Construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history and the turning of modern history

The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc.     

THE LIMITS OF OTTOMAN PRAGMATISM

In this paper I reflect critically on the concept of pragmatism as it is used in Ottoman historiography. Pragmatism has gained increasing currency over the last ten to fifteen years as one of the defining features of the Ottoman polity. I argue that unless it is properly defined from a theoretical‐philosophical perspective, and carefully contextualized from a historical perspective, pragmatism cannot be used as an explanatory or comparative category. When used as a framework of explanation for historical change, pragmatism blurs more than it clarifies an essential aspect of the Ottoman polity that it seeks to define, namely, the political. It is essential to reflect on the difference between the political and politics because whereas the political refers to the configuration of the power relations that organize a society as a legitimate entity, politics refers to the strategies, practices, institutions, or discourses whose purpose is to construct and retain hegemony within a polity. Through an analysis of the concept of pragmatism in Ottoman historiography, I show that for most proponents of Ottoman pragmatism, pragmatism pertains to politics rather than to the political. From a perspective rigorously confined to political theory, I argue that much like the discourse of modern tolerance, pragmatism in Ottoman historiography posits a problematic periodization, relegates the political to the background, and depoliticizes essential power relations.     

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。     

THE CONTEST OVER CONTEXT IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Recent articles critical of the use of context in contextual intellectual history have identified contextual method with the post‐1960s work of the “Cambridge School,” which is regarded as being grounded in a flawed theory of textual interpretation. Focusing on German cultural and political history, this article shows that a contextual historiography was already fully developed in seventeenth‐century ecclesiastical history, and a parallel version of this approach had developed in the field of constitutional history. The modern critique of context emerged only with the appearance of dialectical philosophical history in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The article argues that rather than representing a scholarly engagement with contextual historiography, the central plank of the dialectical critique of contextualism—the notion that contextual explication of thought is insufficient because context itself has transcendental conditions—is actually a cultural‐political attack on it launched on behalf of a hostile and incommensurable academic culture.     

What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography

Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level of interpretive strategies, "Europe" remained the yardstick for historiographical explanation. This article will use the example of postwar Japanese historiography to show that historians resorted to a European model in order to turn seemingly unconnected events in the Japanese past into a historical narrative. This is not to imply, however, that Japanese historiography passively relied on concepts from Western discourse. On the contrary, Japanese historians appropriated and transformed the elements of this discourse in the specific geopolitical setting of the 1940s and 1950s. This act of appropriation served the political purpose of positioning Japan with respect to Asia and the "West." However, on an epistemological level, the priority of "Europe" persisted; Japanese historiography remained a "derivative discourse." Studies in comparative historiography, therefore, should be attentive to these traces of the European descent of academic history and privilege the transnational history of historiography over meditations on its internal rationalization.     

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.     

Better a Warm Hug than a Cold Bath: Nationalist Memory and the Failures of Iranian Historiography

This paper assesses the extent to which the modern historiography of Iran is indebted to a nationalist construction of Iran’s past, rather than proceeding from impartial and critical historical research. The paper pursues this aim by applying the distinction between history (as a scholarly discipline) and memory (as a nationalist construct) to one of the central tropes of the country’s historiography. According to that trope, Iranian history can be summarized as a succession of violent invasions by foreign “races,” which never stamped out Iran’s separate ethnic identity. This resilience is attributed to Iranian civilization’s inherent superiority, which Iranianized the invaders and thus ensured Iran’s survival as a primordial nation. The analysis shows that—counter-intuitively—twentieth-century Iranian historians, instead of subjecting this narrative to critical assessment, have in fact played a central role in developing it into a self-serving historiography. Special attention is given to Zarrinkub’s seminal Two Centuries of Silence.     

20世纪前半期新旧史学关系论争的综述

20世纪前半期关于新旧史学关系的探讨,参与学者人数之多,学术观点之复杂,在整个中国近代史学史上都是罕见的.本文对这场学术探讨进行了系统的梳理和评论,认为它在社会思潮、学术风气的演变以及近代史学学科逐渐完善的客观需求等因素的影响下,呈现了阶段性发展的特点.     

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.     

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.     

严复译著牛津、剑桥讲义及其对中国政治变革的学理想象

中国近代救亡图存使命下新思想的引入,尤以严复为代表。作为思想家、翻译家的严复,其思想来源不乏其时牛津大学、剑桥大学学人的著述。通过严复的译介和立足于中国国情所作的诠释,牛津、剑桥大学的讲座或课程讲义成为国人思想启蒙的重要读物。严复这种译介式的思想启蒙,涉及近代不同政治谱系有关立宪政治的论点,因此在彰显严复本人寻求政治变革用意的同时,也决定了当时的国人对世界认知的广度与深度。     

Ankersmit's Postmodernist Historiography: The Hyperbole of "Opacity"

Ankersmit's articulation of a postmodern theory of history takes seriously both the strengths of traditional historicism and the right of historians to decide what makes sense for disciplinary practice. That makes him an exemplary interlocutor. Ankersmit proposes a theory of historical "representation" which radicalizes the narrative approach to historiography along the lines of poststructuralist textualism. Against this postmodernism but invoking some of his own arguments, I defend the traditional historicist position. I formulate criticisms of the theory of reference entailed in his notion of "narrative substance," of his master analogy of historiography with modern painting, and finally of his characterization of historical hermeneutics. In each case I find him guilty of the hyperbole which he himself cautions against. While it is true that historical narratives cannot be taken to be transparent, in taking them to be opaque Ankersmit puts himself in an untenable position. Finally, Ankersmit seeks to buttress his theoretical case by an interpretation of the new cultural historical texts of authors like Davis and Ginzburg. While this is a concreteness heartily to be welcomed in philosophers of history, I cannot find his construction of this new school's work plausible.     

New Historiography for the cultivation of the character of the “new citizen”: Liang Qichao’s ideas of history education and their practice

ABSTRACT

An advocate for modern Chinese historiography, Liang Qichao’s “new historiography” was ideologically quite closely tied to traditional Confucian historiography: his idea of “historiography” was both a form of scholarship for the provision of knowledge, as well as a type of learning for the cultivation of moral character. The fundamental objective of “new historiography” was to use the history of national development and evolution to educate the people, helping them to become nationally conscious “citizens.” However, according to Liang Qichao’s conception of history, the nationalist aspect of “new historiography” ultimately rested in the cultivation of individual character, not in imparting the concept of nationhood. During the movement to “systematize national heritage,” in his practicing of historiography, Liang primarily studied and compiled Chinese academic and intellectual histories, focusing particularly on Confucian history: he interpreted Confucianism and the cream of Chinese scholarship as a kind of “philosophy of life.” Liang’s historiographical practices eventually took shape as a form of moral education to cultivate the leading talents of society when the country was going through a transformation, while in the process signaling his profound repudiation of the empirical emphasis in historical research of the times.     

历史学的理论成就与中国史学史研究的发展

今年是新中国成立60周年,本刊约请四位学者分别从史学理论与史学史、中国近代史、世界史的角度对新中国史学的发展与成就进行总结。新中国史学在60年的发展历程中曾经历若干曲折,但成就始终是第一位的。以唯物史观为指导的中国马克思主义史学,不仅能够创造辉煌,而且能够在新的历史时期与时俱进,综合创新,不断地解放思想,不断地创造出新的业绩。我们希望四位学者的观点能够为读者提供丰富和发展中国马克思主义史学的视角和思路。     

中国的世界史研究六十年

今年是新中国成立60周年,本刊约请四位学者分别从史学理论与史学史、中国近代史、世界史的角度对新中国史学的发展与成就进行总结。新中国史学在60年的发展历程中曾经历若干曲折,但成就始终是第一位的。以唯物史观为指导的中国马克思主义史学,不仅能够创造辉煌,而且能够在新的历史时期与时俱进,综合创新,不断地解放思想,不断地创造出新的业绩。我们希望四位学者的观点能够为读者提供丰富和发展中国马克思主义史学的视角和思路。     

六十年来中国近代史学科的确立与发展

今年是新中国成立60周年,本刊约请四位学者分别从史学理论与史学史、中国近代史、世界史的角度对新中国史学的发展与成就进行总结。新中国史学在60年的发展历程中曾经历若干曲折,但成就始终是第一位的。以唯物史观为指导的中国马克思主义史学,不仅能够创造辉煌,而且能够在新的历史时期与时俱进,综合创新,不断地解放思想,不断地创造出新的业绩。我们希望四位学者的观点能够为读者提供丰富和发展中国马克思主义史学的视角和思路。     

The Un-European Idea: Vichy and Eurafrica in the Historiography of Europeanism

Imperialist and collaborationist conceptions of Europeanisms have generally been excluded from mainstream historiography with reference to their alleged un-Europeanness. However, by discussing the ideas and writings of two French Europeanists—Louis Le Fur’s and René Viard’s—in the years 1940–41, I argue that it is precisely their Vichyite and imperialist conceptions of Europeanness that underpin their political ideas of a united Europe. Their works therefore call into question a prevailing historiographical narrative of Europeanism as a benign counterpoint to a dark European past. Since, as demonstrated in this article, French Europeanist visions have often been bound up with both collaborationist and imperialist interests, I argue for the need to develop a more inclusive and critical historiographical perspective on the history of Europeanism.     

古典历史的基础:从国之大事到普通百姓的生活

由于古代史料的性质和近代早期历史写作目的的影响,从古代到近代早期的西方,古代史基本为政治和军事史以及大人物所统治,社会经济与普通人遭到忽视。21世纪的古代史写作,大多将政治史排挤到相对次要的地位,普通人及其日常生活成为主要内容,其笔下的古代世界,着重古希腊罗马公民的社会生活以及影响公民生活的诸种政治和经济因素。古代史主题变换与研究转型,既与学者们对史料的认识以及对社会科学方法的借鉴有内在联系,也与西方史学注重公民活动的传统相关。世界古代史研究仍需在掌握语言工具的基础上,更多地借鉴现代社会科学理论与方法,实现从理论、方法到内容的转型,深入古代社会的历史。     

The periphery revisited: Polish post-war historiography on the working class and the new global labour history

This paper explores the characteristics of post-war Polish historiography on the working class and relates it to current trends in global labour history. Although, in Poland, labour history never existed as a separate field, many historians focused their studies on either working-class history or the history of the workers’ movement. After 1945, Polish historiography was circumscribed by political and ideological considerations; however – except during the brief Stalinist period (1951–56) – Marxist methodology was not imposed or applied uncritically. In fact, discussions about the role of the working class in history that began after 1956 generated research interest in new groups of workers and labour relations. Much of this research concerns recently highlighted aspects of labour history, such as marginal groups of workers or free versus unfree labour. Polish historians’ reinterpretation of Marxist orthodoxy proceeded from their empirical studies of nineteenth-century Polish lands – at the periphery of Western capitalist development – as well as from their theoretical influences. This article argues that some aspects of the Polish historiography on the working class qualify it as part of labour history’s heritage, despite the historiography’s significant limitations.     

严复社会史观的构建与近代史学转向

The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc. __________ Translated from Shixue Lilun Yanjiu 史学理论研究 (Historiography Quarterly), 2007, (1): 74–86