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。     

Predicament and responses: Discussions of history education in early modern China

ABSTRACT

Since the early modern era, following the abolishment of the imperial civil service exam and the rise of modern schools, the subject of history was included in education at all levels, from primary to tertiary. However, in comparison with traditional society, the degree of attention devoted to historical knowledge has in fact declined rather than improved. In the 1920s, many contemporaries vocally criticized and pondered the low level of historical knowledge among primary and secondary school students, and occasionally voiced dissatisfaction with history education at the university level as well. Critics primarily focused their discussions on the insufficient attention for history classes, imperfect standards formulated for history classes, poor history teaching materials, and lack of qualified, specialized teachers, forming a universal consensus among contemporaries on the failure of history education. However, the widespread opprobrium attached to history education was closely tied to two facts: first, the historians of early modern China had as yet failed to compile a general history of China acceptable to the majority, greatly disappointing many educators; second, historical resources failed to exercise the mobilizing effect on early modern Chinese society that contemporaries had hoped for, and history thus often became the scapegoat paying the price for practical setbacks and failures in the political arena.     

邓小平对马克思主义史学理论及国史研究的贡献

邓小平在指导中国社会主义建设过程中,不仅批判“四人帮”极“左”思潮,还马克思主义史学理论以本来面目,还用马克思主义史学理论指导研究国史,创造性地提出了研究国史的理论、原则和方法,为当代马克思主义史学发展和国史研究提供了思想武器。     

Analysis of Japanese influence on the three major historiographical trends in early modern China

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the intrinsic relationships between Japanese historiography and the three great historiographical trends of New Historiography, Debates on Ancient History, and Marxist historiography, from the macroscopic perspective of the transformation, development, and early modern growth of modern and early modern Chinese historiography, exploring how Chinese historical researchers selected, deviated from, and assimilated Japanese historiography, while also particularly focusing on how the recipients utilized Japanese historiographical methods and concepts as well as the achievements of Japanese scholars in researching Chinese history to construct their own interpretation of Chinese historiography, in a study of the academic trend of indigenization.     

20世纪中国的史学方法论研究

20世纪中国史学方法论研究,是一笔丰厚的史学遗产。从梁启超的《新史学》,到三四十年代一系列史学理论方法论读本的出版,再到当代台湾的史学方法论研究,是新史学派史学方法发展的大体脉络。从李大钊对马克思主义历史观的介绍和宣传,到郭沫若所代表的开始用马克思主义研究中国历史的尝试和实践,再到翦伯赞的《历史哲学教程》的出版,标志着中国马克思主义史学发展的第一阶段;从50到70年代是马克思主义史学方法广泛普及和曲折发展的时期;改革开放以后的20年,是中国马克思主义史学史上方法论研究空前繁荣和活跃的时期。总结百年来的史学方法论研究,给新世纪史学发展留下了诸多启示。     

HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A SLIGHTLY COSMOPOLITAN POINT OF VIEW

Under review here are three works of different formats and scopes, each addressing questions of theory of history and the history of historiography. First, the mature work of Ignacio Olábarri Gortázar, published by the University Press of Salamanca, where he is now an emeritus professor, collects pieces written over a period of fifteen years that deal with matters related to his field of research in social labor history and other methodological and historiographical issues. Second, Fernando Sánchez Marcos seeks to offer an introductory book on the most noteworthy theoretical and historiographical issues of the twentieth century. Third, the volume from Jaume Aurell (Spain), Peter Burke (England), Catalina Balmaceda, and Felipe Soza (both from Chile) is a general handbook of historiography addressed primarily to students. All have their strengths and weaknesses. The most striking weakness is a persistent limitation of the field of vision, which is restricted to a European/Western (Francophone, Anglophone) cultural universe.     

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.     

中国社会文化史研究:25年反省与进路

我国史学界社会文化史学科兴起25年来,经过了前十年"兴起奠基期"、继十年"发展兴盛期"、近五年"深化扩散期"三个阶段。学术贡献有:理论方法创新,开辟史学新生长点;推动中国近代史研究超越"革命史范式"及"现代化范式",走向"本土现代性";关注民间社会,挖掘内在社会文化资源。存在问题与瓶颈:学科意识模糊,研究"碎片化",平面描述性、意义稀薄及理论缺失。当今社会转型呼唤社会文化史的理论创新成果,未来将会引起关注的"关键论题"有:民间社会、社会治理、生活方式、价值系统。这几个"关键论题",可能会成为社会文化史学者为中国社会发展理论创新作出贡献的生长点。     

关于理论更新对于先秦史研究意义的思考--从解读《牧誓》的启示谈起

目前的先秦史研究中,在具体的实证研究方面已经取得了极为丰硕的成果,但陈旧的理论模式却还在顽固地束缚着我们对于那个时代的宏观把握与总体认识。相对于史学领域内一些理论更新显著的断代研究,先秦史研究这种理论上的滞后显得十分突出。倘若能够从某些新的理论去认识商周时期的历史,我们不仅可以对重大的历史事件提出新的看法,而且对许多具体的历史材料也可以作出新的解释。     

历史学的传承与启新--冯尔康先生访谈录

冯尔康先生的治学,既承继了中国史学的优秀传统,又在新时期史坛中,大力推动并开展了社会史学的研究,为近20来中国史学界极富开创性的学者之一。他在清代政治史、社会经济史、史料学和中国古代社会结构史,尤其是社会史研究领域,均做出了较大的学术贡献。他在理论创新和具体研究中所形成的开拓性、包容性、前瞻性的治学特点,尤具学术魅力,启人新知。     

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

The recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.     

Prof. Dever’s Last Tome: Much Ado about Things and Nothing?

In his recently published book, professor Dever breaks no new ground and adds no new insights into the ever-elusive remote past of the Israelites. Rather, he not only persists in his decades-old, and by-now pointless, scholarly tiff with the European minimalist school of biblical interpretation, but argues, unconvincingly, for the superiority of archeological things as primary sources for writing a true history of ancient Israel. Confusingly, he ends his tome with a plea for integrating [minimalist] biblical hermeneutics with archaeological findings as a way forward to hopelessly construct yet another, but the truest of all histories.     

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.     

PERFORMING HISTORY: HOW HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP IS SHAPED BY EPISTEMIC VIRTUES

Philosophers of history in the past few decades have been predominantly interested in issues of explanation and narrative discourse. Consequently, they have focused consistently and almost exclusively on the historian's (published) output, thereby ignoring that historical scholarship is a practice of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, in which successful performance requires active cultivation of certain skills, attitudes, and virtues. This paper, then, suggests a new agenda for philosophy of history. Inspired by a “performative turn” in the history and philosophy of science, it focuses on the historian's “doings” and proposes to analyze these performances in terms of epistemic virtue. It argues that historical scholarship is embedded in “practices” or “epistemic cultures,” in which knowledge is created and warranted by means of such virtues as honesty, carefulness, accuracy, and balance. These epistemic virtues, however, are not etched in stone: historians may highlight some of them, exchange one for another, or reinterpret their meaning. On the one hand, this suggests a rich area of research for historians of historiography. To what extent can consensus, conflict, continuity, and change in historical scholarship be explained in terms of epistemic virtue? On the other hand, the proposal outlined in this article raises a couple of philosophical questions. For example, on what grounds can historians choose among epistemic virtues? And what concept of the self comes with the notion of virtue? In addressing these questions, philosophy of history may expand its current scope so as to encompass not only “writings” but also “doings,” that is, the virtuous performances historians recognize as professional conduct.