关于陈独秀历史观的若干问题

陈独秀不是历史学家,但他的历史观值得我们研究。他视历史学为一门科学,他对中国古史分期、封建社会长期延续的原因、中国近代史的基本线索和科学体系以及近代社会的性质等重大历史理论问题都提出了看法,有的符合唯物史观,具有一定的理论意义和学术影响,有的则缺乏科学性,存在明显的缺陷。陈独秀历史观影响他对中国现实的认识和态度。     

POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE TWO SITES OF HISTORICITY

This essay examines the two sites of historicity, namely history‐writing and historical agency, and their interrelationship. I borrow the idea of “sites of historicity” from historian Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). For the purpose of analyzing how the relationship between the two sites changes with time and context, using Trouillot's theoretical lens, I examine the philosophies of history of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. By citing instances from these two philosophers, I claim that with the rise of nineteenth‐century colonialism, the two sites of historicity became discursively related in a specific way, whereby historical agency came to be predicated on history‐writing. Hence, in contrast to Kant's work, in Hegel's philosophy of history the relationship between the two sites of historicity acquired a decidedly colonialist form. As a result of this predication of historical agency on history‐writing, the alleged lack of historiography of certain cultures began to be considered as a token of their lack of political ability. The essay ends with the suggestion that the postcolonial thinkers and commentators who deal with historiography should challenge the foregoing predication, as it continues to inform contemporary thought concerning historiography.     

FROM REVOLUTION TO MODERNIZATION: THE PARADIGMATIC TRANSITION IN CHINESE HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE REFORM ERA

Chinese historiography of modern China in the 1980s and 1990s underwent a paradigmatic transition: in place of the traditional revolutionary historiography that bases its analyses on Marxist methodologies and highlights rebellions and revolutions as the overarching themes in modern Chinese history, the emerging modernization paradigm builds its conceptual framework on borrowed modernization theory and foregrounds top‐down, incremental reforms as the main force propelling China's evolution to modernity. This article scrutinizes the origins of the new paradigm in the context of a burgeoning modernization discourse in reform‐era China. It further examines the fundamental divides between the two types of historiography in their respective constructions of master narratives and their different approaches to representing historical events in modern China. Behind the prevalence of the modernization paradigm in Chinese historiography is Chinese historians' unchanged commitment to serving present political needs by interpreting the past.     

当代中国历史学的学术转型与创新 --试论旧课题的改造和新课题的建立

以往中国历史学轰轰烈烈的专题讨论,不仅凝聚了史学界的绝大部分精力,而且形成了一整套的中国化马克思主义历史理论或历史解释系统。它决定着中国史学的研究与编纂,塑造和影响着人们的思维方式。当前的史学学术转型无论如何不可能回避这些旧课题。从史学学科体系的角度看,改造旧课题,将其转换成为新课题,应该,而且可以成为史学学术转型的突破口。     

Im Blickwinkel der Technik: Neue Verhältnisse von Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Changing Perspectives – From the Experimental to the Technological Turn in History and Philosophy of Science. In the 1960s the philosophy of science was transformed through the encounter with the history of science, resulting in a collaborative venture by the name of “History and Philosophy of Science” (HPS). Philosophy of science adopted ever more regularly the format of the case study to reconstruct certain episodes from the history of science, and historians were mostly interested in the production of scientific knowledge. The so‐called “experimental turn” of the 1980s owed to this interaction between philosophy and history. Its guiding question remained quite traditional, however, namely “How do the sciences achieve an agreement between representation and reality?” Only the answers to this question broke with tradition by focusing not on theory but on the role of instruments and experiments. – Roughly 30 years after the experimental turn, another transformative encounter appears to be taking place. HPS is being transformed in the encounter with philosophy of technology. From the point of view of philosophy of technology, the question does not arise whether and how the agreement of mind and world, representation and reality can be achieved. When things are constructed, built or made, human thinking and physical materiality are inseparably intertwined. Instead of seeking to describe a mind‐independent reality, technoscientific researchers are working to acquire and demonstrate capabilities of experimental or predictive control. When science is regarded as a kind of technology, a program of study opens up for epistemology and so do avenues for the historiography of science. History of science might now show how the problems and procedures of the sciences arise from and impinge back upon a world that is itself a product of science and technology. It thereby abandons its traditional HPS niche existence and joins forces with environmental history, history of technology, social, labor, and consumer history.     

6. WHY WE NEED TO MOVE FROM TRUTH‐FUNCTIONALITY TO PERFORMATIVITY IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The central challenge of the philosophy of history and historiography is to find a principled way to rank different interpretations of the past without assuming their truth in terms of correspondence. The narrativist insight of the narrative philosophy of historiography was to correctly question historical realism. It analyzed texts and showed that they cannot reflect the past as it is. However, the rejection of the truth‐functional evaluation threatens to lead to an “anything goes” approach in terms of cognitive evaluation of historiography. In any case, no adequate theory of evaluation has so far been developed, although clearly not all historiographical interpretations are acceptable. Postnarrativist philosophy of historiography suggests that any history book includes a content‐synthesizing unit, but that it is problematic to think that it is “narrative” that structures texts. It is better to think of historiography texts as presenting reasoning for views and theses about the past. Arguments for these theses should be considered not as being true but as more or less appropriate, fitting, or warranted. The historian aims to produce as highly rationally warranted and compelling a thesis of the past as possible; its rational appropriateness depends on three dimensions of cognitive evaluation: the epistemic, the rhetorical, and the discursive.     

ON LAWFULNESS IN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

The use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is based on a misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward's notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history.     

试论罗素的史学审美思想

20世纪50年代,在参与史学是科学还是艺术的大讨论的过程中,英国著名哲学家罗素在史学的服务对象、学术方法和所存在的缺陷方面所提出的一应观点无疑是很有价值的。因为正是这些观点,揭蔡了史学应是审美的这样一个事实;而不能有效地使自己的读者进入审美的境界,即不能使他们通过对史学著述的阅读,来获得“直观自身的本质力量”的愉悦,是当代史学在形态建构和成果具获上的一个严重的缺失。     

20世纪中国史学界对历史规律问题的探讨

20世纪中国历史学界对历史规律性问题进行了长期反复的争论。人们对历史规律的研究主要有两种,一种是社会发展史意义的规律,一种是历史认识论意义的规律。长期以来,绝大多数人把五种生产方式的演进当作历史规律的主要形式。近年来一些学者反思过去研究中的简单化倾向．对历史规律的研究开始进入到历史认识论的层面,对规律的理解日益深入和具体。     

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.     

Lev Gumilev: The Ideologist of the Soviet Empire

Summary

Russian intellectuals like to appeal to examples of foreign history. Lev Gumilev's views on history are a good example. Gumilev was one of the most well-known representatives of Eurasianism, which was in turn one of the most interesting intellectual constructs in Russian historiography. Gumilev believed that Russia was born not from Kievan Rus—the view of the majority of Russian historians of his time—but from the empire of the Mongols. While Gumilev saw Europe as a hostile entity to Russia/Eurasia, this was not the case with the neo-Eurasianists of the Yeltsin era. This article examines Gumilev's Eurasianism and its influence on modern Russian national identity.     

WHAT IS A SCHOLARLY PERSONA? TEN THESES ON VIRTUES,SKILLS, AND DESIRES

What is the problem that “epistemic virtues” seek to solve? This article argues that virtues, epistemic and otherwise, are the key characteristics of “scholarly personae,” that is, of ideal‐typical models of what it takes to be a scholar. Different scholarly personae are characterized by different constellations of virtues and skills or, more precisely, by different constellations of commitments to goods (epistemic, moral, political, and so forth), the pursuit of which requires the exercise of certain virtues and skills. Expanding Hayden White's notion of “historiographical styles” so as to encompass not only historians' writings, but also their nontextual “doings,” the article argues that different styles of “being a historian”—a meticulous archival researcher, an inspired feminist scholar, or an outstanding undergraduate teacher—can be analyzed productively in terms of virtues and skills. Finally, the article claims that virtues and skills, in turn, are rooted in desires, which are shaped by the examples of others as well as by promises of reward. This makes the scholarly persona not merely a useful concept for distinguishing among different types of historians, but also a critical tool for analyzing why certain models of “being a historian” gain in popularity, whereas others become “old‐fashioned.”     

THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE

This rich collection analyzes science in the archives over the past several thousand years. The chapters work together to tell stories of ambitious attempts to provide timeless data for science, which will be used for generations to come—ranging from ancient astronomy to geology to life‐logging and the development of web search. They also demonstrate convincingly that archives are powerful forces across the sciences—every science discussed has an archival base—which partly determine what kind of general knowledge claims can be made by future generations: it is hard to read an archive askance. The collection works best as a series of individual chapters, though some work is done to indicate where they speak to one another. It is a pity that there was not more input from archivists themselves in the project: their noninclusion means that some archival issues (especially what goes on with data after it gets into the archive—how it gets cleaned up, changed, reorganized) are treated somewhat lightly. The collection does provide a very useful set of tools for thinking about scientific archives. It is also an excellent introduction to the peculiarities of scientific archives—one that reflects back on the use of archives in history in general.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

THE WORDS OF HISTORY

In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline. In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right‐wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein's criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein's suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.     

新史学:历史学者的永恒追求 --并以此纪念《史学月刊》创刊300期

作为史学发展进程中一种带有规律性的史学现象的新史学,是历史学发展的内在要求和历史学者的永恒追求。史学史表明,历史学的发展历程,在本质上就是一个一代一代的历史学者在传承既有史学文化遗产的基础上追求新史学的永无止境的过程。历史学者对新史学的追求,是历史学者史家主体意识的鲜明而集中的体现。历史学者所追求的新史学,虽有明确的方向性,但一般只是一个模糊的轮廓。正是通过、并且正是在历史学者对新史学孜孜不倦的永恒追求中,史学不断实现着对自身的超越。     

Paul Touvier et L'église: rapport de la commission historique institutée par le cardinal decourtray

Burke's view of history is an aspect of his thought that has been largely neglected by scholars, despite the wide recognition of its importance. In Burke's view, history, led by providence and by a human nature designed by God, is necessarily progressive. It is, nevertheless, human beings who are largely responsible for building their nations. A variety of civilisations could be generated if people governed a nation in harmony with its peculiar manners and circumstances. Nations can, however, be unstable, because their fortunes fluctuate. Although Burke was very familiar with—and influenced by—several different traditions of historiography, his ideas on history should also be seen as the product of his own reflections.     

TEMPORALITIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The challenge of globalizing historical theory requires that theorization be grounded in material from all parts of the world. Southeast Asia is a world region that is somewhat underrepresented in the theorization of history. The distinctive historical traditions of Southeast Asia present an opportunity to bring new insights to existing theories of history. In this article, I offer a theoretical approach to historical temporality that is grounded in close readings of texts from this region by focusing on how these texts construe temporality through choices of narrative organization. I develop a toolkit for analyzing the temporalities in historical texts from equatorial Southeast Asia (the region covering present-day Indonesia and Malaysia), which includes a precise analytical vocabulary to fully account for their diversity. This approach leads to a theoretical stance that supersedes the conceptual dichotomies of linear/cyclical time and empty/full time, in favor of a more pluralistic understanding of temporalities. The grounded theory presented in this article is not only better suited to working with Southeast Asian materials, but it can also be placed in useful dialogue with existing theories, such as the narrativist approach of Hayden White and recent theorizations of the medieval historiography of Western Europe.     

NEPALESE HISTORY IN A EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE: A CASE STUDY IN TRANSCULTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

In March 2013, a group of German, Nepalese, and Swiss historians, Indologists, and an architectural historian gathered for a workshop in Nepal to develop a new approach to the understanding of South Asian historiography, especially the Nepalese chronicles from the nineteenth century. The outcome is the present collaboratively written article. It is argued that, in the past, the analysis of South Asian historiography has been preoccupied by arguments based on an understanding of history that highlights facts and events. A transcultural and multidisciplinary approach, however, would overcome the common dichotomies of factuality and fictionality, history and myth, or evidence and truth. Recognizing the specificity of South Asian historiography, the article develops an approach to bridge asymmetries and entanglements in the academic use of the past in a way that also opens up a new perspective on Western historiography. By analyzing the religious, spatial, literary, and historical, and contemporary or context‐related aspects of a nineteenth‐century chronicle and by using “fieldwork” as a methodological tool for studying historiography, it is proposed to understand the framing of time and the making of sequences and historical periods as an open process that results in the constant and synchronic creation of chronological spaces.     

LEVINAS,HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this book Anton Froeyman has provided us with a colorful and intriguing account of a Levinasian approach to historical inquiry and historical writing. In my discussion of his book I describe central features of his account and notice how he uses, to develop his view, recent developments in historiography—including the work of figures like Natalie Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, in philosophical thinking about history and historiography, and in various postmodern developments. I sketch central features of Levinas's ethical metaphysics and show that Froeyman's focus on Levinas's interest in our relations with other persons and in particular with their relative differences from us is too narrow. A proper understanding of our infinite responsibility to and for all others, as Levinas portrays it, leads to a broader account than the one Froeyman gives and one that enables us to understand with greater clarity how historiography fits into the Levinasian understanding of our temporal and interpersonal relations with others.