London Stone: Stone of Brutus or Fetish Stone—Making the Myth

The remnant of once-famous “London Stone” stands almost unnoticed today in Cannon Street, in the City of London. Speculation about its origin began as early as the sixteenth century. This paper considers in particular the identification of the Stone as London's talisman (a view embodied in an invented “ancient saying” that linked it to the city's legendary Trojan foundation), or as a prehistoric “fetish stone” set up when London was first settled. The mythologising of London Stone continues, and at the turn of the twenty-first century it is regarded by some as an essential element in London's indefinable “sacred geometry.”     

SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Contained mostly within one brief chapter of his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's philosophy of history has long been considered either hostile or irrelevant to nineteenth‐century philosophy of history. This article argues that, on the contrary, Schopenhauer maintained what would become a widely accepted criticism of the methodological identity of historiography and the natural sciences. His criticism of Hegel's teleological historiography was more philosophically rigorous than is commonly acknowledged. And his proposal of a “genuine” historiography along the model of art became a major influence on the historiography of Burckhardt, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This article accordingly aims to restore Schopenhauer to the conversation of nineteenth‐century philosophy of history.     

Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives

Just like history, historiography is usually written and analyzed within one spatio-temporal setting, traditionally that of a particular nation-state. As a consequence, historiography tends to localize explanations for historiographical developments within national contexts and to neglect international dimensions. As long as that is the case, it is impossible to assess the general and specific aspects of historiographical case studies. This forum, therefore, represents a sustained argument for comparative approaches to historiography. First, my introduction takes a recent study in Canadian historiography as a point of departure in order to illustrate the problems of non-comparative historiography. These problems point to strong arguments in favor of comparative approaches. Second, I place comparative historiography as a genre in relation to a typology that orders theories of historiography on a continuum ranging from general and philosophical to particular and empirical. Third, I put recent debates on the “fragmentation” of historiography in a comparative perspective. Worries among historians about this fragmentation—usually associated with the fragmentation of the nation and the advent of multiculturalism and/or postmodernism—are legitimate when they concern the epistemological foundations of history as a discipline. As soon as the “fragmentation” of historiography leads to—and is legitimated by—epistemological skepticism, a healthy pluralism has given way to an unhealthy relativism. As comparison puts relativism in perspective by revealing its socio-historical foundations, at the same time it creates its rational antidote. Fourth, I summarize the contributions to this forum; all deal—directly or indirectly—with the historiography of the Second World War. Jürgen Kocka's “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg” examines the so-called “special path” of Germany's history. Daniel Levy's “The Future of the Past: Historiographical Disputes and Competing Memories in Germany and Israel” offers a comparative analysis of recent historiographical debates in Germany and Israel. Sebastian Conrad's “What Time is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography” analyzes the conceptual linkage between Japanese historiography and specific interpretations of European history. Richard Bosworth's “Explaining ‘Auschwitz’ after the End of History: The Case of Italy” charts in a comparative perspective the changes since 1989 in Italian historiography concerning fascism. All four articles support the conclusion that next to the method of historical comparison is the politics of comparison, which is hidden in the choice of the parameters. Analyses of both method and politics are essential for an understanding of (comparative) historiography.     

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.     

Science and the History of the Sciences. Conceptual Innovations Through Historicizing Science in the Eighteenth Century

Science and the History of the Sciences. Conceptual Innovations Through Historicizing Science in the Eighteenth Century. The historical reconstruction of science is linked to philosophical discussions of the eighteenth century in many ways. The historiography of philosophy and the historiography of science share the conceptual problem to assemble the multitude of scientific and philosophical practices under general concepts. The historical analysis of scientific progress offers a clue by problematizing definitions of “science” and “sciences” as well as the system of sciences as a whole. By analyzing these conceptual problems and the typology of historical enterprises of the eighteenth century, this paper will discuss the close interrelations which existed between philosophical and historical discourses of eighteenth‐century reflection on science.     

THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

Leon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.     

IN THE FOLDS OF TIME: RASHĪD AL‐DĪN ON THEORIES OF HISTORICITY

By focusing on Rashīd al‐Dīn's (d. 718/1318) historiographical oeuvre and here in particular his “History of the World,” this article challenges the usual approach to his Jāmi? al‐tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) and argues that his was a deeply pluralistic enterprise in a world with many centers, tremendous demographic change, high social mobility, and constantly shifting truth‐claims in an ever expanding cosmos, to which Rashīd al‐Dīn's method, language, and the shape of his history were perfectly adaptable. This article introduces the notion of “parallel pasts” to account for Rashīd al‐Dīn's method. By placing the Jāmi? al‐tawārīkh and its author in their historical and intellectual context, this article also argues that this method is not restricted to Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography: His historiographical work ought to be seen as part of his larger theological and philosophical oeuvre into which the author placed it consciously and explicitly, an oeuvre that is, like Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography, pluralist at heart, and that could be as easily classified as “theology” or “philosophy” as “historiography.”     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

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.     

THE LAST EUROPEAN: A PLEA FOR A RE‐POLITICIZED BENJAMIN

This review of Alexander Gelley's captivating book follows its attempt to respond to Benjamin's plea to “expound the nineteenth century” and liberate us “from the stupendous forces of history,” using aisthesis, “a weak messianic force,” and “dream visions.” Taking the cue from Gelley's reference to Benjamin's rebellion against “a secret agreement between past generations and the present one” (156), this review attempts to open up the context and to wonder about “the secret agreement” between recent Benjamin scholarship and its own sense of the past. The review pleads with future Benjaminians to start asking questions relating to the twentieth century, and attempts to consider the relevance of Benjaminia for current political analysis and recent trends in critical studies.     

Return of the Whig: Reviewing Historiographies of the Meaning of “Secular” in the Australian Colonial Public Instruction Acts

The term “secular” in the Colonial Australian public instruction acts was always controversial. Recent policy debates seek to draw a connection between its original intent and removing religion from schools, notably Marion Maddox's Taking God to School (2014), and Catherine Byrne's “Free, Compulsory and (Not) Secular” (2013). The issue resurfaced recently in a NSW Teachers' Federation Research Paper (Waight, 2022), and in Gross and Rutland's Special Religious Education in Australia and Its Value to Contemporary Society (2021). I propose that while this is a valid public policy issue, any originalist argument actually relies upon a singular historiographical argument, namely a “Whig” historiography. However, across historians the meaning of “secular” has actually been evaluated through four different historiographies: a “Whig” progress narrative; economic materialism; critical theory; and a religious/nationalist approach. Maddox, Byrne and Waight's approaches can be characterised within a “Whig” approach to Australian education history, originally found in “The Melbourne School” of Austin and Gregory, and the textbooks of Barcan. Its revival presents a good opportunity to survey the topic of education historiography, assess the “Whig” argument, and to propose that religious/nationalist historiography provides a more accurate interpretation of the original intent of the term “secular.”     

Governing Institutional Complexity: The Ecology of Games Framework

This paper provides an overview of our adaptation of Norton Long's concept of the “ecology of games” into a theoretical framework for analyzing institutional complexity. I discuss the basic concepts of the framework, discuss hypotheses related to fundamental questions in governance and policy, and outline some basic analytical approaches. The conclusion assesses the future prospects of the ecology of games framework, including future research needs for theoretical and empirical development.     

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.     

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.     

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.”     

Geschichte als leitende Orientierungswissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert

The nineteenth century has sometimes been dubbed “the age of historical science”, taking account of the hegemonic position occupied by historiography vis-à-vis the natural sciences and also its fellow humanities. The “historical method” was widely adopted by all kinds of Kulturwissenschaften. Moreover, public interest focussed on historiography to a quite exceptional degree since it combined scholarly inquiry and the purposes of general education and personal cultivation. Historiography reached the peak of its influence during the two decades leading up to the revolution of 1848. During this period, the ideas of historians on the national state, on the social order and on cultural affairs carried considerable weight. In the second half of the nineteenth century, historiography gradually lost its position of a “pilot discipline”. Sciences such as economics and sociology were better equipped to respond to the needs of German society in the age of industrialization.     

The supreme court of Israel: Formative years, 1948–1955

In seeking to establish a paradigm of a literary “New Jew” for the early twentieth century, we must view the cultural developments of the time on the background of European modernist culture. During this period the European “New Jew” underwent many incarnations, including Max Nordau's muscular hero, Buber's “Renaissance” Jew, Berdyczewski's Nietzschean “new man,” Herzl's “authentic Jew,” and the Hebrew literary talush (rootless person). All the divergent ideas of Jewish renewal propounded in Europe were united in Shaul Tchernichovsky's poetry, either through deliberate reference or as a result of the tenor of the time. This article examines Tchernichovsky's implicit conception of the “New Jew” through two poems: “Lenokhah pesel Apollo” (Before a statue of Apollo, 1899) and “Ani – li misheli ein klum” (I have nothing of my own, 1937).     

From the government to the university: Efforts to write national history in the early Republic

ABSTRACT

From the controversies surrounding the National History Bureau in the early Republic to the short-lived National Historiography Office at Peking University, the traditional undertaking of writing dynastic history experienced many crises during the transformative Republican era. The National History Bureau was merged with Peking University as part of Cai Yuanpei’s efforts to separate the field of national historiography from the government and shift it toward universities, as well as his efforts to further reform the university system. In comparing the staff members and aims of the National History Bureau and the National Historiography Office of Peking University, the latter clearly represented an update in terms of concepts and methods. The purpose of the History Bureau’s shift from “dynastic” to “popular” history, which apparently intentionally imitated the German academic system, was to render national historiography and other related research independent of the government, cast off the traditional moral burden of “condemning evildoers and praising the virtuous,” and gradually move forward on the path of specialization for national historiography within the university system. The National Historiography Office’s various editing plans amply demonstrate this tendency. The many winding detours that the “national history” efforts took between dynastic and popular history both expressed the entanglement of new and old ideas within academic circles, and revealed the contemporary struggle between the government and universities.     

“FUTURE PAST”: TIME AND TELEOLOGY IN (ANCIENT) HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historian's account of the past is strongly shaped by the future of the events narrated. The telos, that is, the vantage point from which the past is envisaged, influences the selection of the material as well as its arrangement. Although the telos is past for historians and readers, it is future for historical agents. The term “future past,” coined by Reinhart Koselleck to highlight the fact that the future was seen differently before the Sattelzeit, also lends itself to capturing this asymmetry and elucidating its ramifications for the writing of history. The first part of the essay elaborates on the notion of “future past”: besides considering its significance and pitfalls, I offset it against the perspectivity of historical knowledge and the concept of narrative “closure” (I). Then the works of two ancient historians, Polybius and Sallust, serve as test cases that illustrate the intricacies of “future past.” Neither has received much credit for intellectual sophistication in scholarship, and yet the different narrative strategies Polybius and Sallust deploy reveal profound reflections on the temporal dynamics of writing history (II). Although the issue of “future past” is particularly pertinent to the strongly narrative historiography of antiquity, the controversy about the end of the Roman Republic demonstrates that it also applies to the works of modern historians (III). Finally, I will argue that “future past” alerts us to an aspect of how we relate to the past that is in danger of being obliterated in the current debate on “presence” and history. The past is present in customs, relics, and rituals, but the historiographical construction of the past is predicated on a complex hermeneutical operation that involves the choice of a telos. The concept of “future past” also differs from post‐structuralist theories through its emphasis on time. Retrospect calms the flow of time, but is unable to arrest it fully, as the openness of the past survives in the form of “future past” (IV).