Long before 1979, Chinese historical research had been dominated by the theory of the Five Modes of Production , according to which the whole Chinese history as well as the other parts of the world had been developed from the first MOD to the last one by one. The modernization theories prevailed during the 1950s and the 1960s, bringing about another uni-linear model of historical changes. For example, W. W. Rostow designed a five-stage process as a universal frame work of economic development, based on which each society could find its position in this uni-line. The task of the less developed societies is just to introduce modernity from the modernized societies so that they can make some developments. Thus modernization is a uni-direction movement as well as a uni-linear process. After 1979, modernization as a new paradigm has been accepted by an increasing number of Chinese historians. The increasing depth and breadth of the academic researches have encouraged such an acceptance, but, admittedly, as a new conceptual system that corresponded to the historic breakthrough and the new direction towards modernization in China. This acceptance also showed the crisis of paradigm , that is, the contradiction between the new themes and the old ones that had dominated Chinese humanities and social sciences. The modernization paradigm based on monistic multi-linear theory considers modernization as a unique breakthrough in history, a great transformation around the whole world, and a historical process that does not have a given ultimate aim and value but different models and routes. The monistic multi-linear theory on historical development is open and all-embracing in historical studies. A variety of historical paradigms is favorable to prosperity of Chinese history.     

Attributing Scientific and Technological Progress: The Case of Holography

Holography, the three‐dimensional imaging technology, was portrayed widely as a paradigm of progress during its decade of explosive expansion 1964–73, and during its subsequent consolidation for commercial and artistic uses up to the mid 1980s. An unusually seductive and prolific subject, holography successively spawned scientific insights, putative applications and new constituencies of practitioners and consumers. Waves of forecasts, associated with different sponsors and user communities, cast holography as a field on the verge of success—but with the dimensions of success repeatedly refashioned. This retargeting of the subject represented a degree of cynical marketeering, but was underpinned by implicit confidence in philosophical positivism and faith in technological progressivism. Each of its communities defined success in terms of expansion, and anticipated continual progressive increase. This paper discusses the contrasting definitions of progress in holography, and how they were fashioned in changing contexts. Focusing equally on reputed ‘failures’ of some aspects of the subject, it explores the varied attributes by which success and failure were linked with progress by different technical communities. This important case illuminates the peculiar post‐World War II environment that melded the military, commercial and popular engagement with scientific and technological subjects, and the competing criteria by which they assessed the products of science.     

Kennedy's Alliance for Progress: countering revolution in Latin America Part II: the historiographical record

Within weeks of his inauguration in January 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed an Alliance for Progress: a $100 billion programme of economic, political and social development for Latin America. Its purpose was to tackle the causes presumed to have sparked the Cuban revolution, chiefly poverty and bad governance, and within half a year every Latin American state except Cuba committed to the goals of the Alliance. But within a few years even proponents of the Alliance doubted its efficacy, a pessimism which increased during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and more so under Richard Nixon. This review of the contemporary and historical literature on the Alliance sets that scholarship within the broader area of US–Latin American relations, with particular emphasis on US–Cuban relations from the 1960s until the twenty‐first century. An important sub‐theme is the peculiarity, the ‘exceptionalness’ of American political rhetoric, derived from and in turn shaping Americans’ sense of the history and the foreign relations of the US: the ‘American mission’ to the world.     

THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE IRONIC FATE OF THE PROGRESSIVE PRAXIS OF RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

Despite its title and stated objectives this edited volume does not provide a broad and inclusive survey of post‐apartheid South African historiographical developments. Its main topic is the unexpected demise in the post‐apartheid context of the radical or revisionist approach that had invigorated and transformed the humanities and social studies during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of the anti‐apartheid struggle the radical historians had developed a plausible model of praxis for progressive scholarship, yet in the new post‐apartheid democratic South Africa radical historical scholarship itself encountered a crisis of survival. This should not be confused with a general “crisis” of historical scholarship in South Africa, as some of the uneven contributions to this volume contend, as that remains an active and diversely productive field due also to substantial contributions by historians not based in South Africa. If the dramatic and ironic fate of radical historical scholarship in the context of the transition to a post‐apartheid democracy is the volume's primary topic, then it unfortunately fails to provide serious and sustained critical reflection on the origins and possible explanations for that crisis. A marked feature of the accounts of “history making” provided in this volume is the (former) radical historians' lack of self‐reflexivity and the scant interest shown in the underlying history of their own intellectual trajectories.     

The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: The Soviet Union,self‐determination,and the creation of the postwar human rights system

The USSR played a key role in the establishment of the post‐World War II human rights system despite its repressive and even murderous domestic record. It forged an alliance with the countries of the Global South in support of decolonization, self‐determination, and social and economic rights, policies opposed by liberal states like the United States, Great Britain, and France. These positions were deeply rooted in the socialist tradition. Moreover, when a human rights movement emerged in the mid‐1960s, its members—in its origins overwhelmingly from the intelligentsia—called not for the overthrow of the Soviet Union but for the fulfilment of Soviet law. The language of rights, proclaimed with such flourish in the 1936 constitution and its successor in 1977, served as the weapon hurled by dissidents as they called on the Soviet government to respect freedom of speech and assembly, and national rights, including the right to emigrate. In turn, the international human rights movement developed from the 1960s to the 1990s largely through support for the Soviet dissident movement, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch prime examples. The Soviet experience is critical to any global history of human rights.     

Pioneer Living 1963 Style: Imaginations of Heritage in a Post‐war Canadian Suburb

This article connects the origins of a Canadian living history museum to the cultural and social developments of 1960s suburban Canada. Although there exists a strong literature on heritage and commemoration in Canada (and around the world), few scholars have looked explicitly at museums in that country. The literature on history museums elsewhere in the world is stronger. However, despite the strengths of this international literature, its focus has been on the use of museums in the present. An important aspect of the use of heritage, the historical contexts in which past museum visitors interpreted museum themes and displays, has not received much attention. This article argues that museum patrons of the 1960s, the decade in which many living history museums were founded, saw pioneer villages in the context of their own modernising lifestyles. However much Black Creek Pioneer Village might reflect anxiety about the direction of modernity, it also framed the past in ways that legitimated modern, suburban living.     

Technological art and Studio International’s eclectic vanguardism

ABSTRACT

This article takes the editorship by Peter Townsend of Studio International, to which the author contributed regularly between 1969 and 1972, as a starting-point to recall decisive personal encounters with Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, Wen-Ying Tsai’s sculptures, Jasia Reichardt’s exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. It goes on to re-endorse the earlier argument that a long historical time-scale was required for the aesthetic implications of photography to become clear, and that, like photography, the computer and holography are technological media whose immediate interactions with aesthetics and the culture at large will take many decades to pan out. Earlier claims about the relationship between art and ecology are then reviewed. Finally the article suggests that though world politics have changed considerably since the 1960s and 1970s, artists have undiminished opportunities to grapple with the challenges of new technologies directly, rather than retreating into a closed system.     

The modemization paradigm based on monistic multi-linear theory: a response to some comments

Long before 1979, Chinese historical research had been dominated by the theory of “the Five Modes of Production”, according to which the whole Chinese history as well as the other parts of the world had been developed from the first MOD to the last one by one. The modernization theories prevailed during the 1950s and the 1960s, bringing about another uni-linear model of historical changes. For example, W. W. Rostow designed a five-stage process as a universal frame work of economic development, based on which each society could find its position in this uni-line. The task of the less developed societies is just to introduce modemity from the modernized societies so that they can make some developments. Thus modernization is a uni-direction movement as well as a uni-linear process. After 1979, modernization as a new paradigm has been accepted by an increasing number of Chinese historians. The increasing depth and breadth of the academic researches have encouraged such an acceptance, but, admittedly, as a new conceptual system that corresponded to the historic breakthrough and the new direction towards modernization in China. This acceptance also showed the “crisis of paradigm”, that is, the contradiction between the new themes and the old ones that had dominated Chinese humanities and social sciences. The modernization paradigm based on monistic multi-linear theory considers modernization as a unique breakthrough in history, a great transformation around the whole world, and a historical process that does not have a given ultimate aim and value but different models and routes. The monistic multi-linear theory on historical development is open and all-embracing in historical studies. A variety of historical paradigms is favorable to prosperity of Chinese history. __________ Translated from: Shixue Yuekan 史学月刊 (Journal of Historical Science), No.5, 2004, by Wang Fan; Revised by Chong Hua     

DOES HISTORY MATTER? CHARLES TAYLOR ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL VALIDITY OF SOCIAL IMAGINARIES

Since its appearance in 2007, Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has received much attention. One of the central issues in the discussions around Taylor's book is the role of history in philosophical argumentation, in particular with regard to normative positions on ultimate affairs. Many critics observe a methodological flaw in using history in philosophical argumentation in that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor's historical approach, on the one hand, and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence, on the other. Since his “faith‐based history” is unwittingly apologetic, it is not only “hard to judge in strictly historical terms,” but it also proves that “when it comes to the most ultimate affairs history may not matter at all.” This paper challenges this verdict by exposing the misunderstanding underlying this interpretation of the role of history in Taylor's narrative. In order to disambiguate the relation between history and philosophy in Taylor's approach, I will raise three questions. First, what is the precise relation between history and ontology, taking into account the ontological validity of what Taylor calls social imaginaries? Second, why does “fullness” get a universal status in his historical narrative? Third, is Taylor's position tenable that the contemporary experience of living within “an immanent frame” allows for an openness to transcendence? In order to answer these questions, I will first compare Peter Gordon's interpretation of the status of social imaginaries with Taylor's position and, on the basis of that comparison, distinguish two definitions of ontology (sections I and II). Subsequently, I try to make it clear that precisely Taylor's emphasis on the historical character of social imaginaries and on their “relaxed” ontological anchorage allows for his claim that “fullness” might have a trans‐historical character (section III). Finally, I would like to show that Taylor's defense of the possibility of an “openness to transcendence”—as a specific mode of fullness—is not couched in “onto‐theological” terms, as suggested by his critics, but that it is the very outcome of taking into account the current historical situation (section IV).     

THINKING AFTER HITLER: THE NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY1

This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post‐1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize‐winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German‐language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.     

Contextualist dilemmas: Methodology of the history of political theory in two stages

This article traces the development of contextualist methodology in the study of the history of political thought/political theory after WWII. It argues that the so-called ‘Cambridge School’, often regarded as the core of historicist contextualism, arose during the 1950s and 1960s in response to dilemmas that were largely internal to (the history of) political philosophy as it was practiced in Britain in an academic culture dominated by analytic philosophy. This first stage of contextualist theorizing, usually associated with Laslett, Skinner and Pocock, was highly influential, but it also contributed to the formation of a new set of problems. These were connected to the diversification and internationalization of the historicist contextualist study of political thought after the 1960s. The ‘second stage’ of contextualist theorizing was shaped by post-analytic and post-modernist impulses among others. Because of the variety of philosophical and conceptual commitments on notions central to the field such as ‘political thinking’, ‘politics’, or ‘power’, it is unlikely that the present historicist contextualist approaches would come to share a unified methodology or theory of historical interpretation.     

3. SIMA QIAN AND HIS WESTERN COLLEAGUES: ON POSSIBLE CATEGORIES OF DESCRIPTION

This article comments on some of Professor Huang's theses by looking at ancient historiography. It deals with the significance of history in its respective cultural contexts; the kind of orientation that historical thinking and historiography provide; and the relationship between concrete examples and abstract rules in historical argumentation. Distinguishing between ancient Greece and Rome, it shows that Huang's explicit and implicit East‐West oppositions are more valid with respect to ancient Greece than to ancient Rome. on important points, the situation of Rome is surprisingly close to that of china. thus not only in China but also in Rome, tradition and history are highly important as a life‐orienting force (as opposed to the importance of speculative thought in Greece); and not only in China but also in Rome the orientation that historical thinking and historiography provide is to a great extent moral (as opposed to orientation through intellectual insight that, for a historian such as Thucydides, is placed in the foreground). As to the relationship between concrete examples and abstract rules in historical argumentation, the paper takes up Professor Rüsen's category of “exemplary meaning‐generation,” but suggests a distinction between example in the sense of “case/instance” and example in the sense of “model/paragon.” Though the two corresponding modes of exemplary meaning‐generation are mostly entwined, it appears that in Chinese and Roman historical works (in accordance with their stress on moral effect) there is a tendency toward meaning‐generation by example in the sense of “model/paragon,” whereas in Greek historiography (in accordance with its stress on intellectual insight) the tendency is toward meaning‐generation by example in the sense of “case/instance.”     

‘Not on Your Life’: Cabinet and Liberalisation of the White Australia Policy, 1964–67

The liberalisation of the White Australia policy in the mid-1960s was a seminal event in Australian history. It marked the beginning of the end for the racial conception of society which had defined the federation since the late-nineteenth century. Cabinet’s discussions of the proposed changes during these years demonstrate that most Australian political leaders were not only fundamentally opposed to reform but also unconvinced by arguments emphasising the policy’s administrative inconsistencies, lack of humanitarianism and racially discriminatory features. Nor were they entirely swayed by arguments of diplomatic expediency, which had been advanced by senior Immigration and External Affairs officials since the 1950s. The decline of British race patriotism in the early 1960s weakened the ideological foundations of White Australia and allowed policy-makers to reconsider its foreign policy implications, especially in terms of Australia’s relations with Asia. Although cautious, the reforms of the mid-1960s represented an important break with the policy’s fundamental principles and provided the groundwork for further liberalisation and the formal abolition of White Australia in the 1970s.     

Hegel and Historicism

Abstract

This article summarises the story of the production of the historical volumes by the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET). SADET was established after former president Thabo Mbeki expressed concern that there was very limited research done on the achievement of a peaceful political settlement in South Africa after decades of violent conflict. SADET's mission is, and has been to conduct a major study of South Africa's political history between 1960 and 1994. The focus of the article is on the project's editorial structure and on its research methodology, particularly the benefits and limitations of the use of oral interviews as the main research tool.     

Ready, willing, and able to divorce: an economic and cultural history of divorce in twentieth-century Sweden

This study outlines a long history of divorce in Sweden, recognizing the importance of considering both economic and cultural factors in the analysis of marital dissolution. Following Ansley Coale, the authors examine how a framework of multiple theoretical constructs, in interaction, can be applied to the development toward mass divorce. Applying a long historical perspective, the authors argue that an analysis of gendered aspects of the interaction between culture and economics is crucial for the understanding of the rise of mass divorce. The empirical analysis finds support for a marked decrease in legal and cultural obstacles to divorce already during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, economic structures remained a severe obstacle that prohibited significant increases in divorce rate prior to World War II. It was only during the 1940s and 1960s, when cultural change was complemented by marked decreases in economic interdependence between spouses, that the divorce rate exhibited significant increases. The authors find that there are advantages to looking at the development of divorce as a history in which multiple empirical factors are examined in conjunction, recognizing that these factors played different roles during different time periods.